Miss Timmins' School for Girls (5 page)

The Woggle came beaming up. He had on his uniform pants, but had changed into a blue bush-shirt and worn rubber slippers. There was a kerosene lamp on the dining table. A dark, fat boy with bad skin was sitting beside it, poring over a thick book. He did not look up. “This is my youngest, Kushal,” said the Woggle. “He is almost sixteen, goes to Sanjeevan School. My older two girls are twins. Yellow and Pinkie. They are in college in Poona.” I could smell the fish frying in the kitchen.

A sofa set with plastic covers on the back to keep off oil stains, a glass showcase cupboard with figurines and photographs, a gleaming white fridge standing proud in the dining room. Their home was my home. I slipped into the role of being the good Maharashtrian girl as into a soft slipper. I neatly presented them with the cushioned version of my life. My father was from Dharwar, he worked with Chitnis Transport. No naval references.

Mrs. Woggle had graying hair, which she tied in a low bun. Tendrils of curly hair escaped the bun and framed her face. A coarse gray hair curled out of a wart on her chin. She brought out our plates with green chutney fish and kokum curry with rice. We ate slowly, talking as the food dried on our hands.

“The twins, they were so alike, absolutely, so I always dressed them in yellow and pink. So it was simple, Yellow and Pinkie,” she said. She ate delicately, resting her fingers, fanned out like a flower, on her steel plate between bites. You just had to weep for poor Yellow.

The rain thundered around us, the lanterns flickered in the wind, and the evening had a special glow. The Woggle, it transpired, had been the head inspector in Panchgani for eighteen years, the only policeman in long pants since 1956. His children had grown up here. “It is a quiet place,” he said. “We don't even have a jail. We keep them in lockup in the police station overnight, and then drive them down to Vai in a jeep. Just the petty criminal classes, you understand. Never a murder, or anything, in all these years.” He spoke proudly, taking a measure of responsibility for Panchgani's good conduct.

After dinner, the tubelight blinked on, though the rain kept its steady pace. “Come as often as you want, you are like our Pinkie and Yellow,” said the Woggles, screwing up their eyes in the sudden brightness as they saw me to the door. The hawaldar had been smoking a bidi on the bench in the veranda. He jumped to attention and obligingly, under the watchful eye of the Woggles, ferried me across the puddles in their compound. Just after we turned the corner to the park, I realized that I had left my little red purse behind. And so we had to trudge back. The hawaldar muttered under his breath, but gamely held the umbrella up.

The pink house was blazing. Even above the pouring rain, I heard the scream of “Kill me! Kill me now and be done with it!” It was a banshee scream, torn from the soul. I saw the tense torso of Mrs. Wagle silhouetted in the window, her hands over her ears.

The inspector came scowling to the door, but smoothed his features into a smile. The wife scurried into the bedroom, and I collected my purse and left.

Were deep dark secrets lodged in the laps of all middle-class Maharashtrian families? Was there no soft, smooth place on this earth? I glanced at the hawaldar, wondering if I should try to get some information from him, but decided against it.

The lights-off bell rang as I walked into school through the back gate, and the dorms snapped dark as I went back to my room.

“C
an I have a word with you, Miss Apte?” called Miss Nelson as I walked past her office the next morning after prayers. The room was cool and quiet. It had a hushed and dignified air.

“Do sit down, Miss Apte. So how are you adjusting to your new life?” she asked, her grave eyes large.

“Please, call me Charu,” I said.

She seemed not to have heard, and continued, “You are barely older than the girls, and away from home for the first time. Hmm, that can take some time. But you must remember, now, that in the school you are not Charulata, you are Miss Apte. The girls need to look up to you, to respect you and to obey you. These young and impressionable minds have been given to us for safekeeping. We do the Lord's work. We lead by example. Now, of course it is fun to get wet in the rain”—she paused, and smiled briefly—“but I cannot afford to have two hundred wet girls on my hands, now, can I?”

I agreed and was duly chastised.

“Don't worry, my dear,” said Miss Nelson, rubbing her hands. “You will soon get used to it.” She smiled, and her eyes softened. “At first, this change can be a bit puzzling. But we are all here to help you.”

She said she had heard I was having some trouble with Shobha Rajbans. “She is going through a difficult phase,” she explained. “Her father has warned me to expect some trouble this term. You see, he is planning to marry again, and she is not happy about it at all.”

“So what should I do?” I asked. “I am finding her very hard to control.”

“You must create a bit of steel inside yourself,” she said. “Only then will they see it, and learn to respect you.

“And, er, Miss Apte,” she added, flushing a deep shade of red. “I hear you had dinner in the bazaar last night, with a policeman. Now, of course I want you to go out and have a good time. You will soon get to know the nice young teachers from Sunbeam.” She was trying, I suppose, to find a subtle way of explaining the not so subtle superiority of the white school.

“We call it the memsahib school,” the Woggle had said at dinner. “Those mames are so stiff. Your father should have put you into Sanjeevan; it is a nice Maharashtrian school.”

I was about to roll over and say, “Yes, Miss Nelson, it will not happen again,” when I was interrupted by an inspiration. “I had dinner with the inspector and his family,” I said, meekly. “Inspector Wagle is a childhood friend of my uncle's, and my father has asked him to be my local guardian.”

“Well, then, I suppose you must go,” said Miss Nelson, grudgingly. “But don't let it interfere with your other activities,” she said. “But don't let them contaminate you” is what I really think she was trying to say. Perhaps she was regretting—despite the Chitnis connection—opening her doors to a Hindu teacher.

I turned smartly on my heels and left, almost bumping into an earnest bunch of girls as I turned. “So
sorry
, Miss Apte,” they chorused. Miss Nelson's office opened at a slant to the wide corridor that led through the prayer hall to the classrooms, so you could never tell if someone was waiting outside.

It was some girls from standard ten, the senior-most class I taught in Timmins. I had them for history and literature, so sometimes it was twice a day for the arts girls. They were a smart class, much less aggressive than Shobha's ninth. I was somewhat embarrassed at the thought that they might have heard parts of my conversation with Miss Nelson. The girls poked their heads into the office.

“Excuse us, Miss Nelson, may we please come in for a minute?” said Nandita, a portly girl who sat at the back of the class.

Miss Nelson had an open-office policy; anyone was free to go in with grievances. Grievances were taken to the principal only under extreme circumstances, and Nandita should have been as nervous as the rest of the girls. But she was not. She turned her head and gave me a smile as she walked in. It was a small and measured smile, but for some reason I felt it was the first real smile I had received in that bristling school. It was appraising, but it was frank. I walked on feeling somewhat better.

Flamboyant Shobha and prosaic, portly Nandita, they became my two pillars of the schoolroom. I thought of them as my two stances—resistance and assistance. Throughout my time in Panchgani, while Shobha mocked and strutted, I felt that Nandita had my back. I felt that when the girls gossiped about me, Nandita took my side, and later, when she saw I was in trouble, she leaped without looking.

Six

Lifting Latches

L
ater, I understood that we were so drawn to each other, Merch, the Prince, and I, because we were the outsiders. Merch, who was called the Mystery Man, was a watcher. He was a tall gangly man of quiet brilliance. He was a Panchgani character, a recluse who lived in two rooms above Dr. Desai's dispensary. Merch rarely spoke to anyone, and so, when we stayed up and talked all night, his unused voice sometimes dipped and swirled without pitch.

I see the three of us on a beach. I am walking at the water's edge, getting my toes wet. The wind curls my hair and tickles my body. I long to go in, but I am waiting for a miracle to transport me. Merch, the wise man, sits at the shore, gleaning the world's wisdom from the sea. He is averse to action, and will not go in. And the Prince, our surfer, waits only for the excitement of the next wave. She plunges in and is transported back to the shore, to fall at our feet, angry, or laughing, or bruised. She is reckless and giving. And for that, we love her, we fear her, we fear for her.

But I know now that we were the shallow ones. There was no deep-sea person among us, not a swimmer, a fisher, or a diver.

I had been in Panchgani for three weeks, or forever. We became friends, the three of us, starting on the night of my twenty-first birthday. It was the fourteenth of June.

Word of my passage into adulthood had been passed along among the teachers, who sang “Happy Birthday” to me at lunchtime. I received a card from my mother with “To Our Darling Daughter” in curly gold letters, and Miss Henderson gave me an embroidered tea cozy. It was Friday, and the Sunbeam teachers had invited me for dinner. They said they were going to cook. I heard they had ordered a cake from Lucky's Bakery. I was excited. I wore a pink silk kurta, made a luxurious, loose plait, and tied four small silver bells into the end of it.

The monsoon had weakened, and we had had no rain for four days. But the air was soft and sweet, and my hair tinkled along as I walked under the rows of swishing silver oaks and saw through them an orange sunset. The bazaar loudspeaker was playing an obscure Hindi song, which now echoes often in my head. It was the first time I felt happy to be in Panchgani.

There were five teachers in Sunbeam: the ever-smiling Malti Innis whom I had met that first day in the staff room; her childhood friend Beena Keval; the Misses Mathews and Jacobs; and Miss Prince. Malti and Beena, both twenty-four years old, were friends from Allahabad. They were going out with two young Anglo Indian teachers from St. Paul's School, and their romances were imagined in graphic detail by the girls. Two years later, they both married their young men and moved to Australia. They were nice girls, ready to have a good time, but both were grounded quite firmly in reason and responsibility.

Miss Mathews and Miss Jacobs were Syrian Christians from South India, very conservative and pious. They had an innocent air about them; I presumed they read only romance novels and never saw movies.

Their first names were Jacinta and Susan. Jacinta was a waif of a woman who, but for her face, could pass for a girl of twelve, playing house with her mother's sari wrapped loosely around her. She would be reduced to paroxysms of coyness when Miss Nelson addressed her. Miss Nelson would continue the conversation, smiling faintly and condescendingly as Jacinta shook her shoulders and her head and fluttered and giggled to an extent that I was moved to feel sorry for her naïveté. Jacinta taught science to the seniors and was said to be brilliant.

Susan Jacobs was older, a poised woman who mostly wore starched white saris. She held her head high, and moved in a calm and dignified manner. She conducted her life as an ambassador for the Syrian Christians. “We are a very small community of South Indian Brahmins, converted by St. Thomas the Apostle,” she told me.

“You mean St. Thomas as in the Bible?” I asked, trying not to sound incredulous.

“Yes, the very one,” she said with a quiet pride. “He landed in South India, in 52 A.D., and is buried in Kerala itself.”

There were quite a few Syrian Christians in Timmins, both teachers and students, and if any of them failed to behave with decorum and dignity, Susan Jacobs took it quite personally. Her dark face was pitted with pockmarks, and one presumed that she was consigned to spinsterhood because of this. She talked softly and had a generally sad air about her, though she did have quite a pleasant smile when she could muster one, showing a small set of gleaming white teeth.

The four of them gathered around me when I arrived and ushered me into their drawing room. There was no sign of Miss Prince. I had not seen her since the day I ran into the rain and looked up and saw her eyes boring into me. I had heard of the debacle with Shobha secondhand and had been imagining my next encounter with her in blurry outlines. I was quite relieved not to have it happen quite so soon.

Sunbeam was a comfortable house halfway up the Panchgani hill, a twenty-minute walk from the bazaar. A long, enclosed veranda worked as the drawing and dining room. The side tables, piled high with papers and books, were draped in dark green tablecloths. All the teachers' rooms opened out into the veranda. The last room was closed, though I could see the light on through the painted glass panes. I presumed that was the room belonging to the wayward Miss Prince.

The teachers were determined to show me a merry time, and I was happy for that. We got into gossiping about the girls. I learned that night that Shobha had many boyfriends—her father even let her meet them during the holidays—and that Bindu Mathais' mother had been sent to an insane asylum. In the staff room the teachers talked of the girls, and in the classrooms the girls talked about the teachers. It was the safest and most satisfying of topics.

The only teacher who was fair game for both was Miss Raswani, the Hindi teacher. Miss Raswani walked straight as a ramrod, her sari always severely pinned and pleated, her thick white hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her pupils had a white rim around them. She had a loud, hoarse voice that terrorized the whole entire school. She had formed no alliances and had no champion but Miss Nelson. She sat in corners, looked at the floor when she walked, and never had conversations. If you ever taught in a class next to her, you could hear her hoarse voice roaring, reading aloud, or grinding down some poor victim. I had never spoken directly with her. She always looked determinedly past me.

Beena informed me that Miss Raswani had a set sari for every day of the week.

“Yes, we know it's Tuesday when she wears her mustard-colored sari,” added Susan.

Before sitting down to dinner, Susan turned her head towards the last, lit room, and called, “Moira, come join us,” but when she did not come, Susan shrugged and said grace. The dinner, baked spaghetti with capsicum and tomatoes, and dry chicken masala with chilies, was tasty after the regimen of water curries and leather chapatis, though not really very good. The Sunbeamers, as they called themselves, ate school food through the week, but always cooked at least one of the weekend dinners. Before the end of the evening, I had been persuaded to be the chief chef the following Friday. “Bring some new food into our world,” begged Malti.

After dinner, Susan emerged from the kitchen, beaming, holding up a frosted layer cake. Malti lit the candles and switched off the lights. They all crowded around me, and, in the middle of the “Happy birthday, dear Charu,” I heard a deeper voice join the chorus. I realized that the Prince had arrived. I realized that the whole giggly dinner conversation had taken place under the shadow of the Prince.

The lights were turned on, and we sat around the living room eating cake. I hated birthday cakes, but I ate dutifully with a cheesy smile. The Prince, barely looking up, wolfed it down. She wore a white cotton kurta pajama, like the ones my uncles in Kolhapur wore in the house. The kurta, made of thin voile, was transparent, and I saw the dark purple patches of her nipples across the room. Though she lounged in her chair, lazy, unaware, limbs outstretched, she had shot a bolt of lightning across the room. No one talked. She finished her cake, came to my chair, and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Happy birthday,” she said in a husky whisper. I had a clear view of her breasts as she bent towards me.

I had just turned twenty-one and had never seen anyone's breasts but my own. My breasts were small and pert, like apples on a board, with a little cherry sitting on top, I thought. Through the translucent fabric, the Prince's breasts looked as big as ripe mangoes, with large plum-red nipples stretched wide. I wanted to brush my shoulder against them. But the moment passed me by. The Prince stalked off to her room without a backward glance.

No one had much to say after that performance. There was no way for them to talk about her in the veranda, because she could hear every word. But I wondered what they made of her and how they lived with her.

Dinner was over, and I guessed that it was time for me to leave. I got up to go. While I was saying thank you and good-bye, vigorously nodding my head like a new adult, Miss Prince emerged from her room. She was wearing her jodhpurs and gum boots, and a white man's shirt made of thick khadi through which no breasts were visible. “I am going to the bazaar to buy some cigarettes,” she said, reaching for her raincoat without looking directly at me. “Would you like to walk with me?”

“Should we take the back road?” she asked as we stepped out into the night. For some reason I was a little tremulous.

“Yes,” I said. “I did not know there was a back road.” My voice came out a simper in the yellow lamplight. We fell into step with each other and walked quietly through the empty street. The night was cloudy and close. The Prince did not look at me. She had on a blue raincoat, which she threw over her shoulders, top button closed at the neck, like a cape. I kept mine chastely folded and tucked under my bent arm.

The road was a narrow one, lined with little homes. It wound itself out onto the lane beside Panchgani Stores, just outside the first pan-bidi stall, before the Timmins end of the bazaar. The Prince bought a packet of Charminars. I wanted a pan, but found myself too shy to ask for it. This twenty-first was turning out to be a first in so many ways. First time actually seeing breasts, and first time buying cigarettes. I had never seen a woman who smoked. But of course, she was white and did not have to go by our rules.

Then she said, looking up and straight at me for the first time, “Would you like to come with me to a friend's place just here? I'll have a smoke, and then we'll go.” When I hesitated, she smiled and said, “How about it? I'll walk you home after.” How could she know, I wondered, that I was afraid to walk home alone at night?

When she said “friend,” I had imagined a woman, British or perhaps Anglo Indian. Not an Indian man. And certainly not the slightly seedy, stalk-like man I had seen slouching through the bazaar a couple of times.

“This is Merch,” said the Prince, sounding somehow bashful. “We call him our Mystery Man.”

Merch lived in two dimly lit rooms. Bookshelves lined one wall. The shelves had speakers mounted on them, and a table in the center held his music system. A bed and one cupboard with a hazy mirror occupied the back wall. A lumpy flowered armchair from some prior generation was next to a table, and a large mattress against the other wall made up the rest of the room. A door on the left opened onto a balcony, and another, across the room to a kitchen. Filled ashtrays were to be seen everywhere. I felt stiff and awkward, in an alien environment. I sat on the edge of the chair. There was an open chess game on the carpet. “It's your move,” said Merch to Prince, lighting her Charminar and one for himself. His fingers were brown with nicotine. The air had an odd, sweet smell.

Prince sat cross-legged, and stared intensely at the game for a long time before moving her knight to check the king. I had thought of two better moves, but I kept them to myself. Merch did not say a word to me that night. “You looked so scared, I was afraid you would fly away if I even looked at you,” he said later. Prince lost the game in a few moves. “Anon,” she said to him at the door as we left.

I judged Prince to be a poor chess player by that game, but learned later that she was just erratic. She would stare blankly at the board for long periods and make such daft moves that you could not help underestimating her. But then, suddenly, in a flash, she could bring you to your knees with two brilliant moves.

It was a short distance down Oak Lane to my hospital. “Good-bye, Miss Charulata,” she said, and she brushed my blot with the back of her hand. She said the last syllables of my name—
lata
—short and clipped, the sound of a horse trotting on a tar road. I fell into bed in a stupor.