Miss Timmins' School for Girls (8 page)

I missed breakfast and slunk into the prayer hall from the back, just as the girls stood up and launched into “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so . . .” My hands were clammy with sweat, strange strips of excitement and dread ran down my spine. I stood next to Miss Raswani, who glared sternly at me, her lips pursed in disapproval. I remember I was holding on to the back of the pew in front of me, clutching for safer ground. I saw the certainty in the faces of the missionaries, and I toyed in a third-person kind of way with the idea of letting Jesus into my heart. But there, in front of me, stood Miss Raswani, Our Lady of the Pursed Lips, her white-rimmed eyes raking me with scorn and disgust, as though she had seen that very kiss.

No wild thoughts, I told myself firmly. I will be brave, like my sweet Ayi. “Ayi, I had my first kiss yesterday. With a girl,” I imagined telling her. I quickly brushed Ayi under the carpet. I walked out of the prayer hall and went in to teach
Macbeth
to the standard-ten girls.

I remember that lesson, because it was the day the tenth-standard girls turned to me, suddenly. Like a school of small silverfish.

“
Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I'd have done it
,” I read. “Why do you think she would say that?”

“Shakespeare sees her as weak because she is a woman,” said Nandita. “He's a chauvinist. She's evil and weak.” Nandita Bhansali was short and plump and had a thick fringe of black hair, which, by midterm, hung raggedly over her square black plastic glasses like eaves. Literature was her favorite subject.

The whole school—teachers, girls, and I imagined even the British missionaries—was in awe of standard ten. They had all been together in Timmins since a very young age and had flowered together into a bouquet. They moved as a whole, and they looked after their own. You could not pry them apart and find a spoiler. At the quiet center was Nandita.

Nandita was one of those girls you would not notice at first, but once you did, you never forgot that she was there. You wanted to know what she was thinking. I thought of her as bobbing through the class, earnest and wise, keeping everything good and aboveboard. She made me teach at a higher level.

Shobha had turned my ninth-standard classes into a circus. She was a drama queen. The tens, on the other hand, gave me a chance. They waited, poised, hanging in the tank with waving fins, until that day when they came towards me, flashing their silver tails. I could feel the whoosh of Nandita's tail turning.

“But as a character within this play, would you say that Lady Macbeth is a coward?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Nandita, not missing a beat.

“She's also manipulative. She can't plunge the knife herself, but puts her husband up to it,” said Akhila Bahadur, an impertinent and squirmy little girl who usually played for laughs in class.

“So that means in the end it's all her fault. Her husband turns out to be the lesser villain. All these male writers, they always blame the women,” announced Nandita, folding her hands as if to say, “Your honor, I rest my case.”

“Perhaps, yes. Shakespeare was grounded in his time, in terms of male and female roles,” I replied. “But these are the big moments of life. You do not know your own weakness until you are tested. You cannot know how you will act till you are actually in that moment.” I said this with feeling. I, who had rarely dreamt of anything but a love marriage, I, who had just arrived from hatching with my parents in a small town, I had been kissed by a woman. To have been kissed by a woman on a windy mountaintop was one thing. But for that kiss to have opened up my body like a fault line was another.

Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeared?
I told myself, becoming both Lord and Lady Macbeth, the adviser and the advised, at once. It is only the shock of a first tongue kiss that I feel, nothing more and nothing less. This was the first and last time. It was an accident. It would never happen again.

I made the class play it out. “Let's put ourselves there. It's dark and rainy. The castle is large and echoing. You are Lady Macbeth. You're going to do this. It will be easy. And then your weak husband will be king. You have always guided him. It will be easy for you, you think. You can do anything. Your husband is too high-strung. You enter the king's chamber. You adjust your eyes to the dark. You hold the dagger up with both hands, practice how you will plunge it. Then, a flash of lightning. You see this old man, his mouth slack. Maybe he is snoring, like your father. You think of the strength it will take to plunge the knife. You don't know where to plunge it; the rib cage looms large beneath your knife.”

“OK, so she realizes that murder is a big thing. Then why is she so ruthless with her husband?” asked Nandita. “Shakespeare is a chauvinistic pig, that's why.”

“Because Lady Macbeth has a weak imagination,” I said. I don't know from where that came. “She still sees it as a simple act. It's only after the deed is done that she feels the enormity of it, and feels remorse.

“I think Shakespeare is great because he gave her remorse,” I said, feeling I had just understood a universal truth. Surely it was remorse I felt, the shivers and the guilt, the flush on my cheeks when I thought of her tongue circling my blot. In truth, I knew nothing of the depths of remorse on that day. That came later.

“That will be your homework question this week,” I continued, flashing brilliance and strength. “Examine Lady Macbeth's role in the light of the women's liberation movement of our time.”

“Can we please have a choice, Miss?” asked Daksha Trivedi, dolefully. Daksha sat in the front row with grumpy determination and always worked very hard. But she usually didn't get it.

“How about, would Lady Macbeth have really killed the king if he had not resembled her father?” said Nandita.

“Very good,” I said. “Do either.” The day after my first kiss was also the day I first began to like teaching.

Nine

Monsoon Swimming

O
n my third day in Timmins, when I saw the green inland form with my mother's little curled letters, my heart turned a half-circle: I had never gotten a letter from my own mother. We had never been apart, my ayi and I. She filled the inland with marching sentences in neat Marathi script.

I have now started going out for walks with your father in the evening. Anita got engaged to a boy from Lucknow, very handsome boy. Auntiji sent us mithai, and Anita came herself and gave it. She said to tell you. The house feels empty without you. I have made chakri and your favorite pickle. I will send it to you in a parcel tomorrow. Baba says that Panchgani is very pretty. He feels you will be happy there. I am knitting you a green and red sweater. I have made fresh sandalwood paste for your face [read blot] and will send it in the same parcel.

I saw our home without me. What would they say to each other, my ayi and baba, across the table? It was I who made them anxious, I who made them laugh.

I wrote long letters to fill the void. At first it was Marathi with Ayi and English with Baba. But soon I just wrote to them together in English. I wrote about the missionaries, marching through the school like onward Christian soldiers, each pursuing her pet mission.

Take Miss Manson. She does spot-checks on the girls' bloomers. The other day I was climbing up the steps to class, when suddenly Miss Manson sprang past me, taking two steps at a time, and ominously patted some poor girls from behind. “Nandita and Akhila,” she said, her big blue eyes awaiting a sinner, “let me hear your elastic.”

The girls live in terror of this. They are to snap the elastic on each leg to prove their bloomers are firmly in place. Luckily, that day, Nandita and Akhila both produced resounding snaps.

She used to give them detention for bad elastic.

But soon, the standard-ten girls went into Miss Nelson's office to complain. “It's not fair, Miss,” said Nandita, the spokesperson. “Detentions are for study-related issues. Miss Manson gives us detention and makes us sew name tapes on our black ribbons.” “It's just not fair,” said the chorus of girls around her.

“Yes, you are quite right, Nandita. This is not an academic issue,” pronounced Miss Nelson after due consideration. I can imagine that she must have paused and looked gravely around—all these white women, Baba, they quell people with a grave look. And once you say “fairness,” they have to listen. But Miss Nelson is a master. I am trying to be like her, at least when I am teaching.

“It is not an academic issue,” she continued. “It is a behavioral issue. Miss Manson is a sports teacher and is in charge of you after school. If you disobey her, then the punishment for that need not be a detention.” Some of the girls might have already been fidgeting with excitement at the victory, so Miss Nelson probably waited a moment. “It will be an order mark,” she said, looking at them with a bland smile. You have to hand it to her. The girls retreated in defeat, because an order mark is a punishment of a much higher magnitude; it is on record against you and your house the whole year, and counts in getting some prize or other, some “Best House” cup or something that they seem to all be working towards.

I tried to write funny letters. I knew they needed to laugh. I began to enjoy writing them, and every time I saw something new, it played along in my mind until it turned funny. I would think of how I could present it. It was like combing my hair. Move a pin, put a pin in, take a pin out. A deft knot, a small twist, and a turn in the mirror.

Sometimes I think that like you, Baba, I am on a ship on high seas. A sealed place with its own set of intricate rules. But a female version, of course, which makes it as different as night and day, I am sure. In this case, as far as I can tell, at least half the “officers” are hysterical. The Hindi teacher, I think, is the worst. Her name is Miss Raswani. First she would purse her lips every time she passed me. Recently she has begun to sniff like a bull about to charge before turning her face away. I spoke to two other young teachers, and they said she does the same to them. They say that laughter makes Miss Raswani's blood boil. Specially if it sounds carefree. These women have no life but the school.

I, of course, made it clear that I was not like “these women” because I met with people outside the school. I wrote home of my evenings, which I had set up in an orderly succession, like a slide show. There was Shrewsbury with Miss Henderson, and spicy peanuts at the Nest with Mr. Woggle drinking beer and the black steep rocks of table-land rising through the mist.

And then, there were the bazaar evenings. I bought ribbons and cold cream and chocolates from Panchgani Stores, repaired slippers, stopped in at the post office to buy stamps and inland forms, and sometimes even booked an “urgent” call home. If it went through, all of us would give a few shouts of “Hello, is everything all right?” to each other through whistling wires.

I almost always went into the Irani Café to buy their famous gootli-pau, the meat cutlets served hot between fresh baked bread. The owner, Mr. Blind Irani, was usually at the cash counter. He took his time, figuring the change, sizing the notes, and weighing the coins in his beefy pink palms. He was a straight-backed dignified man with silver hair, and he talked to everyone while he sorted out the money in his five note drawers and five coin bowls. He put everything in its place first, and then carefully went back in and counted out the change. When no one was buying, he counted the money. “I never write it down,” he said. “I always know how much there is.” He wore thick dark glasses and kept his red-tipped cane hooked behind his seat. He turned his ear towards you when you talked and spoke in the unmirrored way of the blind, face and lips twisting and twitching. He did not accept notes over twenty rupees.

I was very shy with him, and so he spoke to me rarely. I, who had always wanted to fade into the furniture, I thought it would be a release, being invisible. But it wasn't so, and I didn't know why. I doubted if he knew about my facial imperfection. I was not a topic of conversation in those days. He knew I always bought gootli-pau, and he knew I was a Timmins teacher. And yet, I was shy.

The old man had a clear channel to the Letters to the Editor section of the
Poona Herald
. He always kept a cutting of his latest letter at his side, passing it around proudly to his regulars. He was our very own Ved Mehta. He commented on corruption in high places, the conditions of the ghat roads, the need to grow silver oaks in all the hill stations of India. Through all his letters there was a definite undertone of “The British Did It Better.”

One of his pet subjects was the sliding morals of youth.

Even at twenty, these young men are wandering around with long sideburns, trying to play Romeos. In my day, they would be supporting families. They are given too much money by lax parents, too intent on their own pleasures. Little wonder, then, that the young men have no moral fiber.

Merch had been Mr. Irani's conduit into the
Poona Herald
. He had also been the conduit for the old man's antagonist, Mr. Dubash, who lived in Dalwich House, a vast, ramshackle building that the girls said was haunted. We passed it on the way to Parsi Point when I took them for walks.

My worthy opponent talks of the moral fiber of our youth. But I would like to ask him where he was in those days when this humble writer donned a khadi cap and fought beside the finest of our brethren in the freedom movement. Where was he, I ask you. Where were these much-touted ideals when we were exposing ourselves, nay, even risking our lives, chanting “Quit India” on the streets of Bombay? He was not there; oh, no, he was busy sailing boats with young women of dubious character.

The two old men wrote letters, back and forth, like a game of badminton. Lengthy, cantankerous rebuttals and counter-rebuttals written in courteous colonial English, all thuses and therefores and thereabouts. They still played bridge together on Tuesday afternoons, but otherwise did not speak to each other.

Merch would grin and claim to be quite neutral in the matter of the Dueling Parsi Gents of Panchgani. But since he was Mr. Blind Irani's main reader and writer, he was considered to be in Mr. Blind Irani's camp.

I always bought the gootli-pau for two rupees and left. Sitting down alone in a bazaar restaurant would have been risqué. Sometimes, the Prince and Merch would be lounging at Irani's. On those days, I walked past with a tight bazaar smile, the taste of uneaten bread cutlets in my mouth. I hated running into them together in the bazaar. If I passed Merch, I usually more or less ignored him. I knew he understood quite perfectly and did not take it personally. But with Prince, who could tell? She might just wave her arms and shout, “Charu, Charu, come and join us,” and then I would have to go and be seen lounging in the bazaar with hippies during the day, when teachers or girls in uniforms going for evening walks might see me.

I was still trying to keep my two worlds apart.

The first week after the kiss, I did not even look at Pin in school. I was glad she was barely there. I will pretend it never happened, I told myself, and through the Friday dinner at Sunbeam I looked away and spoke to Jacinta or went into the kitchen to stir. Then after dinner, as soon as we turned the corner from Sunbeam, she pulled me to her by the raincoat and we kissed each other like two penguins, water dripping down our hair and cold in our mouths. And then we pulled apart and trotted off to Merch's room without another word.

I was one of those who sat straight-backed in corners and read at breaks. I rubbed my blot furtively at the corners of playing fields. I was a dreamer, and now I delegated it to dreamtime, the rush and sparkle when our eyes would lock and our hands would brush in Merch's room, or our thighs would rub against each other in the backseat of the beige Fiat. The kisses were few and stolen, and only when we were alone. Pin would dart at me behind the bushes as we walked in the rain, and I would kiss her back for a while and then turn my face, or pull away. We did not talk about it.

The Sunbeam dinner was the loosening of the stays. Our eyes would slide around the room and lock with a click.

“I'd rather be mellow,” muttered the Prince as she passed me the puris on the night the lemon dal turned out bitter. She always managed to sit beside me at the Sunbeam table, and would rub her leg against mine, just a little longer than accidentally. Her eyes were chameleon eyes. I had seen them as slits of venom, but they could also grow and fill a whole room with light. And turn so tenderly, to me. I thought of the walk in the rain to Merch's after dinner, and of how she would kiss me on the back road and we would let our hands wander through the gaps in each other's raincoats.

Our fingers brushed static as she handed me the plate. She looked beautiful. I took a plump hot puri and turned to pass the plate to Jacinta. It was a white dinner plate with scalloped edges. She was sitting at the head of the table, and I thought she had grasped it quite firmly. But then she dropped it on the floor between us. I think she threw it. She made a sort of mewing sound and tumbled into her room, her pallu trailing on the puri-strewn floor behind her. Sobs followed. After a few minutes, Susan took Jacinta's plate to her in her room. She could be heard muttering soothingly to her in Malayalam, though we still heard sporadic sobs above the steady rain.

Jacinta talked to me often in the staff room, mostly about herself. Jacinta had an oval, elfin face, limpid eyes, and enormous lashes that she used like Japanese fans. I judged her emotional maturity to be that of an eight-year-old.

I was fascinated because her parents were teachers in Ethiopia. She had been sent to boarding school in India when she was ten and went home only once every other year, for the two-month winter holidays. She seemed to have had a stern childhood with a difficult mother who loved the sons better. “Jacinta is an unusual name for a Syrian Christian. My mother got my name from a gravestone. Shows how much she must have loved me,” she said. She had been sent to Panchgani to wait for marriage prospects. Her parents were looking for boys, she told me, fluttering her eyes coyly.

She must have seen us flirting, Pin and I, seen our eyes dancing. She must hate the Prince. She must hate me too. She had felt akin to me during those long chats in the staff room, she had confided in me, only to find that I had turned depraved, making eyes at the strange foreign woman. And now she was mewing like a tormented kitten in the bedroom.

“I'll clean up the mess, don't worry, just keep eating,” I said perhaps too loudly, and dashed to the kitchen. I had goose bumps from tip to toe. I splashed some cold water on my blot and took a long time finding the broom and bucket.

I knelt to clean the floor. I kept cleaning, long slow strokes. I could not sit across from Malti and Beena and show them my shocked and guilty face. I could not risk them confirming what they might only have guessed. The Prince kept eating, though she did not touch the dal. She heaped large amounts of rice and curry onto each spoonful—as always, she ate quickly and with purpose—and then reached for more. From time to time, she shook her head ruefully. She seemed unaware of everyone else. Malti and Beena swallowed their food with some nervous chatter and raised eyebrows. From my vantage point crouching on the floor—that is how servants must see us, I thought with a start: from the floor, looking up—I saw that Malti and Beena did not look directly at her, but were aware of her every move. They were in awe of her. And then, I thought, so am I. I watch her every move.

That night was the first Friday that I did not go to Merch's. I left quietly without saying good-bye as soon as I finished cleaning, and walked back to my room alone. It was all just innocent flirting, I told myself. I will stop it straightaway. It means nothing to me. I sat in my room and wrote a long letter home to calm myself. I forgot to send it. On Monday, Shankar, the school handyman, gravely handed me a telegram from my mother as I was sitting in the staff room correcting essays with my red and blue pencil.
Going to Kolhapur stop will come and see you soon stop letter follows stop.