Miss Timmins' School for Girls (29 page)

This was one of my theories. Since I knew that Nelson had not killed her own daughter—I had seen the way she stood behind her, I had seen the way she patted her so lovingly on the shoulder, I had seen the way she walked down the hill, so light and jaunty, as though she had made her peace with her daughter, I felt in my gut it could not be her—I began to think that the murderer could perhaps be the mad Hindi teacher.

Sister poured the refill. I wasn't counting her intake, but for me, it was the third, or just maybe it could be the fourth. She made mine weaker than the last.

“More likely, though, I think she ran away because she was afraid,” I said. “Remember, she ran away before the arrest of Nelson. Maybe she was afraid of Nelson, in the next room, after she gave the letter away.”

Sister took another long draught and brought her glass down with a decisive thump, her eyes gleaming with excitement, her cheeks flushed, her face haloed with white tendrils that had escaped the pins.

“That is the exact reason that I know she is dead. Killed off. She could never have survived a day on her own. This I can put down in writing,” she said triumphantly.

“Why?”

“I am the only one here besides Nelson who is party to the fact that Raswani does not—just, you know,
cannot—
handle money. When I came here in 1966 Miss Raswani was staying in your room. Nelson called me for tea one day and requested that I do her a personal favor. She asked me to please do some personal shopping for Miss Raswani. ‘She's a child at heart, she needs our help,' she said to me, giving me that smug smile of hers, trumpeting her saintly self. Miss Raswani used to leave a list in the dispensary on Wednesdays. You know, toothpaste, talcum powder, and the like, and I would buy them when I went to the bazaar and hand over the bills to Nelson.”

“What about her underwear? You mean she never had ever bought herself a single thing her whole life?” This was a stunning new revelation.

“I don't know about her whole life. But here, she hardly ever went out of the school. Grown woman like that, unable to buy herself a peanut. What kind of example to the girls?” muttered Sister scornfully. “I tell you, that Nelsonofyours likes to collect these wounded women so she can play the heroine. I stopped being shopping assistant the day she moved out of here. Wonder who does—oops, I should say who did—it for her.”

The unfinished mother picking up lost souls to nurture. I could see how she was opening up her wing to take me under, another fallen bird. Sister walked to her room, swaying slightly, came back with the remainder of the packet of Mama's Channa and emptied it into a white saucer.

Suddenly, I nearly choked on my channa.

“Sister, remember the first day you took me to the bazaar? At Panchgani Stores, the day they found Jitubhai with the dirty magazine?”

“Oh, that was the funniest thing to happen in Panchgani this year,” said Sister with a chuckle.

“But don't you remember, we came upon Raswani that day, standing at the counter?”

Sister's mouth went slack. “My goodness, it did not even occur to me till now how strange that was,” she said. “But I did not see her buy anything”—there was a trace of triumph in her voice—“No money passed hands. Maybe she came to ask a question.”

I made my escape just as Sister was launching for the tenth time into the story of Raswani peeping into her room with those mad eyes of hers, and walked back to Aeolia.

Two days later, I walked up to Sunbeam with a deep October sunset around me. “Good-bye, Ruby Tuesday,” I was singing as I turned the corner onto the back road I had first walked with Pin. The song played in my head all day, and when I was with the gang at night, I always asked for the Rolling Stones and closed my eyes and thought of Pin.

I walked in as the ladies were sitting in the drawing room waiting for the ayah to lay out the dinner. The table was already set. I was neither invited nor expected. They were flustered to see me, as I knew they would be, since they had been avoiding me in the staff room, just nodding and walking past.

I saw their sheep eyes across the fence and felt my fingers turn into plug points, conductors of the smooth blue charge of electricity that surged through my body. This was what Pin must have felt, the power of being outside the fold.

We sat around surrounded by brown-covered notebooks. Jacinta bravely started some inane conversation about Kalpana Mehta's frog sitting up suddenly amidst a dissection. “While being dissected, he sat up. Literally. One of the biggest frogs I have ever come across.”

I interrupted her abruptly. “Did you know Miss Raswani in Allahabad?” I asked, turning to Malti.

“Yes,” said Malti. “I did. She used to spend the long holiday with us.”

Malti's father, I was told, was a vicar and attached to the same or a similar Protestant mission in Allahabad. When Malti was around ten, Miss Raswani had suddenly turned up with a metal trunk and set herself up in a small room in the bungalow across from the church. She came every year in the first week of December and stayed until February 4, the entire duration of the winter holidays. They used to see her sitting in the veranda and going for a walk in the evenings.

Malti was happy to give me as many details as I wanted. I could see how relieved she was that I had not come to confront her. She was the one who had informed Miss Wilson of the fact that I had been seen running down from table-land, after all.

“In fact, it's because of her,” she said, “that Beena and I are in Timmins today. Every time she came, she had dinner at our house the first night and handed my father an envelope.” It was a letter from Miss Nelson, thanking them for taking care of Miss Raswani. It always contained a hundred-rupee note in case she needed anything. The envelope was always sealed. Malti remembered her father tearing the flap and taking out the big blue note.

“Just imagine, she carried a letter about herself and did not read it even. Like a kid coming to school or something,” added Beena. Raswani was a safe topic, and they were all happy to jump in.

Malti's father had started sending letters back to the principal with Miss Raswani. Soon they had a sort of pen pal–ship going. Her father was in awe of Miss Nelson. He would shake his head and say, “She's a great lady. How she looks after her teachers. And so they decided to send me here to teach, and we convinced Beena's parents to send her too.”

“But was Raswani from Allahabad? How did she find that spot? Did anyone know her?” I asked.

“That's what I'm realizing now. We did not know where she came from. Can you imagine, we did not even know her first name? I was surprised as anyone else when I saw it in the papers.”

“But all those Christmas dinners and everything, you mean you didn't talk to her?” I asked, incredulous.

“We didn't care, I think. We treated her like a madwoman. My brother and I and the other children from around there, we used to run after her and make faces behind her back. She would pretend she did not see us. Once we went too far. It was my brother. He stuck out a stick from behind a bush when she was passing, and she tripped. She ran into her room crying. I feel sorry for her now, actually. Even on her holidays she had to deal with the brats. Poor woman.”

“And later, after you were in Timmins, did you go together to Allahabad?” I asked.

“No,” said Malti. “My father died last year, soon after I came here.” She paused and sniffed and Beena patted her back. “We had to vacate the parsonage, and my mother moved back to her family home near Darjeeling. So now I go there for holidays.”

I never imagined that they shared a past. “Did you talk often, here?” I asked her.

“When she first met me, she said, once or twice, ‘Give my regards to your father,' and sometimes I would say, ‘My father sends his regards,' and when he died, she gave a sympathy card to send to my mother. But then we stopped, just pretended we never had any past. Actually, I sort of tried to avoid her. She was always glowering at me. I always felt she hated me, because of those pranks.”

“Or maybe because she knew she had been treated like a madwoman,” said Beena.

“Maybe that's why she was so stern,” I said. “Afraid that she would lose control.”

“You can say that again. I was always terrified of her,” said Jacinta. “She hated me. I always thought it was because Miss Nelson”—she blushed and fluttered her eyelids—“liked me. She was jealous.” There was a moment of embarrassed silence for poor naïve Jacinta, although there probably was a grain of truth in what she said: They both saw Miss Nelson as their very own charismatic mother figure and had to compete for her favor.

“When she smiled at Miss Nelson, she looked quite soft,” said Susan. “I saw her eyes twinkle, she looked so different.”

No one knew anything of the Hindi teacher's pre-Allahabad days. No one knew where she had been born or bred, or how she came to Timmins and became a pet of the British principal. Everyone assumed it had something to do with a mission connection, that she had been an orphan or something and been brought up in mission schools, just like Estelle of Rowson House.

“But the name doesn't jibe,” said Beena. “In the orphanage, they would have given her a Christian name.” Not Usha, Hindu goddess of dawn.

So it was not like Estelle of Rowson House, we agreed, feeling for a short moment the easy camaraderie of the monsoon feasts. Just then, the dinner came in smelling so much like the school dining room that I felt a sudden wave of nausea. I got up abruptly and left them to their meal.

They were right. Raswani could not have been brought up in an orphanage. Her name would have been changed. To Rose perhaps. Maybe Nelson had spun this web too, converted some solitary wounded teacher and brought her into her fold. Our Lady of Perpetual Succor.

To get to Aeolia you had to walk out of the bazaar, past the municipal garden and the road to table-land, past the electric-green police chowki, and past the house of Adil and Farad, two brothers who kept a regal young cheetah chained in their garage. I had gone to see it with Pin. We had stood still, elbows touching, watching him pace. Today, when I walked past, I saw the cheetah with Pin's proud face, her wild eyes.

Aeolia was the last house on the road out of Panchgani, the road that led down the valley to Vai. It was barely eight o'clock, but the street was dark and quiet. I began to hear rustlings around me. It's only the wind, I told myself firmly, although there really wasn't one. I shone my dim torch determinedly in front of me. The batteries were low, and it cast a barely perceptible circle of light around me.

I had moved to Aeolia three days ago on the back of Shabir's motorbike, balancing my pointy steel trunk on my lap. They planned to come back after the baby, and had left curtains and an orange bedspread, and plates and pots, and a fruit bowl on the square little dining table in the enclosed veranda, and three valley-viewing chairs on the covered porch. It felt quite homey and wonderful, although at night the wind howled and I was buffeted by wild dreams in which Pin would turn up in my childhood and make love to me in my balcony room in Indore while my parents watched.

Tonight, I was jittery. I checked that every door was locked or bolted, and jumped into bed hungry and read a hardcover book with a forgotten library smell—whether from Shabir and Raisa or from Mr. Sopariwalla, the tottering old owner of Aeolia, I could not say—called
How Green Was My Valley
, and I fell into a restless sleep from which I awoke with a start, sure that someone was in my room.

After a forever-lasting stretch of shivers and terrors, I ran up to the light switch near the entrance and put on the naked overhead light. Then I ran around switching on the two lamps and, for good measure, the porch light. I sat at the little dining table and let myself be whisked into a safer world via the green valley in Wales.

Twenty-nine

Mozambique

A
ll drug trips listening to the Doors should be the same, whether they are set in Panchgani or in Columbus, Ohio. But each is different, because as time goes by, you will, say, remember the time we found ourselves in the concrete garden at 2:15 and the neon lights suddenly sparkled, remember the time we saw goldfish glinting in a hidden stepwell on Fort Lohagad and you wrote the poem “Shivaji, Your Goldfish Are Showing,” remember the time we watched the moonrise over the cliff on table-land on Shabir's orange acid?

Shabir had come upon a delicious supply of orange acid from the ashram. Some days he would arrive in Panchgani on his bike, with Raisa fully pregnant and radiant in crimson robes, an orange bandana in her hair. We would meet at Kaka's or at Lucky's or if you missed them there you could just wait on Merch's steps.

Panchgani is perfect in winter. The days are as crisp as thin butter toast, the shadows are sharp in the mountain mornings and at night when the moonlight bounces off the great black rocks of table-land.

These days, we did not go near the needle. We walked straight through the center of the plateau to the back where the descent was not so sheer and we could see a steep footpath down into another valley. In the north we could see the last of the five plateaus.

One day we left Raisa curled and sleeping on Merch's bed—I was a little less in awe of her ethereal beauty now that she had the bubble in front of her, and had small tentative conversations with her, about housekeeping in Aeolia and her family in Bombay. ‘You'll carry on,' she said without a hint of dismay. ‘I'll just sleep here.' We dropped acid and went up to table-land. We watched the flaming sunset sink into crimson and then purple but we did not get high.

Not getting it not getting it, let's take more surely more than half an hour has passed, let's smoke a joint it will bring it on no let's just be done with it and take a quarter more each, what the fuck what will happen we said, and then we all felt the lift together when a ring of lights came on in the valley, bling.

We watched a large yellow moon rise over the fifth plateau and then turn hard and white over our heads, so that table-land shone like a bowl of stone. I lay beside Merch, my arm running along his, our thighs an inch apart. He did not move nearer, and neither did I.

It was as if a switch had been flipped.

AC/DC, swings both ways. That was the joke my college friend Gargi and I understood together in the college corridor, turning our palms from front to back with sly smiles. Swings both ways. I could have read it in a magazine, or heard it from a more boisterous group of girls who sat with boys in the canteen. We thought of men in shiny foreign places, Gargi and I. Not of me.

But there was no denying it. Fresh from that pink corridor I had emerged after one season to swing both ways. For now I was flirting with boys and loving it. I was flirting with all the hippie boys, but most of all with Merch. The monsoon was as intense as a dream. And as distant.

If Pin were here, if she walked into the staff room before the tea came in, skillfully pulled me in a corner and brushed her lips and then her snub nose up against mine, and then turned and left, would I sit down and tingle as I had less than two months ago?

If she had been with me on these long nights with our backs propped against the rocks outside Shankar's defunct den, would I be looking only at her, or smiling into the eyes of some stranger, or jumping up suddenly to take out the packet of cigarettes from Merch's top pocket? I can honestly say that I do not know. I can say that feeling sexy was a current that ran through my body, bouncy and tart, and it was she who started it. Man or woman, it did not matter, I thought. Lovemaking is always with the eyes.

Merch had a dry cough. He would cough periodically and then sit up and slowly light a cigarette, always only using one match, even if the wind was high. After he had finished the cigarette, he would make a joint. He was always calm, quiet, and economical. First he stuck a ball of hash or Bombay Black on the end of a matchstick. Next he put it in a safe spot and emptied the tobacco from a cigarette into the palm of his hand. Then, holding the loose tobacco in his cupped palm, he would light the hash, crumble it into the tobacco, and refill the sleeve, all while paying complete attention to what I was saying. It was a night of deep discussions and walks in various groups and subgroups, because there were five of us, Shabir, Samar, Merch, and I, and Vinoo, a wraith of a boy with big curly hair, a hippie hopeful lured to Panchgani by the rash of newspaper reports of illicit dens in the hills.

These boys with wistful faces brought a steady supply of Bombay Black, or sometimes even fragrant pure Afghani hash, and we drank tea and smoked and sat around swapping thoughts as though we were at a caravansary on an alternative trade route.

We walked down from table-land with looped arms, singing “Show me the way to the next whisky bar” all the way through the sleeping bazaar.

It was November, one month into the winter term. I had been snooping and fact finding, but had come up with nothing. I was nervous and distraught and carried the picture of my ayi with her dead eyes like a steel trunk upon my back. I still addressed my weekly letters to both of them, pretending that Ayi could read. I did not call the house, because I could not bear the thought that my ayi would be right there and not talk to me. I phoned Baba in his office once a week asking about her health. “She's much stronger now,” he would say, or “She is resting a lot,” or “Today she smiled when I read your letter to her.” I revealed nothing of my new circumstances.

I spent as much time as possible with Merch and the gang because they were the seawall that kept out the flood. In their delicious company, I would laugh and lounge for hours and forget the tidal waves of pain and fear and guilt.

That orange acid night pops up vast and iridescent, because things began to speed up again after that night.

The next evening, rested and bathed and vulnerable after the acid, I arrived at Merch's room to find them all leaving for Poona. “Come along,” they said, but no, I would not go. “You forget that I have a job. Unlike all you wastrels and worse,” I said, although I was well aware that it was Thursday and I had nothing to do for three days.

After a cup of tea and a joint, they were getting into the car when Merch changed his mind. “You'll carry on,” he said, pushing hair off his eyes. “I don't think I'll come.”

In his room, he went first to his record player. That was the day he changed the music. He spent some time intent, holding a cigarette in one hand, gingerly sifting through his neatly stacked records, and then the deep dark voice that still makes my hair rise swirled into the room. I sat at the edge of his high four-poster bed, my legs dangling nervously over the edge.

It is time, he said, for Nina Simone.

He turned from the music and came and knelt at my feet. He took my foot into his hands and gently unhooked the strap of first one sandal and then the other, and then he sat up on the bed beside me and took me into his arms. I felt my forehead against his bony chest and thought again of how neatly my head fit into the hollow of his chest. And then he pulled me down so that we lay across from each other, fully dressed, not touching, just talking. We did not even mention Pin, then. There was so much we had to tell each other about ourselves. My mother drank her own urine, I said. And my father is a disgraced man. My mother, he said, is touched. She does not allow anyone into the house since my father died. I should be staying with her, looking after her, but I cannot bring myself to do it. He went to Bombay, he said, for film festivals and Jazz Yatra, and stayed with her then. His mother, he said, lived in Bombay on Napean Sea Road, in an old Parsi flat filled with dark carved wood, and that is where he had grown up, in a flat by the sea, just like me.

But of course you were not quite born yet, he said. He was twenty-nine years old, he told me, eight long years older than me.

We could have met at Hanging Gardens in the evening, I said. My bai took me there all the time.

We could have met at the Big Shoe at Kamala Nehru Park, he said, claiming to have loved the shoe. He went in the evening with his ayah until he was ten, while other boys played ruffian games between the cars in the building compound. But he was sure he had never seen me. I would have never forgotten it if I saw you, he said.

But I did not have the blot then, I said. I surprised myself when it came out as a statement of fact instead of an opening into a dark wound.

That would be a different matter altogether, he admitted, and I took that as a compliment.

And so I could have been a baby dressed in frilly bonnets and hand-knitted wool socks in summer, gurgling in a pram while the sensitive Parsi boy with stick legs hanging from his khaki shorts wandered around inside the yellow shoe with the little cottage roof.

I like, I love, I know, I hate, we talked through the day, a stream of pleasure flowing on the bed between us. From the window I could see the far silhouette of a village hut and a patch of bright paddy. I heard a dog barking, and a woman's voice calling “oi mahtara!” in the valley. I should leave now, I thought, in this perfect time before the touching.

But the world melted when we began to kiss, because Merch poured his soul out in that kiss. I cannot remember how we first took our clothes off, but I remember rubbing my skin against his, and his body stretched out beside mine, so that I felt his ribs against my breasts.

I am a virgin, I said.

He cupped my chin in his hands, and kissed me long and slow, and then he climbed on top of me, and he put his hard penis between my thighs so that it rubbed against me with every long stroke, but he did not enter. We got ourselves into the rhythm until his arm got crushed under me, and then we laughed awkwardly and kissed again, and then the passion began to mount once more. For the first time, I knew where the hollow lay, wanting to be filled.

Do it now, I said, put it in, thinking he hesitated because he worried I might want to keep my virginity intact. But he smiled and shook his head. There will be time, he said, and we started talking again in each other's arms.

But how is it, I asked him, how is it that I can love a woman and a man. Something must be wrong with me. Something must be wrong with me when I feel this way about a woman. One minute my body is in turmoil at the touch of a woman, and then, so soon after she dies, I can turn to love a man. I am afraid, I said. I think I am some sort of wanton woman.

You are not a wanton woman, he said, kneading my thighs. You are not a wanton woman, you are a
wanting
woman. That day, with his face an inch away from mine, I shook my head, not liking the label at all. But later I saw that he had given me a line to wear for all of my life.

I grew up disfigured. I imagined people muttering and pointing at me, perhaps more than they actually did. I grew up withdrawing and watching, my hair around my face. But I had stacked up dozens of dreams in colored bottles against the glass pane, and when they did crack open I understood that I was a wanting woman.

Strange gift, though, from a man who himself refused to step out of the pages of his books. And movies and music, of course, I can hear his voice in my head, bemused.

You must learn, he told me quite firmly that day sitting cross-legged in front of me, to stop confusing sex with morality. Sex is an animal act like eating and sleeping. It is only we, the human race, who have ritualized it, glorified it, and tabooed it. It really is as simple as that, he said. He got up, and with his half-risen penis preceding him, he went to his bookshelf.

And that is how the books began to pile up around the bed.

His penis looked like him, long and lanky with a slight upward curve. “Up boy,” he said when I began to touch him with tentative strokes, and then he suddenly without a warning swung himself on top of me, and we began a greedy dance, long low strokes until our breathing became fast and ragged and I arched up against him clinging while I came, and then he came in spurts upon my thigh and fell limp on top of me. This, he told me, is called thigh-fucking.

It will be a first time for me too, he said, after we had eaten a packet of glucose biscuits and smoked a joint.

You mean you are a virgin too? I asked, surprised. He seemed so sure and practiced.

No, he said, but you will be my first virgin.

Isn't that a trophy kind of thing, to take a virgin? Supposed to be especially sexy? I asked. I had always been certain that I would be a virgin on my wedding night. But now I wanted to know. I wanted to know if it would change the shape of my desire, to have a part of his body inside my own.

I don't know, he said, but I will have to find out. And he got on top of me again. Just relax your thighs, he said, I'm going in. Don't move, just let them flop. It's the outer hip that is the key, he said, his face screwed up in concentration. It was fun, like an experiment that we were doing together. Yes, he said, I feel it. I feel the wall coming down.

I felt a sharp stab of pain, and then a tingling. And then I felt him sliding around inside me, not thrusting anymore. He rolled back down, and we both lay spent, staring at the ceiling. It had not been like making love. I did not come, and neither did he. Later we found two drops of blood on the sheet.

So did that feel just tremendous or something? I asked when he lay beside me, his head propped up.

Not really, he said. I was quite stressed. I thought I would fall down. The pressure, he said smiling ruefully, of being a man. He mopped his brow in mock relief. And you? he asked, raising his eyebrows into a castle top. Are you sorry to be deflowered?

No, I said, just stunned. It took all of five minutes. No one can tell you how it feels, because it is nothing to the body. Only to the mind.

I wish I had been a virgin too, he said. Then we would both be in the same space. We would grow together and learn about love together. Have you read
Ada
by Nabokov?