Miss Timmins' School for Girls (26 page)

“Me?”

I felt she had just opened the door to my soul and
seen the jars of guilt and packets of fear stacked inside. I felt as fluttery as
a schoolgirl summoned to her office for the most heinous of crimes, such as
cheating, stealing, or meeting a boy behind the senior dorm. Me? Why would she
be waiting for me?

Maybe she had seen me up there after all. Maybe she
thinks I killed her daughter after she left.

She seemed not to notice that I was faint with
fear. “The Lord has prepared me for a messenger today,” she said. She was calm
and smiling down at me

OK, so that was better. She wasn't waiting
specifically for me. She was waiting for a visitor; it just happened to be me.
The earth went back to spinning along its prescribed course.

Behind her I could see terraces of emerald-green
paddy fields going up the foothills.

“All of my life,” she said in a grave, measured
tone, “my morning Bible reading has been a staff that guides me through the day.
I usually follow a pattern from my prayer guide. But now”—she smiled very
briefly as she alluded to her circumstances—“I go to the Bible and read wherever
it falls open. I feel closer to the Lord's wishes.”

Today, she said, it fell open on First Chronicles
21:7.

There was a silence in the room. A shaft of
sunlight burst through the window and fell upon her like a halo. I saw motes of
dust dancing above her head.

I waited for her to read it, but she seemed
hesitant, fingering her Bible. Then, wiping her nose firmly, and with a hint of
her principal voice, she said, “Would you like to read it for me,
Charulata?”

“You need to go to the beginning of the passage.
Start from here,” she said, turning the book towards me. The pages were thin and
beautiful as onion skin. On a shelf to the right of her was a bottle of Marmite,
a bottle of Mala's jam, and a tin of Amul cheese.

“How much should I read?” I asked her.

“Till the message is complete,” she said, her hands
folded in front of her.

I read.

And God was displeased with this thing;
therefore he smote Israel.

And David said unto God, I have sinned
greatly, because I have done this thing: but now, I beseech thee, do away the
iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.

And the Lord spake unto Gad, David's seer,
saying,

Go and tell David, saying, Thus saith the
Lord, I offer thee three things: choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto
thee.

So Gad came to David, and said to him, Thus
saith the Lord, Choose thee

Either three years' famine; or three months to
be destroyed before thy foes, while that the sword of thine enemies overtaketh
thee; or else three days the sword of the Lord, even the pestilence, in the
land, and the angel of the Lord destroying throughout all the coasts of Israel.
Now therefore advise thyself what word I shall bring again to him that sent
me.

And David said unto Gad, I am in a great
strait: let me fall now into the hand of the Lord; for very great are his
mercies: but let me not fall into the hand of man.

So the Lord sent pestilence upon Israel: and
there fell of Israel seventy thousand men.

I decided that the passage was complete and stopped
reading.

Nelson spoke with an effort. “I struggled within
myself all these days. But now I know. I must put myself in the hands of the
Lord,” she said in a soft and steady voice.

I was quite breathless and shivering. How was it
that her God was giving her these specific messages? And if she had not killed
Pin, what need was there for the Lord to send her pestilence and kill seventy
thousand men?

I must control my wandering mind, I said sternly to
myself. She had read this passage to herself this morning. And now she had made
me read it. She was in the hands of her Lord. All fair and fine.

So what was the significance of a messenger? Was I
Gad? Did have a direct line to her God? If so, I had not noticed.

And furthermore, why had she not been surprised to
see me popping into her room? It seemed like I had been in this room forever. I
saw her as a big black spider, saying,
Come into my
parlor.

I wanted to reach across her desk and grab a wooden
ruler and rap my head smartly. Stop. Stop. Stop. She knows nothing. She's
probably had slews of Timmins teachers coming to see her every day.

But I was appointed a messenger.

Maybe it was all for my benefit. She had made this
whole thing up for my benefit.

But I heard Merch's mocking voice in my head: “And
how could she be expected to know that you were about to drop by to her hospital
room in Vai?”

No, all pure accident. I felt as if I were in
another dimension. Everything was happening so, so slowly. The smoke from the
hawaldar's bidi drifted through the window, whole minutes went by between each
curl.

I looked at her, hating her for the first time.
That rock-solid armor of saintliness.

Maybe she knew I was on table-land that night.
Maybe she knew I had seen her leave. And she was telling me she would put
herself in the hands of God because I had not come forward to defend her. But
there was a flaw in this thinking. If she knew I saw her leave, why not just
come out and say so? Why not point the finger at me? I could well be construed
to have a motive, once the sordid truth came out.

But the thoughts were slow and spluttering like
ketchup coaxed out of a bottle. If she saw me see her leave, then she thinks I
went up to Pin after she left. She thinks I killed her daughter.

I began to see the room closing in on me. Behind
that mask she hates me. Just as she hated Pin. No, if she hated Pin, then why
should she hate me for killing her? She loved Pin, she loved her not, I was
pulling out petals from a flower, she loved her not, she loved her. I felt her
burning eyes, I thought of her hands itching to squeeze my neck. I felt goose
bumps up my spine.

And then, in slow motion, her face cracked open,
and from underneath, a soft, slug-like face emerged. It was something in the way
she screwed her lips.

To my utter and complete horror, she burst into
tears. “Even that night, on table-land, I could not hug her,” she said, and
covered her face and wept, her whole body racked with sobs.

It was like watching a mountain melt into a
lake.

I kept staring at her like a dolt, frozen. I looked
at her and began to feel sorry for her. But I could not bring myself to stand up
and pat her or anything. Better not to.

How must it have been for this woman, all those
years, seeing her daughter grow, not telling her, not a sign from any of them?
And then, whispers in the night, while they thought Pin slept. Surely, I
thought, the world was divided into two: those who had simple, strong, growing
families, and those whose families twisted and bent further with each
generation. We were the twisted lot, Pin and I.

The secret mother must have stayed with them in
Nasik during all Timmins holidays, and maybe as she sat in the evenings and
watched her daughter skating fiercely in the fading light, she dreamt of how she
would tell her. I will wait until she is a woman, she might have thought. I will
tell her on her wedding day, she might have mused. But as Pin grew with venom
and tore her path of rebellion, Nelson resigned herself to her role. She could
not cast her out, for she believed this was her lot, this her punishment for the
sin of letting a young man in a tight uniform make love to her. But she could
not tell her, either. Her child would remain a thorn in her side. And her
deepest, darkest secret.

But the secret was out, and her daughter was
dead.

Her sobs stopped as suddenly as they had started,
and Nelson nailed her mask back on.

I wanted to leave, but not before I solved the
mystery of the messenger. I fidgeted, hemmed, and then I plunged into it.

“But, but Miss Nelson, what message did I bring to
you?” I asked, my voice melting like ice cream.

“I have my message,” she said. She seemed to be
looking over my head at some hallowed light or something. “You have passed it on
to me, unknowingly. All these years, I thought it was her; having her was my
sin, I thought. But now I know this. You have taught me that my sin was not
loving her. And for this, I must suffer.”

I glimpsed Pin's prickly evenings. How hard that
world must be, with two unhuggable mothers.

Suddenly, I wanted to hug my mother. It was a
physical need, as strong as my desire for Pin had been. My warm, soft, huggable
ayi. I wanted to get up and leave and wake the boys up and make them take me to
Kolhapur right away. It was this urgency in my limbs. I remembered the smell of
Ayi when I came home from school; I remembered how her soft green eyes always
lit up when she saw me.

I stood up to leave.

Nelson walked with me, still clutching the Bible to
her chest with both her hands. She may not have taken the purse with her,
although I can't be sure.

At the door, she turned to me and handed me the
Bible with both hands.

“This was left to me by—” She floundered and
flushed a deep, deep red. She stopped for a moment, adjusted her curls, and then
she said carefully, with a patina of calm on her face that even Jivibai could
have wiped off with a careless duster, “I would like you to keep this
Bible.”

“Maybe you can read it sometimes,” she said, and
paused and locked her eyes into mine, “and think of us.”

That's it, I thought. This is the reason she is
making all this fuss over me. Not because she knows I was there on table-land,
but because she knows I was more to her daughter than a friend. She knows we
were lovers. She must have watched her daughter like a hawk. But I felt no
shame. We were in a bigger moment, after all, concerned with life and death.

“Charulata, I know that you are wiser than your
years. You can see more than other people, because you are different,” she said.
“My father always told me that in this life, one must watch out for special
people. I know that you are one of them. You have suffered. And you can feel the
suffering of others. You have an empathy and power beyond your years. You have a
gift, and you must use it well.”

She hooked her eyes into mine. They were deep and
charismatic. “But some things in life we must all learn the hard way. One day,
you will understand that.”

She gave me the Bible because I had loved her
daughter, and she had not.

I nearly told her then. But I saw Ayi emerging from
her coma and then falling back, or worse, coughing dramatically as in a Hindi
movie and swooning to her death upon hearing that her daughter had been accused
of the murder of her lesbian lover. My mother, I informed ghostly Pin firmly, is
more important than yours. I knew she agreed with me a hundred percent. “Let her
fry,” I heard her pert voice whisper in my ear, like a demented ghost of
Banquo.

Twenty-six

Far White

I
emerged from Nelson's room with an all-consuming need to touch my mother.

The boys were still sleeping, and I could not bear to wait. I asked Gaiky to call for a taxi to the bus depot. “I'm taking the bus,” I said, “I need to go.”

“Chal, I'll take you,” said Gaiky, and I followed him around in a daze as he spoke to various servants and ward boys and finally got into the driver's seat of an ambulance. At the back were two benches facing each other. A family of villagers leading a stooped old man in a dirt gray dhoti climbed into the back. Gaiky motioned me to the front seat.

“Do you ever put on the light and siren?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, and proudly turned on the weak red light and a siren that sounded like a musical horn. Few people showed any interest in moving out of the way as we drove through the rainy bazaar of bright blue dripping tarps, dropped off the locals at their home above a small shop made up of gunnysacks filled with wheat and dals and rice, and then arrived at the bus depot, where Gaiky left Raja barking in the backseat and obligingly procured me a seat in a minivan of pilgrims with red tikas and laddu-eating children returning to Kohlapur. I realized I was ravenous and accepted a fair number of bright yellow sweets.

I was jangled and jittery from the meeting with Nelson. There was a death between us, her daughter, my lover, and so I understood that the encounter must be intense. But I felt it was more than that. I felt as though I had gone to battle and come out defeated, though I could not say why. I still did not know how she would defend herself.

It was evening, and the temple bells were ringing when I reached Kohlapur.

In Ayi's room, the dark little night nurse sat in a corner chair, reading a romance under a metal lamp.

I could see my ayi was awake because she was facing the wall and rubbing her feet together. It was a tic she had recently developed. I brought it up anxiously to Dr. Tendulkar, but he just shook his head. These days he always shook his head and sometimes even sighed. She had stopped talking completely, and ate only milk and bananas. She sat up on her bed, they put a napkin around her neck and peeled her banana. She would hold the banana firmly in one hand and the glass of warm milk in the other, taking big bites and washing each down with a sip. She turned her face if we put any other food in front of her.

The nurses bathed her and dressed her in bright cotton housecoats and took her to the bathroom at regular intervals, and in the evenings we took her for a walk down the center of the ward. She walked on her own, slowly but evenly. You just had to guide her by the elbow. She brushed her teeth when you handed her a toothbrush with toothpaste on it, she lifted her clothes neatly and sat on the commode when you took her to the bathroom, and she insisted on washing herself. My vivacious and glittering ayi had become a zombie person who was always looking somewhere else. The light had been switched off in her green eyes. Sometimes she showed us that she was listening: She sat up or nodded her head vigorously, though it was never quite at the right time. I felt that she was trying, for our sakes, to take interest, but that she had none.

The family powers had decided that it was pointless to leave Ayi in the hospital. She would be much more comfortable at home. They would keep a hospital ayah to take care of her. The large storeroom at the back of the house was being aired and emptied of grains and spices stored in ancient, immense glass jars. It was a somber, mysterious place with small secret places between the jars. I used to hide in its dark corners and dream big dreams when I was small. The jars were taller than me then. I called it the Ali Baba room. It was my favorite room in the house, but it would be a grim sick room for Ayi.

Baba and I had not been consulted in this. In any case, we were too numb and limp to object. Baba seemed to be receding. He had left for Indore the day I left for Panchgani, saying he would return on the weekend. I knew he was uncomfortable in the Kolhapur house. He was a son-in-law and as per protocol he was treated like a visiting potentate, but the veneer of respect was very thin. In the strict hierarchy of the joint family he was one rung above Dipika the fourth sister's husband, who played cards all day long and had never earned a single rupee in his life. Baba was stiff and withdrawn and very formal with them all. I wondered what he would do when Ayi was shifted to the house. I wondered if he would stop visiting her altogether.

I bent over her and smoothed the straying white hair from her forehead. She did not turn, and I could not see her face in the dim light. The nurse looked up from her romance and beckoned me with urgent gestures.

“I have some news for you.” She arched her heavy penciled brows and looked towards Ayi, indicating that it was something she did not want her to know.

She held the room door shut, and we stood outside in the bright white light corridor, where a fat orderly in a dirty dark-green uniform was doling dal onto steel plates. “Last night, your mother sat up in bed and asked for you,” she said. “Very quietly. She called me to her, and said, ‘Get Charu.' I telephoned your family, even though it was 4 a.m. I have seen enough patients suddenly come back at the . . .” She hastened on when she saw the terror in my face. “Your auntie”—she put her arms out to indicate that it was the fat one—“came, and in the morning they phoned your school, but you were not there. We told your mother you would come today. The day nurse said she is waiting all day.”

No wonder I had felt that urgency in Nelly's room. Ayi had been calling me.

“I was asked to tell you to phone your family immediately when you come in,” she said. “Everyone will be so relieved.”

But I did not phone. I lay down beside Ayi, got under the blanket, and stretched out beside her. She turned, and her face was as calm as the face with which she woke me in the mornings for school. I buried my face in her soft pillow breasts, and sobbed my heart out for at least an hour.

I would like to rewind the night and remember that I lay awake in her arms and she stroked my hair and imparted words of kindness and wisdom that I could use as torches through my life, but the truth is that I fell into an exhausted slumber from which I awoke drooling on the pillow in the dead of night, curled, my back to her, with an urgent need to pee and a bone-dry mouth.

I came out of the bathroom and saw her lying on her back, asleep. I watched her breathe for a while, and then shuffled to the spare bed across from her, not wanting to wake her. This was the first night I felt she was near me again. Her spirit is coming back, I thought.

But I was wrong.

The next day, she stopped getting out of bed. She receded deeper into herself, and did not follow us with her eyes. I could not always be sure that she actually saw me. It was not technically a coma. It was as if she inhabited a twilight world. I phoned Baba to come back from Indore.

I usually went to the house at night, but once or twice I could not bear to leave her, and I slept in her room. I don't remember Baba talking to her. He sat beside her all night, reading, patting her from time to time. I slept intermittently. It felt like a deathwatch.

Baba sat rigid through the day on the bench outside the room, his face set in a tight, grim mask. The family thickened, for by now most of the sisters had arrived, some with children in tow. I had barely spoken to him since the day he told me his sordid tale of withdrawing from the navy after being accused of smuggling, although I did believe he was innocent. I could hardly bear to look at him. I had by now begun to invest the last night with deep portent and felt that Ayi had asked me to forgive my father. But I felt only contempt when I saw him sitting there like a sucked slice of lemon. It was because of him that Ayi wanted to die. I would never let a husband decide my life like that, I thought. But she had no choice. No forgiveness was possible. I could only feel anger toward him now. Ayi would have to understand.

It was a few days later, on a mellow afternoon with the first slanting sunlight of approaching winter, that I heard the second part of my father's tale.

The household had awoken from the afternoon slumber and was preparing for the evening gossip session at the hospital. In the visiting daughters' room, I came upon a clutch of women wrapping their saris. Lumpy hips and fat thighs showing through thin petticoats, drawstrings being tied tight around balloon stomachs, blouses being buttoned over bulging cotton bras with bad elastic. They were standing in a semicircle for a slice of the mirror on the cupboard door, their backs to me.

With sudden tears I remembered how I had sat cross-legged on the bed and watched in awe as my ayi swirled and swooped and in five minutes produced the perfect sari. All my life, I thought, all my life I have watched her. I felt faint with fear of a life without her, and had to sit down and put my head between my knees to bring back some blood to my head.

And then their voices came into focus. They had not noticed me.

“I found a boy for her, poor boy, dark, but good family—we have to think of our girl, after all—but when they heard the name of the father, they did not even phone me back,” said Tai with disdain. She was at the pleat stage, pallu standing like a flag atop her stiff breasts. “I can't bear to see that man sitting in her room with that deceitful face of his.”

“To this day, I don't understand why Dada never even looked into the family background,” said Jyotika, a middle sister who was leveling the circle of her sari to the floor with her bare heels.

“Can't you see it is eating him up? The poor man, he will destroy himself like this,” said Jalgaon Masi. Dada had shrunk and withered before our eyes in the days since the Episode.

“And now we are stuck with that girl.”

“She's looking terrible. So thin and dark.”

“Dada is going to leave some money for her,” said Tai. “Can't expect
him
to take responsibility for her.”

I hated them. I hated
him
too, but I hated them more for hating him. I thought suddenly of the order of my mother's inner drawer. The silver watch that Baba had gotten from abroad would be on top of the hankies and, beside them, a round blue plastic bowl containing three keys: one to the safe in the cupboard, one to the bank safe, and one extra key to the front door. In fact, our whole ordered lives had radiated out from that drawer. I saw it shatter in slow motion before my eyes and felt a surge of anger.

I strode into the room, stepped into the center of the circle in front of Tai. “I know why you hate us,” I said. “All of you.” I turned and looked at the women around me in various stages of undress, their eyes boring into me.

“You hate us because she loved us. Your precious Shalini did not love you, she loved us. She was always trying to shield us from your blows. It was all of you. Judging her, judging us, and shaking your heads.” It is you who are responsible for her condition, I thought, and then to my horror I burst into tears.

Tai stepped up and engulfed me in her viselike grip. But I pushed her away.

“Even if I needed help, you all would be the last person on earth I would go to,” I shouted back, turning suddenly to English and knowing it had come out wrong.

This was not the creeping, crawling Charu that they knew. They were all silent for a moment. The industrious ones took it as an opportunity to get more of the mirror.

The decision was being made as I ranted. It must have been a signal that jumped from one face to the other: She should know now.

And so they circled me and told me about my father. Like the stories they had told us children while peeling potatoes in the evening light, stories of sainted wives and brave warriors and capricious gods, they told me how my father had been disgraced because he had been caught having an affair with the wife of the Admiral.

“We did it out of respect for Shalini. We never told you anything. But it is better that you know. A man like him should have been proud to have won a girl like your mother. But no, not him.”

Tai and Jalgaon Masi told the story, the others formed the chorus.

“That too, she was the wife of his superior. That man was like a father to him.”

“Having an affair with a woman old enough to be his mother. Chi. How could Shalini even hold her head up after that?”

I remembered her, the wife of the Admiral. She smelled of talcum powder and foreign perfume, and left a red mark on my cheek when she kissed me.

“A dirty filthy scandal. How your mother could sleep near him all these years, I don't know. And you should have seen that woman. Painted face, wearing sleeveless blouses. Brought shame on the whole family.”

No wonder Baba left a wide and gaping hole in the story he told me on the park bench. No wonder the Admiral had unleashed public disgrace and humiliation—it was a viper he had nurtured in his bosom.

I saw a new Baba, Baba the bachelor boy. He was ten years older than Ayi, thirty-one when he married her. Before he met Ayi, he must have spent his evenings at the U.S. club, where the navy families gathered. He must have had four whiskies and used his charm upon the women. A ladies' man in a crisp white uniform, single and charming. He must have grown used to this life.

“And not only that—he went out with cheap women. People saw him in hotels with secretary types with skirts and short hair,” said Gopika with pursed lips. Tai gave her the look, and she bit her lower lip and shut up.

“And remember all that gossip about the foreign woman? She came forward and said the child was his? Remember that?” piped up badi Bhabhi, who had been pleating quietly behind us all this time.

“Chup,” said Tai in her most authoritative voice. “Those were all just rumors. No need now to bring them up.”

“Did Ayi know all these years?” I asked.

“Everyone knew, by the end,” said majli Bhabhi with a sniff, tying a tail of false hair into a bun at the back of her head.