Miss Timmins' School for Girls (37 page)

“Wait a minute. Let me get this clear. So you did
that purposely, you mentioned murder just to test me out?” I was getting slowly
furious.

“Steady,” said Merch.

“But I talked about it all the time, and I mention
it as a defining moment in my life. I assumed equal knowledge. And now I had to
hear about
your
role in the affair from Akhila, of
all people, and that too after all these years?”

“I wouldn't call it a role. More of a cameo
appearance, don't you think? All I did was tell these two silly girls to stay
out of it. And after it all came out, it hardly mattered. I even forgot about
it.”

“You forgot?” I asked, unbelieving, because no one
forgets those moments. Not even with all the dope. Merch, the Mystery Man. Now
you see him, now you don't. That's what Pin had said to me on table-land the
night she first kissed me.

“Did you know that all these years the girls
thought you were the murderer? Because of that night. And they say Ramona went
crazy because of that night,” I said, and then I felt I had been too harsh.
“Must have been top-rate acting, that's for sure.”

“I think Timmins School education nurtures this
sort of nonsense,” he said.

I decided to visit the nonsense-nurturing school,
even though I knew no one there anymore. Sister Richards had retired, the
Sunbeamers had dispersed, and Shankar now owned a bicycle shop in the bazaar
with Kushal. It was called Shankarson.

In the principal's chair sat a dark, fat woman in a
sari who could have been approaching fifty. I introduced myself to her.
“Charulata Apte, I used to teach here a long time ago. During Miss Nelson's
time,” I said, wondering how much she knew.

She gave a start, clapping her hand to her mouth.
“But this is the strangest thing,” she said. She was a Syrian Christian, pallu
tucked around her waist, thick curls escaping her bun and framing her face, so
she appeared harried. Papers were strewn in untidy piles on the leather-topped
desk.

I remembered this room always hushed and hallowed.
But today, sounds drifted in. I could hear the hum of the life of the school,
and floating in on the balmy air came a distant cry of “baatli paaaper” from the
street. And though the shape and size and the furniture were just the same, and
from the window, when you faced the desk, you still saw the stairs leading up to
the school bell, it had relaxed and become an ordinary room. The atoms and
particles had readjusted themselves; they had forgotten the stern rule of Miss
Shirley Nelson.

“Charulata Apte? Now that is the strangest thing,”
said the new principal for the third time, beaming with excitement. She had a
well-modulated voice and a Malayalam accent. “You just will not believe this. It
is the strangest coincidence, but I just got something in the post for you just
last week.”

I was staring at her, not saying a word.

The principal calmed herself and continued. “Oh,
but perhaps you heard there was a letter for you. Yes, yes, silly of me. You
must have been told. Looks like a lawyer's letter, very thick. They may have
tried to contact you in other ways, of course. But I am glad you are here. I
asked in the prayer hall if anyone knew where to find you. No one knew anything,
though of course all sorts of rumors began floating around. I even wrote to
Sister Richards, she is with her brother in Deolali, but I haven't gotten a
reply. Of course, it's only been one week . . .”

I came out of my trance.

“Yes,” I said dutifully, “only a week.” The letter
must have generated great excitement in the school. Surely the scandals still
loomed over the school, just as they did over us all.

She nodded her head vigorously. She was an
energetic woman. “Only”—she pronounced it
wonly
—“a
week, and really today wonly I was going to send a note to the Chitnis family
address I found in an old book, to Kolhapur. I see lots of Chitnis names on the
sports records in the gym. Must have been smart girls.”

She fished out the envelope and handed it to me.
She did not sit back down immediately, but stood watching, hands on hips,
waiting for my reaction.

It was a substantial cream envelope, official and
foreign, sporting a typed address and an important air. From Stephen J. Bender
and Associates, Esq., London, England. I had never heard of them.

I mumbled my good-byes and swung out of the room,
feeling the whoosh of air from the plait turning behind me like an absent limb.
I heard
seven times seven is forty-nine
—that is how
I always remember that piece of the multiplication table, from an upstairs
window on a warm afternoon—as I floated off to the far throw-ball court, where I
had met Nandita whole for the last time.

I tore open the envelope to find, inside, another
envelope nestled within a crisp typed letter.

I was meant to read the wraparound letter first,
get the outside story before the inside story, and so with shaking hands and a
hammering heart, I did.

Dorothy Bender of Stephen Bender and Associates
informed me that Miss Shirley Nelson had passed away on March 13, 1986. She had
died in her sleep and been discovered two days later by neighbors who called the
police. Among her papers was this letter, sealed and addressed to me. Ms. Bender
continued:

Although all her
affairs and papers were well ordered indeed, there were no instructions
pertaining to the letter. But since it was in the box marked “Upon My
Death,” and contained her will, directions for funeral arrangements, and
other bequests, we feel that she intended it to reach you. We are sending it
care of the school, assuming it to be the most current address she had of
you.

Since we have no
indication of the date when this was written, we cannot know if it will,
indeed, find you.

The envelope, in Miss Nelson's refined, even hand,
was addressed to:

Miss Charulata Apte

c/o Miss Timmins' School for Girls

Panchgani

Maharashtra State

India

I saw her on my first day at school. I heard her
say the hard
t
. “We'll look after Charulata here,”
she had told Baba, putting her arm around me with a reassuring pressure to the
shoulder. I had felt safe and warm under her wing.

Inside the envelope was one sheet of paper, a
foolscap sheet in her looped, slanted handwriting, with a blue ink pen.

Three witches were
called,

Three witches
came—

The mother, the daughter,
and the lover.

Three more witches arrived
on the wind,

Drawn by the shining
eye.

They came uncalled and
left their robes on the mountain.

They stood unbeckoned
beside the witch

Who held the needle that
stitches earth to sky.

They took a spark from her
fire,

Twisting the tale in their
hands.

The blind messenger
carried the robes back that night

Anointed in
blood.

The marked fool would
bear false witness.

I folded the page carefully, put it back in the
smaller envelope, folded the second letter around it, put it back in the larger
envelope, put it all in my purse, and walked out from the gap in the hedge past
the paanwala to Merch's room. I was glad to see that he was not there, but had
left the key hanging inside the window that you had to push open.

I walked onto the balcony and sat on the mattress
that had been dragged out for sunset-viewing, and read the poem again and again
without any understanding, as if I were by-hearting a poem as a child.

It was hard to by-heart. It was clumsy. She could
have done better than that, I thought at first, but then I realized she must
never have been a writer. I saw her sitting in a gray-blue flat in some suburban
spot near London night after night.

And then I curled up and drifted into a shallow
sleep, thinking, I am the third witch, I am the third witch, I am in a story
written by someone else. She was clever, to take me back into
Macbeth
.

I dreamt that as I sat across from her in that
hospital room in Vai, the head of a snake popped out of her mouth and said in a
saintly slithering Nelson voice,
I did it dear
, as
she handed me the black-bound Bible.

It was as if I had known it all along. As if this
had been the reality between us on that afternoon in Vai. The smell of the room
came back to me intact, the smell of lavender water wafting from the
handkerchief she held before her streaming eyes. And underneath, the strong
smell of disinfectant masking the smell of decay and death.

I awoke with a square of moonlight on my face, the
valley spread below me. Merch's balcony was the same—it still held the two of
us, suspended over the smoke of the burning pink petals—but the valley below had
changed, like a slide in a viewmaster. The Krishna that had meandered thinly
through Merch's valley—it came out of the earth inside a cavern in old
Mahabaleshwar—had been dammed and transformed into a glimmering glass lake. The
envelope was under my pillow. I switched on the dim balcony light and read the
poem again.

Merch was snoring softly on his bed. I folded
myself on my balcony mat and lay shivering, staring at the majestic valley, my
thoughts dancing in demented circles.

Three witches were
called,

Three witches
came—

The mother, the daughter,
and the lover.

I was the third witch, the lover, that was for
sure. Nelson had given me the family Bible that day in the hospital room at Vai;
she had known that the Prince and I were lovers.

Three more witches
arrived on the wind,

Drawn by the shining
eye.

They came uncalled and
left their robes on the mountain.

They stood unasked beside
the witch

Who held the needle that
stitches earth to sky.

They took a spark from her
fire,

Twisting the tale in their
hands.

The blind messenger
carried the robes back that night

Anointed in
blood.

The schoolgirls were the additional witches, who
left their raincoats on table-land. They were the twisters of the tale. They had
gotten hold of the letter and broadcast it to the world.

The blind messenger was Mr. Irani, who had found
the raincoats and given them to Merch.

There was no mention of Raswani. She was not any of
the three witches, and neither was she an additional witch, because she left no
robes on table-land.

I had heard through Divya Moghe that for the past
few years the ex-principal of Timmins had become reclusive and lived by herself
with many cats. It was rumored that she had gone quite mad, although there was
no substantiating evidence to support this theory. There was a trace of madness
in her poem, but it rang true. It was an allegory, written and rewritten over
the years. Every word had a meaning.

The murderer was the anointer of blood on the
robes. But would that mean that the schoolgirls killed her? Or was the anointer
indeed the Hindi teacher, who remained nameless? But why mention everyone else
except the murderer?

The marked fool would bear false witness.

Maybe Raswani was the marked fool—marked as in
marked by fate. But then her role was that of a witness. She was not the
perpetuator of the crime.

Or it could be me. I was marked. Obviously I was
marked.

If I was the marked fool who would bear witness,
then Nelson knew I was there behind the rocks, watching her. She went up and
petted Prince and walked down for my benefit.

I did it
, she had said
to me in my dream. And this is what she was saying to me with this poem.

She had trumped me, and she wanted me to know it,
albeit after her death.

I saw the night again. I imagined Nelson as she
walked up to table-land in her daughter's shadow. With one step, she loved her,
with the other, she hated her. Left foot, she wished she was dead, right foot,
she wanted to hug her to her bosom until the day she died.

Her daughter would not turn to her. She did not
look back, even though she knew the secret mother walked behind her. With the
raincoat flung over her shoulder like a cape, she walked with big steps and
stood arrogant beside the needle.

The secret mother waited. I imagined the turmoil
within the principal's breast—the saintly mother of perpetual succor fighting
the secret mother, the sinner mother. She knew only one could live this life. If
the sinner were discovered, the saint must die.

Tomorrow, it would be over. Her daughter would tell
everyone the truth, and she herself would be forced to flee the school
disgraced.

Or she could kill her, tonight.

Surely, that is how it happened that night.

She sat still, letting the thought settle into her
head. She would walk up from behind, she would give her a quick shove. They
would think she slipped. It was for the good of all. It would bring order back
into the world. For what good would it do for her, Shirley Nelson, to live
disgraced when she was so good and strong in this garden she tended? Her
daughter was just a thorn, asking to be cut.

And then the clouds parted, and the principal saw
the schoolgirls under the needle. And then, as she knew they would, she saw them
stop in their tracks as they saw their principal. She did not look up, and she
heard them turn and run as generations of guilty girls had run when she turned
her blind eye.