Miss Timmins' School for Girls (6 page)

Seven

Lemon Dal

T
he next Friday, I cooked my first dinner at Sunbeam. It was a resounding success, mainly due to Mrs. Woggle. I had gone up to the inspector's pink house a few days earlier. We were still in the dry pause between the rains; the red mud in the ditches had begun to harden, and the air was heavy. I caught up with Mrs. Woggle as she was turning up the path from the park, carrying an orange cloth bag plump with vegetables. I had not seen the house in daylight before. The pink had the tinge of cheap cake icing, and the doors and windows were a freshly painted bright green. It was called the Nest.

She was very enthusiastic about my dinner plans and happily offered me fresh-ground flour, sweet yogurt, and her own homemade ghee and pickle. I was going to make the perfect Marathi vegetarian meal. “You are just like my Pinkie,” she said, patting my back. “Everything you want to do well. I will send a hawaldar to Sunbeam with all the items on Friday evening. You can return the vessels and the bag later.” I looked for her unhappy soul but could see only the calm and serene fish-fryer.

The next evening we went to buy vegetables together. She wore a blue nylon sari and was a master vegetable buyer who could pick out a pile of juicy red tomatoes from a heap that looked near death. As we bought piles of rain-green methi bunches, I wondered how my ayi was shopping without me. I usually walked behind her with the bags, lost in my own thoughts. I had written about my dinner with the Woggles, because I was sure she would approve of them.

That Friday, Malti was in Sunbeam when I got there after school. She tucked her sari pallu to her waist and helped me wash and chop. “I never went into the kitchen in Allahabad,” she said, gingerly holding a tomato under a running tap. Susan laid the table. She set a place for Miss Prince. We sort of smirked at each other in school now, the Prince and I, when our paths crossed, but it was not that often. The Prince did not hang around the school during her free periods like the rest of us. Jacinta informed me with a giggle that Moira often went to meet her friend—“that strange man they call Merch,” she said, wrinkling her nose. It was, of course, considered scandalous, as was everything the Prince did.

I wondered if they were having an affair and imagined how they would look together, she with the white full body. Merch, angular and unclothed, I could not quite imagine. He was a clothed kind of man. That I had not ever seen a naked man was another reason. I did not think she would deign to come to our dinner.

But she did come. She walked in wearing shiny, knee-length gum boots, even though the air was turning torrid. Miss Jacobs had finished grace, and I was dashing around with hot bhakris. She popped a large smile and said, “Oh, can I join you, please?” Her eyes grew bright when she smiled, and her mouth spread wide and generous across her face. It was a smile that you could follow. She infected us all with her high spirits that night. She went into her room, turned on some music that I did not know, and returned with feet clad in elaborate embroidered slippers, her hair shining, slicked back. She was carrying two fat red candles. “Mood, ladies, we must have mood,” she announced. “This is our Charu's first solo performance: surely a river-crossing on the path to adulthood.” I was not sure if she was mocking me, but I felt happy.

The food, the music, and the flickering light of the candles made us all expand, and soon Susan's pitted face relaxed and began to look like a schoolgirl's. “I used to have hair like yours, Charu,” she said, smiling shyly. She told us how her mother used to wash her curly hair every day, and comb and oil it in the sun while it was still wet, and how she walked to school along the water in her village in Kerala.

Beena and Malti were meeting their bright young Anglo Indian teachers from St. Paul's and left soon after dinner, both with raincoats and torches and shawls over their arms. Jacinta and Susan said their good-nights and went into their rooms.

All of a sudden, we found ourselves alone in the dim dining room, the Prince and I. I sat around for an awkward moment, and then I got up to go. “I have to mark a history test,” I mumbled.

“Come sit in my room a while, please, Miss Charulata,” said the Prince softly. I wished she would not address me as Miss Charulata, because she made me feel like a middle-class Maharashtrian girl crossed with a Timmins teacher.

And so I entered her room. I realized then that you could live in the world for a full twenty-one years, imagining always that everyone except movie stars lived like you, in stuffed and brightly lit places with scrubbed kitchens, only to find out that you were completely free to decorate your room anyway you wanted.

Her room was red. Two lamps on two low stools were draped with thin deep-red cloth, casting a soft red glow around the room. There were mattresses lined with colorful cushions on the floor. It was the kind of room I imagined in lush harems. There was even a hookah in the corner. There was no sign of school-issue furniture, except for a large cupboard with an oval mirror on one door and a bookshelf in the corner. She sat me down on the mattress and, with increasing urgency, began rummaging around in drawers. “Damn. No cigarettes again. We'll just have to go to Merch's, won't we?” she said with an impish grin. And so we trotted off to Merch's again, the same silent walk, but now I knew the road and was much more comfortable. I was sure I could even talk to her, and there were a lot of questions I wanted to ask her, but I could not frame any of them.

If I said, “What are you doing here?” she would have to make a reference to her infamous record.

Should I say, “When did you come here?” she would surely think I knew she was thrown out of two schools

I wanted to know if she had ever been to England, but if I asked her that, she might think I was in awe of England, like so many of the teachers.

“Did you grow up in India?” Yes, I could ask that. She spoke to the servants in fluent Marathi, and her accent was different from the missionaries. But then again I started thinking that perhaps it was too intimate a question to ask an Englishwoman you hardly knew.

And so the road that had seemed so long on that first night came to an end, and I said nothing at all.

That night the rain started up again when we were with Merch. First the wind began to blow in gusts so that curtains flapped and doors and windows snapped around the town. We stood on Merch's balcony until the rain crashed down like a wall upon us, and then we ran in, laughing.

“How about a game of chess, Charu?” said Merch. He guessed that I played the game, although I had not said anything that first night. He gave me a thin graying towel to wipe my hair, but I couldn't bring myself to use it. He had just set up the game, and I'd made the first move, when friends dropped in. They were a couple of rich kids from Bombay who had rented a windy house called Aeolia at the outer edge of the town. They had come, they said, to “soak up the monsoon.” I concluded in awe that they were hippies, though I had seen the likes of them only in
Life
magazine. The boy was tall and lean, with long curly hair he tied in a small low ponytail. The girl was wraithlike in a long and flowing dress, and moved gracefully, like water. They wore orange clothes. No one explained anything to me that night.

“Let's go for a drive to Mahabaleshwar,” they said. They had a beige Fiat, and the three of us squeezed into the back, the Prince in the middle. We left the car windows half open, so the rain sprayed our faces and the wind tore our hair. Mahabaleshwar, straddled on another hill, was famous because it had the second-highest rainfall in the world. All of us on the third ghat felt a little more important at having our little corner recognized by the whole wide world. We were sometimes mentioned in geography textbooks.

As long as I will remember it, they were playing the Doors song “Riders on the Storm” that night in the car. The mist was as thick as whitewash; it flung our headlights back at us. We could see almost nothing. Shabir, as the boy was called, made his girlfriend, Raisa, wipe the inside of the windshield from time to time. They all seemed to inhabit some cryptic, and very funny, imaginary world. “Should we wake up the farmers?” said Shabir as he turned the corner out of Panchgani. “Place problem in the car, boss,” said Merch. The farmers were another couple of just-married Bombay hippies, who had started a halfhearted strawberry farm on the road between Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani, but no one bothered to tell me anything. My new friends left me to sink or swim. It was dark and close in the car, but my blot was calm. I was so shy and quiet with all these new people, but, surprisingly, I did not feel at all self-conscious. They were all inventing themselves as they went along, and I felt oddly at peace among them. They did not even try to draw me into the conversation.

We had a series of blurry adventures that night, but I do not really know if that was the night we went madly hunting around the shuttered town searching for tea, or if that was the night the car got flooded and water came gushing out of the backseat, or if that was the night we went to Kate's Point and parked the car at the top of the hill. I remember we all got out and stood with our bodies plastered against the car. The wind from the valley sucked our breath, our clothes became wet and heavy. I remember a filtered moonlight, which made our teeth glow white.

I know it was the night when we sat shivering and wet in the backseat that she squeezed my hand as our car went slithering and sliding down the Kate's Point hill, and the girlfriend hung her head out with a torch to check if the wheels were slipping off the mountain edge. But I do not remember if it was on that first night of the long rain that the Prince held my hand in the car, or if it was deeper in the heart of the monsoon. We locked our hands, tight and sweaty, as the car lurched and slithered most dubiously down the hill, and then unlocked them, quite naturally, when we reached the road.

I lived for the weekends. They began with dinner at Sunbeam and then stretched out into nights of pot and music and deep discussions, mostly in Merch's room.

The excitement began on Friday evening, after school. The Sunbeamers also waxed enthusiastic. Jacinta summoned delicious homemade fish pickle from deep Kerala, and Malti showed us how to make the only thing she knew, her Tibetan ayah's dumpling soup. In the small kitchen, where it took at least four damp matches to light the gas stove, sometimes by lantern light, we stuffed parathas and made chutney fish wrapped in banana leaves; carrots with grated coconut and coriander; and, once, chicken with cardamom and crushed cashews.

Like me, the Sunbeamers were just getting to know Moira Prince. They had lived with her for almost two years, but at a distance. She kept to herself. They were wary of her. She was white, she was moody, and she had a dark and scandalous past.

I began to call her Pin. I learned the order of names from Merch.

“She hates being called Moira. The girls call her Miss Prince. Her friends call her Pin,” he warned me one night as we talked in his room while she sat in a corner with eyes closed, lost in some song.

“Why, what's wrong with Moira?” I asked.

“She told me she herself would never associate with anyone called Moira. Can't blame her. It's a kind of a prissy name, don't you think?” It was true, the name did not suit her. I began to notice how she flinched when Miss Nelson and the teachers called her Moira.

She talked of the Sunbeamers with disdain. “Eager little twits,” she called them.

But she always came for the Friday night dinners. She would emerge from her room in a fresh white khadi shirt and jodhpurs, smelling of Cinthol soap, her hair combed back and shining wet.

She told her share of stories. “In Singapore I ate a monkey brain,” she said. “After midnight, in the streets, they cook monkey brain, and they have this hollowed-out table where they put the monkey, live and wriggling underneath, between the plates. And then they slice the skull like a coconut so that you flip it open and eat the brain.”

“What did it taste like?” I asked, though I wasn't sure how much of this I should be believing.

I remember she put down her fork and spoon, looked up at me very gravely, and said, “Balls. It tastes like balls,” and then she continued to eat. Everyone looked down at their plates. Malti cleared her throat and got up to fetch more rice from the kitchen. With Pin you never knew when she would go too far, when she would take a moment over the edge.

It was Pin who gave us lemon dal. One Friday she sauntered in early while we were cooking, leaving the door of her room ajar so that we could have music as we chopped and stirred. She wasn't about to cook, but she was a good taster. There was a half-lemon lying near the stove, where dal was being boiled. “Why don't you throw it in the dal, just like that, with the rind, and let it boil?” she said.

“Everyone knows you only put in lemon after the food is cooked. It turns bitter when boiled,” we protested. “And that too, with the rind in it.”

Nobody in the room had ever heard of such a thing. And we had grown up on three different cuisines, spread far across the land.

I threw the green lemon in anyway, as an act of faith. The dal turned out bewitching, with a lime-bitter fillip I had never tasted in anything before. We called it the Sunbeam Special. And I know in my gut that of all the things we cooked together, every one of us will always make lemon dal. And when we eat it, we always will be back in that breathless monsoon. The evening when we made it first, the dal was a lovely yellow; it slipped down the throat and warmed your stomach like a new world opening.

Soon after dinner, we would disband. The Allahabad girls were off to their dates, the Christian ladies went chastely to bed, and Pin and I walked down to Merch's room.

They taught me many things in the rain, the Prince and the Mystery Man. They taught me that sitting in Merch's room at night, we could well be in Switzerland.