Miss Timmins' School for Girls (35 page)

Epilogue

Chinese
Lunch

CHARU

I
first
came across the concept of the “doughnut truth” in
Ada
. When I learned of the schoolgirls' sinister meeting with Merch
on table-land, I wondered if Merch had given me Nabokov's novel all those years
ago so I would know about the hole he had left inside the truth.

We were at Kamling restaurant, Akhila and I,
shielded from the molten heat of May by deep air-conditioning. We were meeting
after twelve years.

Akhila had called one morning when I was ready to
leave for college, books under arm, bag on shoulder, tiffin packed.

“Miss Apte? Miss Apte, this is Akhila, from
Timmins. I used to be Akhila Bahadur in those days. Remember?”

I really wanted to put down the phone and be gone.
I knew I would be late for class.

Much to my surprise, I was leading an almost
respectable life at thirty-two. I was teaching in a Bombay college, I was
rearing my child and tending my father. Except that I had no husband.

Ayi lived on for ten years after I left Panchgani.
She gradually became somewhat more alert, recognizing us all, saying small
words, and laughing at everything. She put on a lot of weight and was like a
jolly Buddha. I finished my master's degree, married a rather inconsistent and
unsuitable co-student, and had a daughter. We visited Ayi and Baba in Indore as
often as we could. When we were coming, she would wait at the window holding out
a toy she had bought for Uma. Uma would be looking up as soon as we got off at
the train station. “Is that the window, is that Nani's window?” she would whine
at every corner, until we arrived and she would charge up the stairs and leap
into Ayi's arms. Ayi died in her sleep in 1984, soon after my husband and I
parted ways, and Baba moved in with me. He was very active in his retirement,
having set up a complete regimen for himself, which included picking up Uma from
school, buying fresh vegetables and meat every day, and a brisk evening walk of
exactly five miles. I thought of us as a happy family. The Panchgani gang had
dispersed, though we still met from time to time.

The white light of summer was blasting into the
little room. I began to feel the sweat prickling on my upper lip. I had never
been that fond of Akhila. “I'm late for class . . .” I began.

And then I remembered her face framed in Mahrukh
Tunty's bra.

One cup was fitted to her head, as snug as a
swimming cap. The bra was hooked and hung down to her chest like a demented
necklace, the second cup pointy and erect over her left ear.

Mahrukh Tunty's huge round breasts have since
gotten her on the cover of
Playboy
magazine, and
made her famous through the length and breadth of India and beyond. But in those
days, her mountain breasts were a legend only in Panchgani.

Mahrukh was very proud of her breasts then, and
happy to parade the evidence. She was prefect of the lower dorm in Rowson House,
and she regularly had her minions hold the voluminous underwear over the sigri
in the veranda. The center never dried in the monsoons.

On an afternoon of deep rain, I came upon girls
gathered and roaring as if around a cockfight. In the center of the circle were
two heads in the two cups of Mahrukh's brassiere, bouncing on their haunches
towards a stretched skipping rope. The bra strap was fastened at their chins,
and they had one arm around each other's shoulders in a lunatic version of the
three-legged race.

They scattered when they saw me, and somehow only
Akhila was left beside the burning coals, the lacy cup still fitted to her head
like a cap, her pigtails popping out from underneath.

“Look Miss. Monsoon swimming,” she said, her black
eyes dancing. I smiled and walked on, waiting to tell Pin so we could both roll
with laughter on her bed.

“Of course, I remember you Akhila,” I said, warming
to her.

“I saw you at Breach Candy the other day, you had a
little girl with you. I waved and called, but you did not see me. I think you
were trying to catch a taxi outside Premsons. And then, strangely enough, I ran
into Divya Moghe, just out of the blue at some function. We began talking, and
she told me she is doing her Ph.D. under you. In Kalina, she said. It must be
fate, I thought. First I see you, then I hear about you. I got your number from
her. I knew I had to meet you.”

Akhila and I agreed to meet for lunch at Kamling
restaurant a week later.

I smoothed my sari and sat down across from Akhila
at the corner table she had chosen. Her hair was tied up in a high ponytail, she
wore a printed salwar, and looked plump and matronly as a mother of two has
every right to be. There were big single diamonds in her ears and on the third
finger of her left hand. Her thickened features appeared to me as flimsy as a
cardboard mask, for I could see the impudent grin of a fourteen-year-old beneath
it.

“I somehow remember you with shining lips and oiled
lashes,” I said.

She burst out laughing. She still had naughty eyes.
“Vaseline,” she said. “I put large globs of Vaseline on my lips and eyelashes
that year. I felt glossy, like a model. Punita Parikh told us that Vaseline made
eyelashes grow. So we all started doing it. But I was obsessive. I kept a bottle
in my desk and would lather it on between periods.”

“Did you know that Raswani died?” she added.

“Yes, in jail, a year ago. Or was it six months?” I
still got bits of Timmins news from Divya Moghe.

“But do you really believe that Raswani killed
Prince?” she said, putting vinegar and onions on her sweet corn soup with the
blue glass spoon.

We had all believed it at that time. We had wanted
to believe it. Because we all knew Raswani was mad enough to kill, and we knew
she needed to live in custody. And we wanted the case solved, all of us, for our
own different reasons. Doubts were discussed only behind closed doors.

When could Raswani have climbed up the hill, where
could she have waited, and how could she have come down unseen when it was clear
that an unseemly number of Panchgani residents were on and around table-land
that night?

“Is it a promenade like Marine Drive or something?”
said the judge, who had never been to Panchgani, not finding it as bizarre as it
really was.

For a time, I was obsessed.

“No,” I said to Akhila. “It does not feel right. In
fact, if you want to know, I don't think she was up there at all that
night.”

Akhila was shoveling chop suey into her mouth with
boarding school urgency. She nodded vigorously. “I agree with you,” she said.
“But not Nandita. Nandita is a hundred percent sure that Raswani killed the
Prince that night. She has it on the authority of that time when she spoke to
Raswani and Raswani gave her the famous letter. She says that Raswani revered
Nelson and finally lost her mind and killed Prince to save her. And then tried
to killed Nandita, because she thought Nandita had guessed the truth. And you
know how Nandita can be. I am even afraid to open my mouth and say anything.”
She rolled her eyes up towards the red pagoda lights hanging from the
ceiling.

I did know how forceful Nandita could be. Nandita
who swept through the corridors of power in her fast foreign wheelchair, Nandita
the smart lawyer in a handloom sari, Nandita the champion of the crippled, whom
she was now agitating to be called handicapped.

I wrote a chapter for her book
Deformed
(Oxford University Press, 1981). It was a very clever
anthology of deformity. I was one of the ten women whom she persuaded to write
about their personal bodily defects. There was a woman with buckteeth that
flared right out of her lips, a woman with a club foot, a woman who was trying
to commit suicide and had been rescued and was now scarred, a blind woman who
had remained a spinster and sat mostly alone in the back room of her brother's
house, and so forth. Each chapter contained a photograph of the deformed as an
adult and, when available, as a child. Some of the chapters were “as told to
Nandita Bhansali.” Nandita's own story brought up the end. She started out with
her fall and her crippling, how her worst childhood nightmare became real, and
how you find new strengths, but she quickly broadened the discourse to the need
to legislate to protect the weaker sections, this being the duty of any modern
society that considered itself humane.

If her chapter was the most potent, mine was the
funniest. Not that it was rip-roaring or anything, but it did have a dash of
humor, and so Nandita wisely placed it first.

In my teens, at functions and gatherings, I sat in
a corner and watched other corner and back-row people. The severely deformed
were single and had to be attended to by servants. In addition, entire families
who did not fit into the center sat on the rows of chairs that lined the back
walls of marriage halls, and I, invisible among them, spent my time formulating
the relative ladder of deformity. My chapter, called “The Greater Blemish,” was
based on my observation that among couples, the woman was always at least one
rung lower than the man. A girl with a bad face might be able to marry a man
with a clubfoot. A limping girl had to marry a cripple in a wheelchair; a pretty
deaf girl, an old man. A rich girl with a cleft lip could be married to a poor
boy who needed prospects. Interclass was permitted because of the other
disparities—rich girls with deformities were married to poor boys without
prospects—but not intercaste. Caste must be maintained at all costs. A Brahmin
could never marry a Banya. Not in an arranged marriage!

That was the essay, and sandwiched in between were
the social underpinnings of how women were always at least one rung lower in a
feudal patriarchal society; the hierarchy just became more pronounced in cases
of deformity.

I could have mentioned that I lost my deformity the
day I looked firmly into the mirror and decided that I had been dealt a goodly
hand after all. What happened was that the blot popped right out of my soul the
day I saw Nandita leave the hospital with her mother pushing her wheelchair, a
small, straight smile on her face. I knew my deformity could be dreamt away, but
hers could not be. A girl in a wheelchair could not pretend to be whole, not for
all the perfumes of Arabia.

“I can understand why Nandita needs to believe that
it was Raswani,” I said across the half-eaten plates of chicken chow fun. “She
told me she still has nightmares about Raswani's mad eyes looming over her,
flared in unfathomable anger.”

“So if it was not Raswani, and you saw Nelson
leave, who could it be?”

“I think she jumped,” I said.

It was logical to imagine that Prince went up to
table-land that night with every intention of jumping to her death from the top
of the cliff. She was a passionate and unstable girl, given to mood swings. And
that night, she had felt completely alone.

Only your own family will tell
you when you have snot on your face
, she said to me that night.
Only your very own people.

And maybe if I had been wise and courageous, I
could have seen that she had something on her mind, that she wanted to talk. She
might have shown me the letter that was in her pocket. But I was young, and my
head was full of silly romance books. Everything revolved around what she did to
me. And so I fought with her, and she stormed out. And then she had her fight
with Nelson.

She walked up to table-land, her world as sharp and
wounding as the blade of a steel sword. She must have been ready to jump when I
saw her. I remembered how her raincoat flapped in the wind. Nelson interrupted
her plans by going up to make amends. Prince did not turn, and Nelson did not
stay.

Did she know I was there behind the rocks? I
believe she did. I believe that it was I who sealed her death. I knew that if I
had gone up to her as she sat on the edge, she would not have jumped that
night.

“But what about the struggle?” said Akhila. “There
were signs of a struggle.”

“I think some of it was her grabbing at dirt and
rocks as she fell. And the rest, imagined. Don't forget Inspector Wagle needed a
reason for putting Shankar in jail.”

“I don't think so,” she said.

“What do you think then?” I shot back, our old
hostility raising its head again.

“The strangest thing is how half of Panchgani was
up there that night. In the middle of the monsoon, in the middle of the night,
so many people just randomly there. It is out of a detective novel. You have to
admit that, at least. I was in the school since I was seven, and I had never
been on table-land at night—except once, when Miss Wilson took us stargazing—and
there we were, breaking out of bounds, on that very night. We hadn't even
planned to be on table-land. I said it when we got back to the school and I say
it to this day. It was the rain stopping suddenly after so long. And that too on
a full-moon night. It drove us all mad that night.”

There was nothing to disagree about. It had been a
fateful night.

“Miss Nelson,” she said, her words tumbling over
each other, lest I not let her finish, “Miss Nelson was the most logical
suspect. But then, as in any proper murder mystery, it turned out that she was
innocent. We hold up many of the minor characters who, according to storybook
logic, should have done it. I mean Mr. Blind Irani, it turns out, was walking on
table-land that night and, with his tapping cane, could have banged into her and
accidentally pushed her over. Or there was even Shankar.”

She hesitated, swallowed a large sip from her
second Fanta, and said, “Well, what the hell, it's been so long.”