The Red Carpet (6 page)

When the Queen of England finally recognized her efforts on behalf of English Culture and invited her to tea, Mrs. Rafter would have nothing to be ashamed of.

Our parents kept out of her way, and agreed with everything she said. It was hard not to. Who could object to her high moral standards? And certainly, a convent-educated accent was an asset. It would give the girls better marriage options. Most of all, they agreed with Mrs. Rafter’s view that girls must be Good. It dovetailed nicely with their own notions of the fitness of things.

As in, Boys Will Be Boys,
but Girls Must Be Good.

This involved, primarily, keeping our knees together, and our minds pure. Pure, as in virginal. Innocent of the depredations of Man (or Boy), at least until their parental duty was done. Delivered, one girl, unsullied, to the marital bed. Her price far above rubies.

When Mrs. Rafter walked onto the sports field, we already knew that she was in a bad mood. Forty minutes of Mrs. Rafter’s class first thing in the morning had resulted in:

Two copybooks flung out of the window for untidy writing.

Two girls punished with her ruler: on the legs to keep their knees together, on the arm to keep their backs from touching the chair. You creatures, she said, will never be Ladies. Why are you crying? You think good marks excuse bad behavior? Write one hundred times: I will learn to act like a Lady.

Sports Day practice sessions had intensified every day. Now, just two days before the big event, we did nothing else. The whole school spent hours out on the big field, practicing, training, running, jumping. The three school houses would be competing head-to-head, winning and losing points with every event. This was the only time of the year when the School Goddesses, the older girls, the House Captains, the Prefects, the School Captain, who chatted with such ease and familiarity with the teachers, would condescend to notice us, the junior girls. “Good jump!” they would call. “Well done,” and we would look to see if our friends had noticed.

We practiced everything, including the cheers. We were divided into three houses, each named after the first school principals. On Sports Day we’d take turns shouting, house by house:

Two Four Six EIGHT,
Who do we appreciATE?
. . . Kensington!
Whisky soda ginger POP,
Here comes Ashley
. . . on the TOP!
North South East WEST,
Who is the Very BEST?
. . . Brunton!

I was competing in the fifty-meter dash. Usually I was part of the scaff-and-raff, the greater lumpen herd, never one of those who won points at school by being good at studies, or who mastered the art of talking chirpily to the teachers and about whom they told parents, “Oh, she’s
such
a nice girl!”; not losing house points was the best I could strive for. Luckily, a lifetime of being chased around my home by my older brother had given me a turn for speed that was unmatched. Winning the race meant winning fifty points for the house and smiles from the seniors and teachers. That one day on the sports field made up for my shabby academics and everything else.

That one day, I would shed the Sports Day skirt that modestly covered the Sports Day shorts below. I would race down the field ahead of everyone else, my braids flailing behind me, the house ribbon fluttering on my arm.

And when I did, for just a few minutes, my entire house, senior to junior, would chant in unison: Two-Four-Six-Eight-Who-Do-We-Appreciate?

Me.

I had just finished my practice run (“well done!”) and had rejoined the rest of my class on the side of the field, when Mrs. Rafter appeared. I didn’t care; teachers often came to watch us practice. I was more concerned with what my friends and I were going to do.

Usually, at practice sessions we hung around the older girls. As temperatures soared, they would casually remove their blazers and look over their shoulders. That was our signal to compete for the honor of holding their blazers, which also gave us the right to talk about it for a whole day afterwards. Not this year, though. This year, the four of us were absorbed in our own private club, which had started a few weeks earlier during lunchtime.

This was the most exciting club I had ever known. It was also the most secretive. It had just four members, Tara “Tash” Srinivasan, Freny “Bats” Batlivala, Susan “Benjy” Benjamin, and myself. And we all knew the penalty of getting caught.

I had just caught Tash’s eye, and started waving in her direction, when I saw her eyes glaze over. I looked around, and knew right away that I was in for it.

Mrs. Rafter had come to a halt in front of my class. She had her ruler out. Today of all days, she was going to do a Surprise Check.

“Okay, girls,” she said, and we all squatted to the floor in a straight line, knees apart. From where she stood, it gave her a straight view down our parted skirts right down to our underpants. They were supposed to be white. I, thanks to Mary, was wearing pink. Mrs. Rafter’s voice silenced the entire great big field, and all the girls on it.

You girl!

Yes, you.

Stand up.

What is that rubbish you are wearing?

Come here.

The ruler in her hand lifted the edge of my skirt high enough for everyone to see.

Look at this, she said. Decent girls wear white, my girl. Doesn’t your mother know that?

Answer me, girl.

Do you have a tongue in your head or is it completely empty?

My classmates, from the safety of white underpants, giggled dutifully.

Hold out your hand, girl.

Why are you crying?

I hated Mary. As soon as I got home, I was going to climb onto the terrace, go to my special hiding place, unearth that fiverupee note that she had given me, and go show it to my mother, and tell her the truth. Then, I would show her my pink underwear, and the red mark of Mrs. Rafter’s ruler that always took hours to fade.

Then, Mary would see.

My friends led me away to one corner of the field, and waited impatiently for me to finish crying.

“Are we having a club meeting?” I asked, drying my tears.

“Yes, of course we are,” said Tash. “Didn’t you get my note?”

No, I said.

“Well, doesn’t matter. It probably fell on the floor and got lost.”

Supposing someone finds it, I asked, my hand still smarting. “Don’t worry,” said Tash. “Nobody will find it.

“Okay, here’s the story,” she said. “It’s a Famous Five one.”

Oh goody, we said, and made sure that no one was close to us, listening.

“Julian, Dick and George and Ann are driving along in the car to a picnic.”

What color was the car? we asked. And what were they wearing?

“The car was . . . okay, blue. And they weren’t wearing anything. They were Naked.”

I went home that evening, eager to talk to my mother about Mary.

I never got the chance.

I was met by my mother, who didn’t smile, who didn’t hug me, or ask me how Sports Day practice went.

“Explain this,” she said, holding out a five-rupee note.

“I found this in your desk drawer,” she said.

No, I wanted to say. You could not have. I had hidden it up on the terrace the previous evening, in a hiding place I thought only I knew. A little niche, hidden by brickwork. Big enough for small secrets.

Except I should have remembered that, years ago, it was Mary who had first shown it to me.

Later, I heard my mother crying to my father: “I forced her to apologize to Mary. Bad girl. So shocking. We have never had trouble like this with Ramu. Yes, of course I am going to punish her. I was going to make puri-palya for her lunch tomorrow, but now I won’t.”

I stayed awake for a long time that night. I waited for my parents to go to sleep, before slipping from my bed and running into the drawing room. I still had one more thing to do that day, for our club meeting.

Tomorrow was my turn, and I wanted to outdo them all. I couldn’t make up stories the way Tash did, but alternatives were acceptable. They were just more dangerous.

The drawing room was lined with books. I switched on the torch and spelled my way through the titles, until I came to the one I wanted. “Harold Robbins,” it said. It was on the Forbidden shelf, banned not just to me but to my brother Ramu as well. But of course he had read every book on that shelf, and from things he had said, I knew that this was the book I wanted. I was slipping it off the shelf when I heard her voice, clothed in darkness:

Oho, missy. And what would your mother say if she saw you now?

I ran.

Ran back to my room, and threw the book under the bed.

And waited for Mary to follow.

She didn’t, and the house grew quiet. After a while, I rescued the book and tucked it into the bottom of my schoolbag. I went to sleep.

But the next day, in school, when I triumphantly gathered my club members around me, the book was missing.

Our club had started, as most school stuff did, during lunch break.

Lunchtime in school was fifteen minutes of urgent swallowing, followed by half an hour of play. When we were ten, we would take our lunch boxes to a far corner of the big field and have a picnic. Lunch was usually sandwiches: cucumber, coconut-and-mint chutney, cheese, or jam, packed into plastic lunch boxes that had a separate compartment for chips or biscuits. Sometimes our mothers would provide roti rolls instead: chapatis with cooked vegetables rolled up inside, or jam, or spicy mango pickle. The four of us would trade bites, everyone else’s lunch always tasting better than our own, and fantasize about the meals we would really like to have. Naturally, all our secret food fantasies revolved around English food, exotic fare that Enid Blyton said tasted better than anything else in the world. Steak and kidney pie. Roast beef. Ham and watercress sandwiches.

And then we’d walk round and round the field, and talk endlessly, about our classmates, our families, and when we would get our menstrual periods, in the manner of girls who are just discovering the art of female conversation.

It was Tash, naturally enough, who escalated the thing to a whole new level. She announced impressively one day: “Yesterday I had sex.”

Sandwiches were forgotten. Really? Why yes, she said. Really. Just yesterday, she and Phiroze, a ten-year-old boy who lived next door, went behind his house, took off their clothes, and Had Sex. Were you sitting or standing, we asked. Tash thought it through for a minute and said, Standing. That’s how it’s always done. And then, to seal her expertise, she used the Word: we Fucked, she said, and watched as Bats, Benjy, and I rolled about on the ground, squealing and giggling.

We knew the basic theory, of course: we had all pored through the
Reader’s Digest Family Health Guide
(available in every home), staring in silence at the picture of the naked woman (eighteen years old, according to the caption), and wondering if the senior girls in our school indeed had breasts like that, and waists like that, and god forbid, hair all over their privates. Then we’d turn the page over to the picture of the man (naked, also at eighteen years) and have a collective fit of the giggles. The guide described sex as “the insertion of the penis into the vagina,” but we knew better: sex was when a man’s su-su and a woman’s su-su touched.

But according to Tash, we really knew nothing at all.

Her authority was unchallenged. She’d come up with new stories, some to do with herself, others to do with our favorite storybook characters, who were always naked, and who had sex, it appeared, with hundreds of people, and all at the same time. We would listen agog, our heads close together, our feet walking, walking, round and round the field. We listened during lunchtime, we whispered in chapel, we waited for sports practice. We knew for certain that if we were ever caught, we would be severely punished. Maybe even expelled. “That’s why,” said Tash, “we have to meet Far From Everybody.”

Accordingly, we called ourselves the Far From Everybody Club, and we waited for Tash’s creative genius to send us a note: FFEC meeting. Field. Lunchtime. That meant she’d thought of another good one. After a while, Tash got tired and we all had to take turns and come up with something new.

That day was my turn, but somebody had abstracted the Harold Robbins from my bag. I fretted furiously. Was it someone at school? Or was it Mary at home?

I didn’t know which was worse.

“Never mind the book,” said Tash. “Tell us a story. Yourself and somebody else.”

My brain struggled to come up with something, but it was difficult. I couldn’t make up anything. The only thing I could possibly tell them about myself and somebody else wasn’t some silly make-believe. It happened to be true.

But the truth was the one thing I couldn’t really talk about. Not to my mother. Not to my friends. Truth was either like the
Reader’s Digest
or like my secret. Boring, or shameful.

When I was little and disobeyed Mary or threw a tantrum, she was not allowed to smack me. That was a privilege reserved for my mother alone. Instead, she would devise new and interesting ways to keep me quiet. She slipped me forbidden sweets. She threw away the milk I did not want to drink and told my mother I had drunk it all. Sometimes she would drink it herself.

By the time I was four, Mary had learned to manage me as she did my mother. Sometimes, though, I would still disobey her and run to hide behind my mother. Who would either scold me or scold Mary, depending on her mood. Like all baby-ayahs, Mary learned to cope with the magic rule: all credit for good behavior was given to me; any problems were attributed to Mary directly. “Not drunk her milk? Why? Why are you letting her behave like this?” my mother would ask. “What happened, baby? Mary scolded you and made you cry? Don’t scold her. Just tell her. She will listen, she is a good little
gundu
.”

And Mary would agree with her, and nod her head in appreciation, and smile at me, and I, victorious, would put my hand in hers, while my mother watched in a pleased, self-satisfied way. See? she seemed to say. Any problems, just come to me.

Except, that is, when she was resting, or in the midst of preparing to go out. Then my mother’s temper would boil over.