Miss Timmins' School for Girls (36 page)

I knew she would not let me go without finishing
what she had to say.

“We always boil it down to two,” she said. “Shobha
felt it was you. And Ramona will insist to this day that it is Merch,” she said,
cracking ice with her teeth.

“Merch? Why Merch?” I asked, bemused, for how could
Merch the Mystery Man hurt anyone?

“A love triangle. A crime of passion.” She mumbled,
looking into her food.

She rode it to the end. I had to grant her that. I
could imagine she brooked no nonsense from her children or her in-laws. I
wondered what bizarre turns their thoughts had taken to pin the deed on Merch, a
man whose feet barely touched the ground.

“You really don't know Merch,” I assured her. “I
can tell you he would be the least likely man on earth to kill for passion.” I
was very patronizing. I ordered another salted lemon soda.

“You forget,” I said, “that I was very close to her
before she died. I know instinctively that she jumped. She saw no life for
herself, she jumped.”

“And all those people, you and Merch and Nelson, up
there to watch her.”

“Look, I can't explain it all in rational terms.
You know that. It was as if she pulled us all to her that night. But none of us
could help her. Maybe she called us there to say good-bye.” I shrugged. “And for
your information, Merch was not there.”

Akhila shook her head. “I don't know if Merch is
still a friend of yours,” she said, “but I wonder about him. I mean, you know
Ramona has never been the same since the episode with Merch on table-land.”

Merch, who was so gentle and elegant in those days,
I could not see that at all. Were they still like schoolgirls after all these
years? Were they still seeing the world through the Timmins filter?

“And what are you talking about?”

It was as if I had put a live wire to her head. She
seemed electrified. She leaned forward, she sat back.“I can't believe it. You
actually did not know it all these years?” She shook her head. “I never smoke in
public, but I can't help it, what the heck.” She continued babbling, fumbling
through her lumpy round purse for her pack. “They are not going to believe this.
They won't believe it. I wish Shobha and Nandita were here. At least one of
them. Otherwise, they just won't believe this. Gosh, imagine. All these years
you did not know about Merch's role in this whole murder episode.”

“The night of the funeral, when you went back up to
table-land with Merch, didn't you know that we followed you?” Her hand was
shaking as she rested her cigarette on an ashtray. “I mean, I wasn't there, but
I know it like I was. It was Nandita and Ramona. They followed you up to
table-land. Didn't you know?”

I shook my head. No, I did not know. I was still
disbelieving, but something tripped in my gut, perhaps, because I felt hot and
flushed and I had to fan myself with a Kamling napkin.

“Then why did you leave first, alone?” asked
Akhila. She narrowed her eyes and looked at me through the smoke of both our
cigarettes, for all the world like a Miss Marple from the colonies.

I recalled that night on table-land. We could still
feel her presence near the needle, Merch and I, hugging and weeping. And then we
sat quietly for some time. “He said he had promised to wait for Mr. Irani and
walk down with him,” I said. “You know the old man used to walk on table-land at
any time, day or night, since he could not see anyway, he said it made no
difference to him.”

“But he threatened to kill them. As soon as you
left, Merch walked up to Nandita and Ramona where they were hiding behind the
bushes, and he said he would kill them if they tried to snoop into the murder,”
she said quietly.

Merch? Our Merch threatening to kill two
schoolgirls?

“I'm sorry, I can't see it. I know he would never
use the word snoop,” I said, and I knew it. How could anyone see him, with his
lazy walk, parting the bushes, bending over the girls and telling them with a
quizzical smile, “Don't
snoop
into the murder or I
will kill you?”

Akhila was quite astounded. “What is it with you?”
she said, jerking forward with exasperation. “Was it a '70s pot thing or
something? And what about the raincoats? How did he happen to have those
raincoats if he hadn't been on table-land the night of the murder?”

Raincoats? This was a new story, after all these
years. I listened in silence as she told me how Merch walked the two girls back
to his room, giving them the raincoats they had left on table-land the night of
the murder along with a sinister threat.

“Ramona's mother tells everyone that her daughter
has become touched,” said Akhila, patting her temple. “Every time we go there
and Ramona spends hours talking intense nonsense, her mother says, as we leave,
‘It is a curse. Because she looked into the eyes of a killer as a child. A fresh
killer still mad from the murder.' But of course the mother is rather hysterical
herself.”

I felt I had been dragged through that entire
monsoon again during the course of this one Chinese lunch. First the schooldays
with the girls floating like blue-checked balloons, and then the raw days after
she died, when I was like a dead chicken ready for the fire. I withdrew into my
shell, as if I were still twenty-one. I could only look at her, dumbly.

She tilted her head and eyed me with a somber look,
resting her case. She had been perky, not pretty, as a girl, and now had a
blithe kind of confidence. Her chubby cheeks had filled out into a round
pleasant face. I could see her ordering endless plates of chicken sandwiches at
CCI Club for her plump children.

I sat back, spent and cold as the air-conditioning
dried the rivers of sweat on my body. It was not that I believed everything she
said. It was that I felt suddenly certain that I had danced like a snake for the
eyes of a killer.

I was possessed all of a sudden with the intensity
of those days. I took a taxi from Kamling restaurant, past Marine Drive, where
the sea glimmered like glass under the white-hot sky and pigeons picked at peas
on the promenade, and went directly to Merch's room in his mother's flat on
Napean Sea Road. I ran up the servants' spiral stairway at the back of the
building, arriving breathless on the fourth floor to find a lock on the door. I
waited a while, heart aflutter like Charulata Apte of the old days, though I had
not felt a whiff of that in any of the hundred times I had been to his room in
Bombay all these years. The room had a separate entrance, a bed in a corner, and
a balcony in the same place as his room in Panchgani. Instead of the layered
mountains, the balcony faced a champa tree, on which kites got stuck in January
and swung idly all through the summer. In the monsoon, the kites fell to the
ground defeated, and the champas blossomed, blowing gusts of scented air into
his room in the afternoons as if he were a Mughal monarch. It was the servants'
room of his mother's large flat.

The alcove leading to his room had a forsaken air,
and so I climbed down and went again up the main staircase and rang the front
doorbell. His mother answered and stood as she always did, blocking the front
door. She was elegant, in an ironed shift and a shock of short white hair. She
was, as always, very warm and friendly, and we stood at the door for a full
twenty minutes cooing to each other—how is that nice dark young man you brought
with you last time, how is your daughter, I'm sorry I always forget her name—but
she did not ask me in. “Sorry, the house is being pest-controlled today, and we
are busy covering up all the furniture,” she said. She always made an excuse not
to invite me in.

Turned out Merch had gone to Panchgani a few days
ago. “He said he is going to be there for some time, doing his portraits. He did
not tell me anything about when he is coming back. If you see him, please tell
him he has to be back by next Tuesday. I need him to sign some papers and the
ration card has to be renewed, not actually renewed, but last time the ganga
took it they said there is something wrong with it.” I left before she could
think up any more reasons.

I
n my
dignified householder stage, I did not dash off on foolish hikes and errands.
But the restlessness of the old days took hold of loin and limb, and I decided I
could not wait for Merch to come back to Bombay. That Friday, after classes, I
left Uma in my father's care and went up the winding ghat road to Panchgani and
entered the room above the dispensary for the first time in a dozen years.

Half the kitchen was now a darkroom. Merch's
black-and-white portraits of Panchgani people—portraits of fat Kaka in his
restaurant, Mr. Irani playing blind bridge in the sun—were hung around without
apparent order.

“What kind of idiot were you in those years,
Merch?” I asked him, sitting on the bed, legs dangling. “Who were you in those
days?” My mind was turning somersaults after the first joint. “Did you think you
were that young man in
Crime and Punishment
? Smoking
dope all day thinking of devious plans? I can't remember his name. You know,
that young man who stayed in a cupboard and killed the old lady.”

“Dimitri Dimitrovich,” said Merch. “It's safe to
call all Russian heroes Dimitri Dimitrovich.”

He must have known where I was heading. There was
silence for a time as he went into the kitchen to make me some tea.

“You don't know, Charu,” he said, coming out of the
kitchen with two steaming cups. “I was obsessed with you in those days. Even
when you were with Pin. I used to look at you all the time in the room, just
wait for you to look up at me. I felt you were like a rosebud, you had a perfume
around you. I concentrated on you. I knew I would make love to you. Even when I
saw you with Pin. It was funny, I wasn't jealous or anything, you just kept
growing more beautiful before my eyes, blossoming. I knew it would happen
suddenly one day, like magic. And it did.”

We sat there, lost in our own regrets for a
while.

I lit a cigarette and through the distance of the
smoke I saw him again. Merch has stopped smoking—“Only tobacco,” he always
explains, “only stopped tobacco”—now that he is past forty. His hair is still
straggly and long, but he has a very small bald patch at the back of his head,
which he tries to comb over. I remembered him in this very room, bending over
this same record player when his body was lithe and shiny. I could not find him
sinister.

“But were the girls right, or were they not?” My
words came out in a tumble. “I have come all this way. I rushed straight to your
house in Bombay and then came all the way here to Panchgani to ask you two
burning questions. What were you doing on table-land on the night of her death?

“You were seen on the cliff that night, you know,”
I said, accusingly. “Why did you never tell me, Merch, in all these years?”

“How am I supposed to tell you I was there when I
was not? We went up together. It was the night of the funeral. That was the
night I was up on table-land, with you.”

“But we went up together, we sobbed and had this
heart-wrenching moment. And then you sent me down alone, saying you had to wait
for Mr. Irani, right? Now Akhila tells me you went up to Nandita and Ramona, who
were hiding behind the bushes, and you took them down to your room and gave them
the raincoats they had left on the night of the murder. There was no sign of Mr.
Irani. I don't understand at all.”

I had always felt our love started that night, when
we hugged and sobbed beside the needle. And to think that he lied and plotted
that night hurt, even after all these years.

“You did not even tell me that we had been
followed!” I said, disgruntled.

He fidgeted around for a while, blowing his nose
with a crumpled handkerchief. “You found out about my fifteen minutes,” he said
with the shy, shiny smile that had wormed its way into my heart all those years
ago. “The two girls followed us up that night. I knew they were hiding in the
bushes. So after you left, I walked up to them. It was such a strange echoing
kind of night. Poor things, they were crouching and shivering behind the bush.
It was so out of Enid Blyton, I could not help myself. I stood over them and
told them to leave detecting to the adults. I think I said something about
consequences. I did a sort of sinister Cyrus.” He was sheepish.

“I need some clarity here. Why didn't you just tell
me, instead of sending me down alone first like that under a false pretext?”

“Mr. Blind Irani showed me the raincoats the
morning after Pin's fall. He had found them on table-land. The girls' names were
below the hoods. I knew Nandita, Ramona, and Akhila. I had taught them
intermittently. I thought I would hold on to the raincoats for a day or two and
see how it went down. Didn't want to get the girls in trouble. And then I saw
the same girls following us. I figured they might have seen you up there that
night. So I thought I'd give them a scare, keep them off your trail, so to
speak. So I did my sinister act.”

It hit me with the force of a thunderclap. “You
mean you actually thought, Merch, all these years, that I committed the
murder?”

He laughed then, for the first time in the story.
“Don't be silly,” he said. “Not all these years, just the first few days. Not
that I thought you physically pushed her. I thought that you and Pin might have
gone up to table-land after the rain stopped. I thought she might have slipped
in some skirmish, and you might have panicked. Something like that. It was quite
probable, you must admit.

“And you—so fragile those three days in my room. I
felt I held a bird in my hand. And then you asked about guilt, you may not
remember”—I remember, Merch, I remember everything—“but you turned as white as a
sheet and got off the bed when I mentioned murder.”