Miss Timmins' School for Girls (3 page)

My mother had been a beauty. She was a small-town girl, from Kolhapur, but she was the daughter of the famous Chitnis clan, an upstanding and light-skinned Maharashtrian Brahmin family whose gaily colored trucks plied the roads as far north as New Delhi. She was a princess. She had large green eyes that lit up when she smiled, and an oval face with delicious dimples. She was vivacious and high-strung. Her match to a promising young naval officer from a much less stellar family had been quite controversial since there were already many offers for her hand from good families. My grandfather had met my father in Bombay at a dinner and was so impressed by this bright, graceful officer that, without even meeting his family, he had decided to marry his favorite daughter to this man. The young man would give her a big life, he had reckoned. Wisely, he cultivated him, followed the young man's career for two years while his daughter was finishing college. Then, a month after her B.A. exams, when Shalini was twenty-one, the couple had a grand wedding in Kolhapur. My father was ten years older than my mother. With his well-bred beauty by his side, he jumped a few steps up all sorts of ladders. I wonder still how she felt about it. Did her father ask her what she wanted?

The “tragedy” of Shalini's life always hung in the air during our visits to Kolhapur. I dreaded the visits. I felt apart from my cousins because I was marked. For the aunts, I was a part of their beloved Shalini's “big problem.” I hated and feared the seven aunts. I slunk around the rambling house on hot afternoons as they sat gossiping, waiting to pick up clues about my mysterious past.

One day, I overheard Tai, the oldest sister, talking to a new young daughter-in-law of the house. “And that night, after the court-martial, she broke every bottle in the house,” my aunt said with relish. “She took a stick and smashed the whole cupboard, bottle by bottle. Then she started cleaning up the mess. But she was crying so hard, and, just imagine, eight months pregnant, she was down on her hands and knees, picking up the glass. They found her passed out and scratched and bleeding. I tell you, she is a saint,” she said, solemnly, adding in a whisper, “They said her sari was soaked in whisky.”

Tai was the oldest, fattest, and most domineering of the aunts. The younger women called her Hitler. She was going through a long and sweaty menopause, and periodically had to wipe her fat and pitted face with a small towel she kept tucked into her sari waist. I remember the towel as always being shocking pink with white polka dots.

The episode she related brought alive an afternoon I had until then believed to be a dream: My mother is in hospital, and Baba has been sleeping there at night. My ayah Anandi bai and I are picking up pieces of glass in my parents' bedroom. It is hot in the room; the windows facing the sea are closed against the monsoons. Anandi bai has big patches of sweat on her pink sari blouse. I remember finding a large, thick piece of glass on the counterpane. Often, in my little balcony room in Indore, I awoke in the dead of night from a dream in which I was picking up large pieces of clinking glass off my bed. I would find myself sitting up, sweeping the quilt with my hands, my hair falling over my face.

Now I knew the central memory was true, and the dreams, ripples. The story filled out a whole corner of the jigsaw puzzle. My father's booming voice, the late night fights and tears, the long parties. My father was drinking in those days! And my mother had blamed that for all the troubles. She had passed out that night and lost her baby.

After that stolen conversation, the summer holiday in Kolhapur passed in a daze. I was fourteen years old. I was numb with shock. In all my years in Indore, I had never even met anyone who “drank.” Sometimes a person was referred to as a “going to clubs and drinking sort of man,” and I always imagined such men to be mysterious and brutal, smelling of aftershave. Not like us. I spent that holiday reading Barbara Cartland romances, novels set in nineteenth-century England. Every morning I would set out with one of the ayahs, walk to Kamal's Book House, and take out a romance. I read twelve Barbara Cartland books and a thick, fat hardbound romance called
Thelma
on that holiday. At night, I read with a torch under the mosquito net and listened to the dogs howling. There were nights when the dogs of the town seemed to be discussing the history of the entire universe.

“Shalini, what's with that daughter of yours?” the aunts would ask. “All day she lies around and reads. She should learn to cook. How will you get her married?”

How will you get her married? That was the refrain that always followed my mother and me like a tail on a dog. We had learned to ignore it. Ayi would smile and proudly say, “Our Charu is so clever, she wins so many prizes. English prize, chess prize, history prize. Charu, go get your report,” she would order proudly.

As she sat gossiping with the women in the courtyard at the center of the house, I could see that she was apart from them all. Not only was she the most beautiful, I would think happily, she also had an inner grace. I do not know if it was the urine therapy, as she said, or if it was her sweetness and strength, but her skin had become more and more translucent over the years, and her face glowed with an inner light. Her soft green eyes were always ready to twinkle. I called them the Eveready batteries, because they were ever ready to light up with a smile.

She had grown over the years from a spoiled daughter of a transport magnate to a strong and grounded woman shepherding her wounded family. She was our shelter from the storm. My father became quiet and retiring, rarely venturing an opinion. She, in turn, became cheerful and optimistic. She did it at first to hold our fragile lives together. We could always trust her to see the brighter side of things. “When you marry, you are together rowing the same boat through life,” she told me. “If one partner loses his oar, you just have to row harder; otherwise, the boat will sink.”

She kept all her fancy saris, jewels, and purses from those days locked in a separate Godrej cupboard. Some evenings I would open the cupboard, pull out the saris, and finger all the brocades, silks, and chiffons. A faint perfume always clung to the saris, petticoats, and neatly piled lace handkerchiefs—the perfume of the flat by the sea.

I got my period when I was thirteen. That night I heard my father firmly say, “Ata bus kar, Shalini.” Now stop it all, Shalini.

Soon after, all the cures were terminated. My parents had always believed the blot would go away or at least fade a little after puberty. When it did not, my mother braced herself and set out to teach me to live with it. She taught me to be a stoic, to fold up my life and expect little, to live within the borders of my fate, to make my joy from small things, from incense and flowers and shining surfaces and delicately cooked food. I was raised to be happy in the graces of an orderly life.

Her words washed off with the first rain of Panchgani, because they were a lie. She told me to be content with my lot, but she was not content with hers. She taught me to follow her, but she did not know where she would go.

Because our life was a sham. Because while I lay in my room with my hair spread out on the pillow and dreamed of escape, I believed Baba behind his patient eyes was dreaming too. Of leaving us one morning, of walking out of Navjeevan Housing Society and turning the corner and becoming a man without a past.

It was not a life without passions as I had thought—hearing them snoring in the room next to mine as the seasons passed and I ate and slept and my body stretched and bulged—but an elaborate mask dance. We did have dreams, the three of us. We lived piled atop each other in six hundred square feet of space (including the balcony), inhabiting a hive of secret dreams and passions. We ate and slept and awoke each day, putting nothing into the family dream pool. We did not say we will go to the caves for a picnic this Sunday with Dhanu, we will go to Simla for holidays this summer, we will get Charu married with so much pomp we will bring in a band from Bombay. No. We did not dream together, we did not hope together. It had been a half-life, a life in the shadows.

But the glass, Ayi always said, look at the full side of the glass. And so, dutiful daughter that I am, I swirl my Indore life around again and see through the clear liquid.

I see that I did not scowl and glower at my parents at the dinner table. I did not say I am counting the days until I leave this place, I am waiting to go to Bombay. I passed the spinach demurely under the tubelight because I could not bear to hurt them.

I understood why Baba did not leave. Over the rim of his newspaper each morning he saw Ayi with her hair parted down the middle making his perfect cup of tea, he saw me with my starched school uniform and my spanking white socks and my satchel slung over my shoulder—and he knew he would have to come back so he could see us again. He bowed his head and manfully shouldered his yoke each day, only because he loved us.

And Ayi. Who knew what Ayi dreamt of as she smiled and sang and surrounded us in her net of love? The trajectory of our dreams did not include her. We did not know, we did not care to know, that her joy was as thin as tracing paper.

Four

Miss Nelson's
Cross

L
ater, when
they asked me how I, a conventional girl usually considered meek, had become so
friendly—they would say “friendly” with a wink or a leering grin—with the
scandalous and most salacious Miss Prince, I would sometimes say it all began
with Shobha Rajbans.

Shobha Rajbans was in my ninth-standard class. She
was one of the sparkling ones, those bold girls who make others laugh and cry.
At fourteen, Shobha was already fully bloomed, tall and wide hipped, with
respectable breasts bobbing inside her blue-checked uniform. She flashed her
almond eyes, she tossed her short wavy hair, and she knew that the world was
hers. She had dimples and wonderful, loud laughter that could be heard echoing
in the hallways.

Shobha intimidated me from the start. She was
bright, she was confident, she was rich, and she was so, so superior. She also
had the right accent. She had the urban-upper-class-right-school English accent,
and although I knew more of the literature of that little island than she ever
would, my accent was what the girls called vernacular. And that gave them the
permission to turn me into a caricature.

I was teaching the ninth-standard English, English
literature, and the British Raj in Indian history. I taught them for at least
two and sometimes three periods a day. And until I was able to raise my voice
against her, the classes with Shobha could dissolve into hell at any time. I got
to being thick-skinned about it once it occurred to me that there was no need to
take it personally. It was merely a part of the girls' great ongoing war against
authority. And Shobha was a natural warrior.

The first day, after prayers, I had her class for
English. I made them all stand up in turns and tell me their names and their
hobbies. But that was a mistake. Hobbies were for ten-year-olds, not thirteen-
and fourteen-year-olds. The “good” girls said reading, sports, and music. The
rebellious ones said things like seeing movies and meeting boys, watching my
face for a reaction. Shobha, sitting at the back of the class, stood up with a
disdainful flick of her hair and said, “My two best hobbies are drying Mahrukh
Tunty's bras on the sigri in the monsoons, and rotary swinging.”

I did not understand, of course. But I did know
that it was a part of their insular humor.

I forgot Miss Henderson's biscuit-tasting advice
and flashed Shobha a friendly smile. I was sure I was going to win them over by
just being friendly. I couldn't really go wrong, I thought; I was almost their
age. “Maybe you will explain them to me after school today,” I said.

“The explaining of this would indeed be terrific,
Miss Apte,” she replied in a very vernacular accent, at which point the already
giggling girls convulsed in laughter. I thought they laughed at my accent. I
vowed to speak like them.

“Please write a three- to five-page essay, ‘How I
Spent My Summer Holidays,' ” I said before I swung out, pigtail and dupatta
flying.

The next night, I slipped up at dinner duty and
said “Eat your vegetable” to Amla Sanghvi, pronouncing it “vagitable.” Shobha
imitated me all evening. Every time I passed her table, she would loudly say,
“Can I have more va-gi-ta-ble, please?” or “The vagitable is so good today, no?”
The girls would then burst out into giggles all over again, until little Amla
had to be taken out to the dormitory because she choked on her food.

It was the second-worst evening of my entire stay
in Timmins. The noise grew in bursts, bouncing around the room like a ball.
Girls began to squeal and shout from one table to another, and soon started
throwing bread and even cutlets across the room. I thought I glimpsed a girl on
her hands and knees scurrying under the table. Butlers in red turbans passed
along the periphery of my vision, carrying large steel trays. I knew my
humiliation to be complete.

I had long ago devised a trick for dealing with all
those patronizing aunts, all those nudging girls and staring strangers, living
as I did, with a blot by my side. I could take my soul out of my body, or
perhaps it shrank and became transparent inside me like a boiled onion. Anyway,
I could be looking down on myself from above the room. And I would keep telling
myself in a firm but kind voice, “This is not happening to you. Not happening to
you.” I had never cried in public, not even when I had been punished for kicking
that little girl in a pink nylon dress at Baba's office Diwali puja. I had not
cried when Baba shouted at me right in the middle of the prayer ceremony, and so
I knew how to keep the tears from my eyes.

Two days later, I came upon Shobha's essay in the
staff room. The staff room was between the gym and the piano room. It faced the
upper netball field, where the senior girls wandered around during their breaks.
In the afternoons, the sounds of chopsticks and Brahms wafted into the room.
There was usually some tepid tea in a large brown teapot covered with a tea cozy
embroidered in a green and red rose design, in chain stitch, which looked most
certainly like the handiwork of Miss Henderson.

I was sitting in the staff room. It was a hot,
quiet afternoon, pregnant with the promise of the monsoon. When I came upon
Shobha's essay, I couldn't help laughing out loud. I had just met Miss Malti
Innis, small and smiley, in a printed cotton sari, sitting on a creaky sofa
nearby. “Call me Malti,” she said. She was the class teacher for standard five
and was mainly involved with the juniors. “You must come to Sunbeam for dinner
soon.”

I showed her the essay. She arched a neat little
eyebrow and started reading it aloud.

In the summer holidays, parents are Apt to
spoil the child. In Timmins, we are Apt to get food that the village goats
discard. So, after the terrible, terrible food of the past three months at
school, all my favorite dishes were Apt to be cooked every day. Deoka, our cook,
who has been with us since I was a child, was Apt to ask me every morning what I
wanted, and spent most of the day making it. I was Apt to eat too much. All the
girls are Apt to eat too much, like camels, storing up for the desert ahead. It
is Apt to be hot in Bombay in May, and I was Apt to eat ice cream and go to the
club for a swim everyday.

I saw four movies this holiday, three English
and one Hindi. I am Apt to like English movies better than Hindi movies, and my
favorite movie was “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,” with Sidney Poitier. I went
to see it with my cousin Bubli, who studies in Bombay. But she is Apt to like
Hindi movies better, and preferred “Bobby” starring Dimple Kapadia.

Summer holidays are Apt to go by too fast.
Soon, three weeks were over. Now we are back in school, not tired, certainly not
happy, and Apt to be angry when asked to write retarded essays for English
class. As Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur, would say, “The
unfairfullness of this is terrible.”

Moira Prince strode into the room around the second
sentence. I had heard of her. They always said her name in lowered voices and
stopped short. She was one of the two British teachers in the school who were
not missionaries. I had not seen her because she never came to lunch in the
staff dining room, itself quite a scandal, since it was a quickly conveyed if
unwritten rule that all teachers must come to lunch.

She poured herself a cup of tea, stood with her
legs apart, and stared at me long and hard. Her green eyes reminded me of glass
marbles. Most adults look at me, flinch a little, look away briefly, compose
their eyes, and then look again at me. Some studiously avoid looking at the
blot, others take it in their stride and treat it naturally. It is my Rorschach
blot; I had a whole science of judging character by the way people first looked
at me in those days. But the Prince deliberately moved her cat eyes slowly
around me, stopping, always, at the blot. It was an insolent look, I thought. I
hadn't come across anything like this before, and I froze into a clear cube of
ice, a pasted grin on my face.

When Malti finished reading the essay, Prince put
down her teacup with a decisive thump. “That Shobha girl needs to be brought
down a peg or two,” she said. “I would love to put her across my knees and spank
her bottom until she cries.” She spoke in a soft, slow drawl, in an accent I had
not heard before.

She had a compact, muscular body, a freckled face,
and reddish brown hair, cropped short. Large jowls and a button mouth with soft
pouty lips lent her a slightly bulldoggish air. She wore khaki jodhpurs that
puffed out at the thighs and then became tight from the knees down, and brown
tall boots that stopped just below the knees. She seemed to have stepped out of
some other universe, and I was quite completely flustered. For some reason, I
had a flash of Phileas Fogg striding around the world in eighty days.

The Hindi teacher, Miss Raswani, a vigorous
white-haired woman who wore her sari an inch above her ankles, had been sitting
at the back correcting her papers. Miss Raswani was a crusty old bird. The girls
were terrified of her, and the teachers just left her alone. No one ever sat at
“her” desk in the staff room, no one spoke to her, and she never entered
conversations. She sat at the desk backing the room, slashing at notebooks with
a red pencil.

Suddenly, she banged her books on the table, pursed
her lips, straightened her sari, and strode out of the room muttering “wicked,
wicked, wicked” in a hoarse voice. She did not look at any of us. I wasn't sure
whether she was referring to Shobha's essay or to Miss Prince. I suspected it
was Miss Prince.

Malti flashed a conspiratorial smile. She had her
back to Miss Prince and did not turn around to look at her. The bell rang, and,
stowing our books in our respective shelves, we both left to face our
classrooms.

“Shobha's last line is a reference to the Nabob of
Bhanipur,” Malti explained to me on the way out. “He is an Indian character in
the Billy Bunter books. He always says only one line in any conversation, and it
always goes like this: ‘The telling of this would indeed be terrible,' ” she
said, shaking her head from side to side in the Indian version of the British
version of the Indian speaking English.

“The nines and tens were speaking like him all last
term. They said that this is how the British expect the brown race to speak. It
was very funny at first, though I must say it is getting a bit tedious now,” she
added. She did not bring up Shobha's cheeky manipulation of my name. She must
have sensed that I would need to digest this on my own, and I liked her
immediately for that.

Shobha had passed the essay around the class before
she handed it to me. It went down as the Apt Essay. In Timmins, I will always be
called Apt behind my back. It could have been worse, I figured. Most teachers
had a “behind their back name.” I could so easily have been christened by one of
the more spiteful girls and ended up with a meaner name. They called Miss
Debabushnam, the fleshy-faced junior art teacher, “Gaylord,” after a Punjabi
restaurant in Bombay.

I wanted to know about Moira Prince. I wanted to
know who this scandalous white woman with a strange accent was, and what she was
doing in this small backwater school. I brought it up that evening with Miss
Henderson while having tea and Shrewsbury biscuits in her cozy pink room.

“Moira Prince is Miss Nelson's cross,” Miss
Henderson said. “You wouldn't think it to look at her, my dear, but Moira's
parents were missionaries. They were in Nasik with Miss Nelson, and very dear
friends. It appears that Miss Nelson promised Moira's mother on her deathbed to
look after her.”

“How did they die?”

“It was a big news story. A bus overturned just
outside Nasik. It was mostly full of locals, I think ten people died. They were
coming back from a prayer meeting in another town. Her father, Reverend
Prince—we knew him, he held such wonderful meetings here with us—died instantly,
but her mother was in critical condition in hospital for some days. It was all
so sudden and tragic. She called Moira and Miss Nelson to her deathbed, joined
their hands, and said, “She will be a good mother to you.”

“Poor thing. How old was she when her parents
died?” I asked, imagining the Prince as a tomboy of ten, the day she became Miss
Nelson's cross.

“Oh, my, I can't say for sure. Let's see, she must
be twenty-seven or twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine now. She's not thirty, I can
always tell thirty. So she must have been at least twenty-five when her parents
passed away. It was in the monsoons, in August, I think, two years ago. Miss
Nelson had to rush down by taxi it was raining so hard. And Moira was teaching
in Pelham Girls School in Mussoorie—you know, in the north, in the
Himalayas.”

She was already older than me when her parents
died. “So why did she need to be looked after at that age?” I asked.

“Moira will always need to be looked after,” said
Miss Henderson with a sigh and a shake of the head. “Mothers know these
things.”

Miss Henderson always got her tea piping hot,
because, as she pointed out, she was closest to the kitchen, and also because
she and Mrs. Cummings, the mistress of the kitchen, were the best of
friends.

Miss Prince, I was told, had saintly parents. She
was an only child, and a bad seed. Started out teaching in Bombay, in Queen Mary
School for Girls, but had left under a cloud. In Mussoorie, she had been asked
to leave Pelham.

“My sister Rosie is the kitchen matron there, and
she told me this,” said Miss Henderson with relish.

“But what was she thrown out for?” I asked, all
agog.