Miss Timmins' School for Girls (4 page)

“Lord only knows,” sighed Miss Henderson, wiping
her lips with her lace-edged handkerchief, which she kept tucked in the sleeve
of her flowered shift. “It happened soon after the parents died, in the middle
of the winter term. Miss Nelson called some of us to the drawing room and told
us that Miss Prince had had a difficult time, and that we were going to look
after her a little. She said she was confident that our Timmins was such a good
place that Miss Prince would get along just fine here. Miss Nelson always
believes the best of everyone, you know. And Miss Prince has been given very few
responsibilities here, less chance to get into trouble.”

Although Moira had taught various subjects in her
other teaching jobs, she had been given a more marginal role as sports teacher
to the middles and seniors in Timmins. She worked closely under the watchful
eyes of Miss Manson, who was the sports mistress.

“And has she?” I asked. “I mean, has she got along
fine here?”

“Well, there has been some trouble, here and there,
and it could have turned into a scandal, I tell you,” she started, lowering her
voice, and then paused to do some complex maneuver with her knitting
needles.

When she looked back up at me, she changed the
subject. She had decided not to tell the story. She's too young and raw, and
she'll find out soon enough in this place, she might have thought. Miss
Henderson was absolutely right. I did find out, though the knowledge did not
come to me in quite the way she might have imagined as she sat there knitting
her cable design sweater.

So far, Miss Henderson had emerged as my best guide
in this dense and opaque world. She was a homely, maternal woman with bowed legs
and thin brown hair that was always composed in neat rows of tight little
ringlets. Her room was on my way down to the hospital after classes, and I had
made it almost a habit to stop by for tea. Miss Henderson always seemed glad to
see me. The girls would have gone down for evening games, their shouts floating
up from the hockey field and lower garden. She was usually free at that time.
She would put down an extra plate and bring out her tin. The Shrewsbury biscuits
were thick, butter-laden, and not too sweet, and they crumbled deliciously in
tea. Miss Henderson always took only one biscuit, but she always urged me to
have two, which I always did, though I did it with the guilty feeling that I
should really be more well-bred and take only one, and I never enjoyed the
second quite as much as the first. Those early, innocent days always taste of
Shrewsbury biscuits.

“These are the famous Poona biscuits. Kayani's
Bakery is not far from our house there. I always make everyone who comes bring
me a tin,” said Miss Henderson. The Hendersons were a large and close-knit Anglo
Indian clan with good English names. There were four Anglo Indian staff members
in our school. Miss Henderson, Sister Richards, Mrs. Cummings, and Miss DeYoung,
who all ran the home section of the school. They were all descendants of British
railway clerks who had married Indians many generations ago, and were proud of
their blood. Anglo Indians married each other, held on to their British names,
and identified with the whites, not the Indians.

Miss Henderson was the crossroads matron. The girls
got their periods in her dorm, they became boy crazed, had crushes on their
prefects and teachers. They turned high-strung, cheeky, and delinquent. But Miss
Henderson was a simple woman of good instincts, and she managed to herd them
through those difficult years without too much trauma. Unlike the missionaries
and most of the teachers, who kept their worlds quite shuttered from the girls,
Miss Henderson could often be seen at the center of a blue-checked crowd,
listening to eagerly told anecdotes from home. And she shared her life with
them. She discussed her father's railway job, her mother's asthma, her widowed
sister's only son, Frankie. Even I remember how her brother's daughter got
third-degree burns and was forever scarred.

Miss Henderson was carrying a large pot of boiling
water with a towel into the bathroom of the family home in Poona. Little Joan,
naked and ready for the bath, was to have been sitting on the stool near the
cold water tap. But Joan thought of hiding behind the door, and as Miss
Henderson kicked the door wide open with her left leg, Joan burst out from
behind to say boo. “Oh, how much I wept,” she would say, shaking her head. “And
to think nothing happened to me. Just one or two small burns.”

But Hendy, as the girls called her, had a legendary
temper. It could erupt at any moment, sometimes quite unexpectedly. There were
times when I heard her high-pitched shouts all the way in the hospital. She kept
the naughty ones in a small dorm next to her room. Shobha had been in that room
the year before.

Her advice on Shobha was pitch-perfect, and I was
still humbly holding on to good advice.

“You must give her detention,” she said firmly.

“But it is a funny essay, and I have hardly started
teaching,” I protested.

“Believe me, you will never get any good work out
of her; she'll get more and more cheeky. You have to take the upper hand right
away,” said Miss Henderson.

That is just what I did. I gave her detention in as
firm and unwavering a voice as I could muster, and though the upper hand did not
come so quickly, my detention forged the first link in the chain of events that
bound me to the Prince.

D
etention was on Saturday mornings, after dormitory inspection and tuck
shop, during the girls' precious free time. In the true British boarding school
tradition, the young minds and bodies were kept busy at all times, given very
little time to be the devil's workshop.

The Prince was on detention duty that day, and she
caught Shobha reading
Rosemary's Baby
. Miss Prince
had one of her famous fits of “bad behavior.” From snatches and whispers and
teachers' gossip, I learned that the whole school waited for Miss Prince's
periodic outbursts of inappropriate behavior. Last term she had slapped a senior
girl across the face so hard that she left red finger marks across her cheeks,
and had been called into Miss Nelson's hushed office and made to apologize right
then and there. The term before, she taught the middles a dirty marching song to
the tune of “Colonel Bogey March.”

While pacing up and down the detention room, the
Prince had noticed Shobha reading a book. She strode back to the teacher's desk
in front of the class.

In a voice chilled twenty degrees below zero, she
said, “Shobha Rajbans, bring that book to me.” She examined
Rosemary's Baby
and looked from Shobha to the book and back at
Shobha with an unnerving glare that would have sliced through almost anyone.

“This is Miss Apte's detention,” she said, with a
sneer. “That was a nasty thing you did to a new young teacher. Think you are the
smartest thing, don't you now? Bring me the essay you were supposed to
write.”

Shobha tossed her hair, returned to her desk, and
swaggered back up with her finished detention assignment. Miss Prince glanced at
it fleetingly. “Since you have obviously finished your work, you can go back to
your desk and remain standing,” she said.

Shobha strode back, head high, and stood and stood
and stood. Detention ended, the girls walked out. Miss Prince remained seated at
her teacher's desk in front of the classroom, reading
Rosemary's Baby
. She did not look up. Shobha remained standing. At
first, the girls buzzed around outside the classroom, but they had to leave when
the lunch bell rang. Shobha did not go down for lunch; she remained standing
until two o'clock, when the rest bell rang.

News of the incident spread through the senior and
middle school. Miss Henderson heard the girls discussing it around her dorm in
excited clusters.

When Shobha was not on her bed ten minutes after
rest bell, Miss Henderson was seen going to Miss Nelson's room. Soon, Miss
Nelson was observed trotting past Upper Willoughby on her way up to the
classrooms. Shobha had stood for two and a half hours, and had had no lunch.

Shobha became the heroine of the moment. At
teatime, girls from other classes offered her condensed milk, Kraft cheese, and
other snacks from home to make up for her lost lunch. This was one of the more
rare and selfless acts of boarding school life, since food from home was the
highest rung of heaven. Even the standard-eleven prefects called for her during
the evening walk and asked her to tell the story again.

Miss Nelson gave Shobha an order mark, the highest
punishment that Timmins conferred. Nelly, as the girls called her, announced the
order marks after prayers on Friday mornings. She announced them with a sad and
solemn air. The guilty girls would have to stand up and hang their heads,
suitably ashamed. For the more serious offenses, Nelly would pause and give the
offending girl a piercing stare, dripping with disappointment. The worse the
offense was considered, the longer the pause. On very rare occasions, she even
added a reproving word after the pause. The entire prayer hall looked on with
frowning faces.

“There is enough evil in the world,” she said that
day after a very long pause, “without adding to it.” For Miss Nelson, I think
the larger sin had been reading a book about the devil. She confiscated
Rosemary's Baby
, and the girls imagined that her purse
was thicker after that.

The Prince had expected an apology as she kept
Shobha standing. “It was like waiting for a bus,” she said to me sheepishly
later, in one of her mellower moods. “The longer I sat there waiting for that
wretched girl to say sorry, the harder it became to get up and call it off. I
was quite relieved when the old goat came and got me out of it.”

Five

Dinner with the Woggles

“A
re you going to the bazaar, Miss Apte?” called the nurse, Sister Richards, as I stepped out of my hospital room one evening a couple of days later, all dressed up in my peacock-blue chudidar kurta. “I am going to the general store to buy supplies for the dispensary. I can show you our shortcut to the bazaar if you wait just a few minutes while I lock up.”

I was glad to have company, and we set out walking down a small footpath that came out in five minutes to Oak Lane, which ran parallel to the bazaar.

“This way, you don't have to walk all the way to the top of the school to the main gate. You can come and go as you like,” muttered Sister Richards. She had a grumpy air, and at first I was a little intimidated by her. I soon realized that it was her general anger at getting old, losing her looks, and finding herself in her sixties as a nurse in a girls' boarding school.

Sister Richards was fair and stout. She had very fine, translucent skin, now sagging in clusters around her mouth and gray eyes. She may have remained beautiful well into her forties. She always wore her nurse's uniform, a belted white dress with the stiff nurse cap, and she wound her white hair into a small netted bun at the back. She had about five safety pins stuck onto her right breast, like a badge.

She always made it quite clear that she was not like the “rest of them”—the bunch of spinsters, she did not say, but indicated, with a smart sniff. She had been an army nurse in World War II, and she had seen a thing or two. She had been stationed in Burma. “You know that song ‘The Road to Mandalay'?” she would ask. “It was practically written in my barrack.” Nobody had ever heard of that song.

Panchgani Stores took up one whole corner of the bazaar. It was the largest store in Panchgani, and it sold almost everything one might need. There was a display counter running across its length containing soaps, talcum powder, Pond's cream, Himalaya face snow, hair oils, and shampoos. The store sold biscuits and tea and homemade jams and honey, lanterns and Duckback raincoats.

We waited at the counter, Sister Richards and I, but no one came to attend to us.

There was a grumbling woman already waiting at the counter. I recognized her by her shock of white hair as Miss Raswani, the Hindi teacher who had run out of the staff room crying “wicked, wicked, wicked.” I gave her a weak smile. She ignored me, glared with a kind of venomous anger at Sister Richards for a short while, and then turned her face away from us and walked out of the store. “What kind of shopkeepers are these?” I heard her muttering as she went past me.

“This is very strange,” said Sister, and I thought she meant the strange behavior of the Hindi teacher, and so I nodded yes, because it had been most strange indeed; but no, it was the service at Panchgani Stores she referred to. “Very strange. Either the owner or his wife or at least the peon is always here. I think we should go in the back and see if there is any trouble,” she said, and lifted up the wooden slat of the counter. We could hear large snorts billowing out from the back.

We walked through the shelves and cupboards and hanging umbrellas to the office at the back where, around a desk piled high with dusty files and papers, there sat a policeman with a pendulous paunch, and a very thin and small man and woman who looked, against the light, like a doll couple. They were all convulsed with laughter. “Oh, Sister, good to see you, come and have a cup of tea, oh so funny this story is,” the thin man said with a giggle. The peon, who was also hovering around and quite merry, set out chairs and brought in the best masala chai I have tasted to this day.

“You tell,” said the wife with a smirk. She had a loud, hoarse voice that burst forcefully out of her small frame.

“Well, you see, if you had come just ten minutes ago, Sister, you would have seen me in handcuffs, being dragged out by Inspector Wagle,” said the man, who seemed to be in his thirties. He was as thin as a stick, and a bit stooped. But his lips were full and sensuous. He licked them slowly, between words. I found it hard to take my eyes off them.

“Come now, Mr. Sheth,” said the nurse. “A more law-abiding person I have yet to see.”

“No, it is true. My friend Inspector Wagle came here to arrest me,” he said. His laughs were like a series of backward hiccups.

“You know, Jitubhai, I would always hear your side first,” protested the inspector, his big belly shaking as he laughed.

The story unfolded gradually. Jitubhai, the biggest merchant in town, had successfully been making his own jam from his own strawberries and raspberries. The jam was now beginning to sell quite well in Poona, and there had even been an offer from a Bombay store. Ever the entrepreneur, Jitubhai decided to begin making honey too.

Since he knew nothing about making or selling honey, he wanted to get the best information about making honey from abroad. “In America, they write books and magazines about everything, so I thought I will order from there,” said the astute one, who was wearing that day a brown-and-white-checked bush-shirt. Poring over catalogs from America late at night, he said he came upon the right magazine:
Honey
.

It was no easy matter to get a magazine subscription from foreign lands, he assured us. Since you were not allowed to own any foreign exchange, you had to buy postal-stamp certificates and then carry on a correspondence with the magazine to convince them that postal stamps from India were actual currency. Every letter took ten days to get across. Finally, the magazine came by sea mail, taking a month or two. The whole process had spanned eight months, and Jitubhai had waited patiently, dreaming of his factory in which prolific American-trained bees would churn out rivers of honey.

Today, Inspector Wagle had come in with the magazine in his hands.

Inspector Wagle now related his side of the story. He spoke English with a Marathi overlay. “This afternoon Postmaster Gaikwad came to my office with this magazine in his hand,” said the inspector, merrily slurping his tea. “He himself was quite embarrassed. ‘Sir,' he said, ‘I have a puzzling matter on my hands. I thought it best to bring it to your attention.' ‘Just wait till I clear it up,' I told the postmaster. I would be forced to arrest Jitubhai under the Suppression of Obscenities Act, you know. I had to get to the bottom of the matter immediately.”

The inspector was telling this story for the first time, and he could not contain himself. Tears streamed down his face. “The sheer terror on Jitubhai's face when he saw the cover of the magazine he had ordered,” he gasped. “It was not about beehives or bottles of honey, not at all.”

“How was I to know that in America they call these kinds of loose women honey?” asked Jitubhai, looking at us for support. “Now I have to start again to get information about honey.”

“You better make sure it's not another funny magazine before you order it,” said Inspector Wagle, and that sent us all into another round of laughter.

Inspector Wagle started up a conversation with me in Marathi about my caste and subcaste. The laughter had warmed the air between us, and he smiled and said, “Come and have dinner with my family. Come next week. I will send my hawaldar to bring you to our house on Tuesday. Janaki's food will remind you of your mother's.”

“Oh, my Lord,” Sister said with a chuckle as we walked back. “To think of little Jitubhai and that dirty magazine.”

She told me Jitubhai had moved to Panchgani from Bombay many years ago, when he had been diagnosed with the dreaded TB. This was before streptomycin, and Panchgani with its dry mountain air was known to be good for the lungs. He and his wife had come to the town, thinking he had but a few years to live, as an invalid. He started the store with his share of the family money and now was industriously running the best store in town.

“Good night, my girl,” said Sister as we parted. “I don't suppose you will go to Inspector Wagle's?”

“Why not? He seemed like a nice family man,” I blurted out, surprised. He seemed like a homebody in this alien place. He actually reminded me of an uncle from Dharwar.

“It's just that they don't like you mixing with bazaar people here,” said Sister. Clearly, I had still not picked up all the snobberies of my position, of being a teacher in a white school.

In my outside life, I would never have dared to go after that; I needed so much to be the good girl. But then, hadn't I decreed that my Panchgani life was to be an inside life, and I was to float free for six months? A giggle of delight welled up deep inside my stomach and rose up to my throat. I thought, I might as well go. It will be fun, eating dinner with the Wagles.

I don't think Sister was waiting for my answer. She was just advising me about school protocol. “Good night, Sister,” I said chastely, and walked into my room through the back door.

I
n Indore we waited for the rains through the long summers when the sun pressed its back hard and tight upon our heads. My gulmohor tree turned to flame in May, and mothers in the compound collected the fallen orange petals to bathe their babies. It soothed their angry red skins. My mother fed me fridge-cold buttermilk in a tall steel glass when I came home from school.

Baba would track the progress of the monsoon current across the Arabian Sea. As with everything, he had his own private observations to go by. When the sparrows dug their beaks into the dry earth, he said, the monsoon was less than two weeks away. He was usually right.

It was Tuesday, the day of my dinner with the Wagles, when the sky broke open in Panchgani. The girls were at tea in the dining room, gorging away on pickle and Ferradol syrup and other improbable snacks. The clouds had been gathering over the mountains since noon, and the winds were high. We could hear thunder in the distance. The school was electric. The girls' hair burst through their black ribbons, and their dresses billowed around their belts like checked balloons, ready to float them up into the blue light.

It was dark in the dining room, the tubelights were on and humming when the rain came crashing down. The middle and senior dormitories were low, sprawling buildings with verandas and walkways wrapped around the upper garden. The girls spilled into the veranda; the missionaries, having tea in Miss Nelson's private drawing room as was their custom, came out onto their balcony; and I, on my way down to my room after classes, without a thought, I rushed into the rain, arms outstretched.

In school, in college, at home, when the first drops fell, we always rushed out to drink the rain, the young mothers with their children in their arms.

In Indore the first rain came as a teaser, a few big hot drops releasing the heady smell of first wet earth. Today the cold rain came down hard and thick, with the force of buckets of wet paint at Holi. The musky scent of the earth wound itself around me like a satin sheet, promising bright green paddy fields and the fragrance of white flowers, of mogras and jasmine and raat ki rani, and of bunches of sontaka sold on the streets in the evenings. It was only after I opened out my wet hair and tucked a fallen flame-red shoe-flower behind my ear that I realized I was the only one out in the rain.

The rain was pouring down over the sloping tin roof in a great big gushing tap. Girls and teachers were lined up in the verandas, behind the curtain of water. Every eye was on me. I felt the hard green eyes of Miss Prince. My skin prickled. The moment seemed to hold forever. I was a tragic actress in a stadium. I lifted my hair up, wound it around my hand, and tied it in a bun. Should I bow, should I wave, shouldn't they clap? I could feel my blot begin to prick. I knew it would soon turn sore and angry. I felt ugly all over again. I wrapped my wet green dupatta around my shoulders and forced my feet not to run. My bun came undone as I turned. Back straight up, my wet hair live like snakes upon my back, I made my way with measured steps to my room. I did not look back. I was my father's daughter; I knew there was an art to retreat.

The lights went out as I was peeling off my clothes. “The wretched lights always go off with the rain,” grumbled Sister as she brought in a lantern for me. The hot water I had ordered for my evening bath had turned tepid; the mali had probably dumped it into my bucket hours ago. But I was too dazed to care. I lit five candles around the bathroom and quickly threw a few mugs of the water over each shoulder.

In the mirror, my eyes flashed black and quick, and my face glowed. The blot looked pink, like a nipple. I might just be a creature of the night, I thought, feeling strange and elated. I made one long shining braid with my still wet hair. I wore a bloodred kurta to match the hibiscus in my still-wet hair, and was screwing on my silver dangle earrings when I heard Shobha's voice in the dispensary.

“Sister Richards, can you please tell Miss Apte that there is a policeman upstairs asking for her,” she called above the rain, her voice sharp and curious.

“Please tell him I will be up right away,” I shouted. To walk up with her would have been to talk to her. Let her wonder.

It was seven o'clock, the dinner bell had just rung, and the girls were lining up ready to file into the dining room. Their whispers and nudges followed me as I walked past them. “She's being arrested,” I heard them say. But I was learning to live in the fishbowl and did not even look at them.

The hawaldar, a wiry mountain man with bowed legs, was waiting outside the pantry. Bearers in white uniforms were pumping hissing pressure lamps to light the dining room. The hawaldar was dressed in khaki shorts and carried a large black government-issue umbrella. He sprang up when I arrived and opened the umbrella like a sail over our heads as we launched into the churning night. I knew at once that I should have worn gum boots.

We sloshed through the lantern-dim bazaar and turned right just before the municipal park. The Woggles, as the girls called Inspector Wagle and his wife, lived in a pink and white house behind the bazaar on the way up to a plateau called table-land, past the cemetery, but before the big fallen boulder that was said to have crushed a marriage party many years ago.