Miss Timmins' School for Girls (7 page)

They convinced me of this by presenting an array of facts. Panchgani, they pointed out, was the Kashmir of Maharashtra, since it said so on the sign when you entered the town from the Sandy Banks side. And Kashmir, every child knew, was the Switzerland of India. All we needed, they said firmly, was the right kind of music. And they had the right music. I learned slowly to love Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, and Lindesfarne, and the Doors, but most of all, that monsoon, it was the White Album we listened to. I thought of myself as Dear Prudence, afraid to go out and play.

They told me I was heaven-sent, because with my rich knowledge of Marathi and English, I could add to their compendium of words and phrases that were common to the two. They had extracted phrases such as “hey bug” and “neat bus,” “far white luggage” and “what lovely,” but were searching, they said, for a sentence that would make sense in both languages. I never did come up with anything, and they soon moved on to French and Marathi, though they were hampered by the fact, which Merch admitted, that neither of them really knew French. They did manage to come up with “à la mode” and “tout le monde,” which in Marathi mean “here comes a turn” and “head has broken,” respectively.

They had a world of private jokes and word games that they pursued with relish. I had not before seen humor used with such sincerity, so that it became a screen from the world, and I was enchanted.

They could turn without a warning into Freny and Cyrus, a retired Parsi couple with a retarded son and a servant called Somu, whom they were always sending off on impossible missions. Late, in Merch's room, with the rain thundering down around us, we would send Somu out for cigarettes and sweet spiced chai, and while he was at it, could he go to Kaka's and get hot, hot kheema pau, and five plates of dal fry, and also wake up Dhondu, the Panchgani Stores' peon, who slept behind the store, and ask him to take out two choco bars from the only kerosene freezer in town? “And also, Somu, could you run off to England for a jar of that marmalade I love?” Freny would call
.

“English this and English that.” Merch's face would become craggy, and his shoulders curled close to his neck. He sometimes let a glint of a shy smile escape from his eyes just before delivering an exceptional line. “And who will change Tempton's diapers, I ask you, when Somu is not back in the morning?”

Freny and Cyrus had the worst marriage. They would blame each other for everything, especially their son.

“It is because of you that Tempton wears diapers,” Merch said one night, his voice thick, his accent pitch-perfect. “I told you to start training him at least when he was six. I begged you on his tenth birthday. But no. Now he is twenty-two. I ask you, is this any way to bring up a child?”

“Not that you have ever bothered to change a single one of those diapers,” retorted Pin. She did attempt a slight imitation of a Parsi accent, but she sounded mostly like herself, her Indian accent with a British undertow almost intact. She would burst out laughing in the middle of a sentence, and we would have to wait for her to recover before she delivered it.

Merch would pace around the room, he would go and loom over Pin as she sat on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chin, he would wave his arms and shout, becoming the Unmerch.

That night—Shabir, his girlfriend Raisa, their friend Samar, and I were there—we laughed so hard we had to bend and gasp. No one in the room ever entered those exchanges. No one dared, I suppose, because they were so perfect. The skits, though short and sudden, would develop a history. After the performance that night, Tempton was always twenty-two and always wore diapers.

When I still thought they were lovers, I imagined that perhaps they had a practiced repertoire of jokes and skits. I imagined them laughing as they made them up, and I was jealous.

Later I realized that they just had the same quirky humor, and could build quickly off each other. But I was still jealous.

Eight

Scottish Dancing

I
n 1974 there were eight boarding schools in Panchgani, representing almost every religion of India. There was Sanjeevan, the Hindu school near Sandy Banks; the Anjuman Islam School for boys; the Parsi girls' school; the Parsi boys' school; the three Christian schools; and a Bahai School on the way to the valley. The schools stayed in session during the monsoons. The students played indoor games and went for long walks to dissipate their energy.

In Timmins we had Scottish dancing. It had been raining constantly for ten days. We talked louder, and our laughter was high-pitched, pouring into thin spaces between the drumming water. The girls were often in the gym, bobbing up and down, while bagpipes played on an ancient record player donated by young Miss Wilson's twin sister, who lived in America. Miss Manson, during a furlough to England, had brought back Scottish dancing manuals, and now had divided the girls into groups of eight, lined them up, and had them doing padoba kuppes.

My weekends were still quite secret, and at school I was good little Charu, smiling and scraping and trying to get the girls in hand. I would sit with Miss Henderson in the evenings, when she had kilt fittings with the girls, her mouth full of pins. Her knitting basket overflowed with red, blue, and green balls of wool, because the girls wore pom-poms in their house colors sewn onto their navy-blue church berets for the Scottish Dancing Competition.

Miss Manson, Miss Henderson, and the girls were busy scrounging for kilts and plaid scarves. Miss McCall, the piano teacher, a soulful Scottish woman who was not a missionary but for some reason was languishing in Panchgani in a flat little house behind the bazaar where she kept parrots, could be counted on to come up with three kilts; Miss Manson of the Holy Trinity was good for two; and the rest were a challenge. Shobha Rajbans' mother, who was on a European tour, had sent her a red-checked pleated skirt that bobbed just above her knees as she danced.

The Scottish Dancing Competition was also known as the mid-monsoon dance. It was on July 10, almost a month after my first dinner at Sunbeam. The school was in a fever pitch of excitement on the evening of the competition. The top tier of Panchgani residents trooped in wearing just-pressed jackets and saris. The senior boys from St. Paul's, in long locks and red blazers, filled the gym with the smell of their sweaty socks. The convent girls sat next to them, blushing and giggling. The big news at the back of the gym, where the dancing girls were lined up in their formations, was that Shobha had a new boyfriend, and he was sitting in the front row. The gym served also as our auditorium and had a good-sized stage at the far end. The Scottish dancing, however, took place on the gym floor, with the audience seated in rows on the edges of the floor, and on the stage. At the front of the stage sat the three judges: a nun from St. Mary's Convent, an Anglo Indian master from St. Paul's, and Mr. Billimoria, principal of the Parsi school, whose culture was considered more attuned to the finer, Western arts and music.

It was when the girls bobbed in, their toes perfectly pointed and their chests puffed out like Scottish Highlanders, that it struck me just how bizarre the school was. No wonder I felt I was swimming underwater. Not only had the missionaries created a British boarding school in this corner of India, they had even managed to create the Victorian boarding school of their own childhoods.

I saw Pin sitting with Merch at the back of the stage. In Indore, when I pored over
Femina
and
Eve's Weekly
, dreaming of the lives of the models that lounged across those pages, it was their sophistication I yearned for. And though Merch and Pin were too eccentric and ungainly to be glamorous, this same sophistication glowed around them, pulling me into their orbit.

I was intrigued by Pin's past. I had pieced it together by now, from scraps dropped by Merch, Hendy, and Sister Richards. I had assembled the skeleton of her life. Her parents had been traveling missionaries. They went around the country holding prayer meetings in schools and camps run by the same Presbyterian mission. Her father was a very persuasive preacher, and the prayer meetings often turned into teary, emotionally fraught conversion marathons. Moira grew up in Nasik, attending the mission school there. At fourteen, she was sent to boarding school in England.

“That's where she must have learned all her bad habits,” said Hendy with a suggestive sniff, though she did not deign to specify the habits.

Every time I heard something new about her, the dark side beckoned.

I was learning to decipher her many moods. It was her mood that always drove our evenings. Merch was the harbor. I had no idea what he did with his days and nights—Sister Richards told me that he wrote for the district newspaper and was a stringer for the
Poona Herald
, though he said the last story he wrote was in 1968, when two Irani boys had kidnapped a girl from St. Mary's Convent—but I imagined him, always, in his room, ready to draw us into his special world.

Pin had times when she carried a dark cloud on her head, those nights when she smoked silently in the corner with her eyes glazed, and we played chess or talked softly in a glow, Merch and I, of books and exotic places we would visit in our lives. There were some nights, though, when she was just plain angry. On those nights, it was target practice. Anyone was fair game. She slashed everyone. Raswani, the Hindi teacher who had pronounced her to be wicked that day in the staff room, was a spying, conniving psychopath. Malti and Beena were silly blind mice. Jacinta was an empty little potlet, Susan a frustrated cow, and all the teachers “fucking spinsters.” But on those angry nights, it was mostly Miss Nelson she ranted against. “That saintly bitch,” she would say, her eyes small slits of venom. “Biggest hypocrite on this planet.”

I was unsettled by the profanity and anger. “Who has wronged her?” I asked Merch once, when we found ourselves alone.

“It's all about the parents,” he said. I could not buy that package. Many people lost parents. It was tragic, no doubt, and it must be terrible. But she was already a grown-up then, so why this intense hatred for her guardian?

“Her parents were strange creatures.”

“So?” I asked.

He laughed, “OK, all parents are strange creatures, I'll grant you that. But she feels they hated her, all three of them, her parents and Miss Nelson.”

“Never heard of parents hating their children. And if Nelson hates her, why would she keep her in the school in the first place?” I asked.

Merch shrugged. “Yes, there is that,” he said, and changed the subject.

I knew there was a secret, and Merch was its keeper. I tried to work it out of Pin. I would pry in small corners, but everything she said made her more mysterious. In the beginning, I took her with a pinch of salt. It was a touch of paranoia, I reasoned, and I felt somewhat sorry for Miss Nelson having to keep her in line.

“She is a wounded one. Sometimes you just have to wrap her in cotton wool,” offered Merch, following my thoughts, and suddenly, instead of recoiling, I wanted to hold her in my arms and shield her poor naïve heart against the hard world.

And then there were those other nights, when she was quicksilver. Her eyes would turn large and liquid, and she would say small funny things unexpectedly, in the middle of conversations. There was a sparkle around her. The hippies and the farmers would often be there, and we would sit around Merch's room. The nights were redolent with music, laughter, and dreams that stretched thin and clear into the future. It felt like we were all in a cozy little spaceship, spinning around the universe.

With Merch I felt light and graceful. With her, it was butterflies. My stomach turned somersaults when she looked at me. I thought about her a lot. I constructed conversations in my head with her, but I rarely had them. In my hospital room, with the rain drumming on my temples, I would stay up and think of ways I could have answered her sudden swirls of tenderness and humor. When we walked from Sunbeam to Merch's at night, she had this way of striding along deep in conversation, and then stopping suddenly to deliver her punch line. I would have to look back at her to hear her. Walking up alone to classes, I would often catch myself nodding and saying a word out loud, looking back for her tousled head behind my shoulder. She often kept her hood down, even in the pouring rain, and rivulets of water poured down from her curls.

Some sort of Shiva, I thought.

She waved to me as we were all leaving the gym after the Scottish dancing, and was waiting for me outside under a dripping eave. She was in a good mood, bouncing with laughter and enthusiasm.

“Brown girls bowing in kilts,” she said with sparkling eyes. “This is
absolutely
my reason for being here.” We both laughed out loud. I was thinking then only of the colonial implications of this neat turn of phase. Later that night, it came as a complete revelation to me that there was also a further meaning embedded in that line, and she had hoped that I would guess it. If I'd known, I'm not sure that I would have walked up to table-land with her that night.

We walked out together, I thought, perhaps to buy cigarettes around the corner. She did not stop at the bidi stall, however, and we walked on. I did not ask where. The rain had slowed to a fine drizzle, but the world was still encased in water. The wind tugged at my raincoat hood as we turned the corner and saw the land rise up to the clouds.

In Marathi, Panchgani means five volcanoes, the “panch ganis” that surround the village. The nearest of the volcanoes was a long plateau called table-land. During the day, table-land filled the horizon to the right of the bazaar like a resting lion, its back parallel to the sky. That night, it became a giant cake, with the clouds hovering like white icing on the top.

I guessed she'd had a miserable childhood. But so, I figured, had I. As we walked past the Muslim cemetery on the way to table-land, I asked her what was the best memory of her childhood.

“My skates,” she said warmly. “Every evening in Nasik, in the mission compound, I would sail through the air. I went fast, I could swoop and swirl and whiz. People from the mission would often sit around and watch me. I think I did that for two whole years.

“The skates were great,” she said, in a rush of remembering. “We went back to England for furlough when I was seven. I learnt to skate there, and they bought the best pair of skates in the shop just before we came back to India.” She usually referred to her parents as “they.”

“And when did you stop?” I asked, wanting to hold that memory complete.

“Well, you see, I started sneaking out of the compound.”

She would. “It was more fun on the road,” she said, shaking her head ruefully, her lips turned up in a cheeky smile.

“Did they yell at you?”

“They were quite sorrowful. They thought I was being deceitful. And then of course I had an accident, and broke a hand and a foot.”

“And then?” You had to pry it out of her; she never volunteered too much.

“After that I started cycling,” she said, matter-of-factly.

As we walked up to table-land that night, Pin darted suddenly through a gap in the hedge into the Woggles' garden. I stood outside, too timid to breach a property line at night. She came back a few minutes later with a handful of the jasmine that grew on the creeper behind the garden gate. She held the flowers in her cupped hands, and we walked slowly up the winding road, burying our heads in their fragrance.

This was my first time on table-land at night. It was easy to walk in the dark, because the ground was hard and smooth. Its top felt like it had been sliced with a sharp knife. The wind churned the drizzle and spat it at us in angry bursts. We kept our raincoats on and sat on some rocks beside the pond. “Why is Merch called the Mystery Man?” I asked her. She threw a few aimless pebbles into the pond. “Now you see him, now you don't,” she said. She turned to me and brushed back the hair scurrying around my face. Then, without a warning, she pulled me to her and kissed me on the lips.

She pulled back, smiled at me, and started kissing again, her tongue slowly massaging mine. I had read in some faceless love story that a girl is never completely surprised by her first kiss. It can be sooner than she expected. Not ever unexpected. But for me, that kiss on table-land was a bolt of lightning flashing down on from the sky.

In my dreams, I saw always, my clear dewlike face, being held in the moonlight by a lean man, usually called Rahul. Kissing another woman on a wet night, kissing the Prince on table-land, no. The kiss was unexpected and completely undreamt. But the plunging in my stomach was the same as in the kisses of my dreams. Her tongue coaxed mine out, and slowly my lips, my tongue started dueling and dancing along with hers. We broke apart, and she kissed the rain off my face, licked my blot with a flat tongue, and then went back, again into my mouth. I cannot say how long I stayed. I remember licking a raindrop from the tip of her nose.

But then the devil of confusion and panic possessed me, and I tore myself away and ran and ran and ran all the way down the slope and through the bazaar and down to my room. I did not look back, but I knew she did not follow me that night. The hard rain started up again, the fireflies I had seen on the way up had closed themselves up, the edge of my gum boots rubbed raw against my calves, and my pink silk kurta was plastered to my breasts. I rubbed the thin towel hard against my skin, and jumped, naked, into my damp bed. All night I drifted in and out of strange half-finished dreams of childhood dread, turning ice-cold one minute, and then, when the kiss came back to haunt me, I would grow hot and flushed.

The next morning my blot was red and angry, and my face swollen. I could do nothing with my hair but tie it in a knot above my head. I felt naked, I felt that anyone who looked at me would know my deep dark secret.