Miss Timmins' School for Girls (31 page)

We walked in silence for a while. Ramona was the weak link, I was thinking. She's the one who has seen the most. I should talk to her.

“Did she say she actually physically saw Miss Prince?” I asked.

“No, but . . .”

“And did anyone else, any of you see her?”

Nandita told me of the scream, and of the night when they called her spirit. I realized that they assumed I knew of this scream. I had not heard even the faintest of rumors.

“Who heard this scream?”

“Everyone heard it,” said Akhila. “You can ask anyone.”

“Well it's for sure all the girls in Willoughby and Pearsall heard it. So the matrons and teachers around them must have too. The hospital is too far, though. We asked the mumps girls, and they didn't hear it,” said Nandita.

“And even you thought it was the ghost of Miss Prince? If only half the school heard and the teachers in Sunbeam didn't hear it, then it was physical, not ethereal, no?” I asked, lifting my eyebrows at Nandita the Sane.

“But Miss, we didn't know about Miss Nelson then, remember? Everyone was confused. The Upper Willoughby girls insist it was Miss Nelson, and the Lower Willoughby girls swear that they heard it like a growl growing out of Miss Raswani's room. So we thought we would consult higher authorities, as it were. Shobha, Akhila, and I decided to do a planchette. I never really thought anything would happen,” said Nandita quietly.

All three of us continued to walk, looking down at our feet on the red mud path. “Do you believe that it was really her? I mean, do you think the ghost of Miss Prince really visited Ramona?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” I said softly and saw a lightening in her opaque eyes.

Akhila was fidgeting in the manner of schoolgirls who are about to say something they've been storing up. Usually something you don't want to hear. Finally, as we approached the staff room, she blurted it out.

“Miss, maybe Dr. Desai has some more rooms above his dispensary, you could stay there,” she said, stressing “there” and giving me a pleased look as though she had popped a big round sweet into her mouth. I saw Nandita nudge her furiously.

“I have had enough of the smell of disinfectant, thank you,” I said, and lifted the pink curtain and walked into the sanctuary of the staff room where no student was ever allowed to set foot. But I heard what they said as they walked past.

“I should have asked, ‘Does Merch smell of disinfectant?' That's what I should have done,” said Akhila.

“Why didn't you just shut up, you idiot,” snapped Nandita. “You spoilt it all.”

“But you were supposed to bring up Merch, we agreed.” Akhila was saying with a rising tide of disgruntlement. “We were supposed to warn her of the danger. What is the point of rehearsing it”—and then to my disappointment they walked out of my range of hearing and Nandita's soft reply was only a mumble. I turned around with flushed cheeks to see Miss Munim, the art teacher, leering at me with raised eyebrows and a foolish grin. I had no time to think because the bell rang.

Eleven-year-olds still crowded around you and wanted to tell you about their days. They hadn't reached the dueling stage yet, and you could let your guard down.

Divya Moghe of standard six had become something of an acolyte. “We never knew Hindi could be so much fun, Miss,” she said. She always offered to carry my books to the staff room, and she always chattered on at full speed, trying to stuff as much into the walk as she could.

The day after my conversation with Nandita and Akhila, Divya was very subdued as she walked beside me carrying sixteen brown-paper-covered Hindi notebooks that I was taking home to correct. “Nandita wants you to meet her in the far throwball court right now. She says it's urgent.”

“Did she say why?”

“She does not want anyone else to know.” Divya looked at me gravely. I wondered how much of the story she knew. “I think it's to do with the mystery. She says she wanted to tell you yesterday, but Akhila got in the way.”

I was on my way to little lunch in the staff room. Little lunch was 10:35 to 10:45. For the girls, it was the only meal left to choice. They could go down to the pantry and get a banana if they wanted. Sometimes there were two glucose biscuits, and on rare occasions, when Miss Cummings felt bountiful, there were two glucose biscuits and a banana, and word would spread quickly and there would be a line outside the pantry. For the teachers, there was a large pot of tea, a tray of Marie biscuits, and a bowl of bananas or small sour oranges.

I loved little lunch. The kitchen in Aeolia was a dark dank outhouse with a Primus stove that took me more than twenty minutes to light. On teaching days I would sit down in the staff room and drink two cups of tea, have a variable number of Marie biscuits, and end with a banana. In winter, they often had small, sweet elaichi bananas, of which I often ate two. Women I had barely exchanged more than two sentences with last term, such as the oily history teacher, the wife of the superintendent of St. Paul's who taught some junior class, and Mrs. Paranjpe, the ex–French teacher who chewed paan, sat down next to me and engaged me in small talk now that I had acquired this aura of mystery.

Meeting Nandita during little lunch would be a considerable sacrifice, but I knew it was for my own good, and so I went and found her leaning against the stone wall that bounded the school

“Miss, I wanted to ask you, do you feel someone has been watching you?” she asked.

I did. After the
How Green Was My Valley
night, my skin crawled after dark. I was afraid to walk to Aeolia at night. The wind howled, the trees swayed, and beneath the sounds I heard the edge of a growl. And when the wind stopped, I heard footsteps and, once, a cough. I could not read because I did not want to leave the light on; I did not want her, him, them, it to watch me. I locked all the doors and windows and lay rigid in the dark, staring up. But I remember one thing: My blot was quiet. Some nights the mali beat his wife and I tried to find her screams reassuring, at least, for sounds of life, but then I began to hear other sounds and screams beneath them. Sometimes I slept at Merch's.

But I enjoyed the quiet, golden afternoons in Aeolia. I came back after school and I could work or read or dream. I took long naps from which I awoke to the evening sounds from the mali's hut. I bathed, dressed—mostly in jeans—gathered my books, and left. I kept some clothes in a drawer in Merch's bathroom.

Shabir had said I was imagining it. “Aeolia is a little spooky,” he said. “We used to hear rumblings and rustlings. It's on the windward side. Apparently it's named after Aeolus, Greek god of the wind.”

“Or it could be the schoolgirls, spying on you,” said Merch.

“They are locked up in that school,” I said.

“They did get out that night,” he pointed out.

In the safety of the home team I sometimes felt I was imagining the whole thing. But now, I looked at Nandita's face and began to feel she was laughing at me. I had assumed that she was on my side. Now I felt betrayed.

Maybe Merch was right. They were spying on me because they fancied themselves detectives. I imagined the schoolgirls giggling as I changed and talked to myself, as I did so often these days. Or with Merch. Merch. Akhila had insinuated my relationship with Merch. How would she know?

I saw a streak of red before my eyes. “So are you trying to tell me you girls have been spying on me?” I roared, not recognizing the voice that assaulted my ears as my own.

“No, no, Miss, how could we? I know you are innocent,” she said, taken aback by my sudden lash of anger.

Shobha was calling to her from the netball field. The Nandita calls became louder as Shobha and Akhila turned the corner near the water tanks.

Nandita gave a resigned sigh. “It's hard to talk with all these chattering girls. But I have so much to tell you,” she muttered.

She started to walk away, and then stopped and turned.

“It's all around you, Miss, you must take care.”

“What's around me?” I asked urgently, deeply contrite now, verging on the pathetic. “What is all around me?”

Death, I thought, she is saying death is all around me.

Shobha and Akhila were upon us, not at all pleased to see Nandita consorting secretly with me. She turned to them with a placating air, walking towards them with her head tilted, arms outstretched.

“Just look around you, please, Miss. I think you are in danger,” she whispered to me before she turned. For that moment, she was the teacher, and I, a thick-headed child.

Akhila and Shobha did not even offer the statutory “Good morning, Miss Apte.” They just turned insolently and walked back towards the classrooms.

T
hat evening, i went for a walk to table-land. I reached the needle in time for sunset.

I sat facing the cliff, as the Prince had done. I sat at the sharp cliff edge, my legs dangling in the void, just as she must have done on the night of her death. Ever since her death, I had wanted to go, but I was afraid to go so far. Today, though, the earth was dry and hard and safe, not slippery as on the monsoon night of her death.

Table-land was empty. I heard no sound except an occasional puff of wind. The distant volcanoes glowed orange, then deep pink as the sun dipped behind them, and then silver in the light of the rising moon as I sat there, calm and Buddhist and untouchable.

I was getting nowhere with the murder mystery, and my affair with Merch was at a dead end. I could see only three roads down from the precipice, each steeper than the next. I could leave Nelson, her Lord, and her lawyer to defend themselves and go home to Ayi until I was needed in court. I could stay on in Panchgani and try to solve my personal mystery: Was I being followed and watched, was it really the sounds of some sinister scuffling and scrambling I heard in the night at Aeolia, or was I going mad? Or I could go and tell Woggle that my first statement was a lie.

“I did see something on table-land that night, Inspector Wagle,” I would have to say.

I have always had a natural tendency to lie. My first lies began with the blot, little subterfuges to protect my own separate world. They blossomed into bigger lies when I loved Pin, necessary deceits but deceits still, because my love was sinful to some, though not to me. I could be nostalgic about them now. They were little lies; there was no loss of life or limb or fortune attached to them. My first lie was of that night on table-land. My first black lie. And I was stuck with it.

Imagine if I went up to Woggle's office—or perhaps I should knock at the Nest on the way down. What if Yellow opened the door with a long plait and a flowered yellow housecoat, and when Woggle came out in his torn T-shirt, I said, “Inspector, I lied. I cannot lie any longer, for I lie awake at nights and need to take shelter in drugs and sex and rock and roll. I cannot lie anymore because my lie might take an innocent person to prison for the rest of her life. I was up on table-land, and I saw Nelson leave while Prince was still alive.”

“And why did you lie in the first place?” he would surely ask.

To protect my parents, to protect myself. Because I did not have the courage then. I thought you would think it was me.

He might just believe it. Or he might not.

I could be a bent Baba or a broken Ayi for the rest of my life.

Or I could get lucky.

I was in a trance when I turned to go. “This is good-bye, Pin,” I shouted into the void, but the wind snatched my words away.

I had run into Merch in the bazaar on the way up. He had walked around the bend in the road past the municipal park with me. We sat down beside a tree while he discreetly and casually rolled a small joint he called the travel special. We did not ask each other anything, where we were going or what we were doing. “Come by later,” he said. “Samar will probably be there.” I said I would.

To this day, I cannot say for sure if it was because I was lost in intense stoned thoughts and swung too fast to bring my legs off the edge—but I am not Pin the surfer, I am Charu, squeamish about heights—or if it was because I was given a small sudden shove by ghostly unseen hands. Either way, enthralled by wide vistas and a winter sunset, I tumbled off the cliff.

I took one long deep breath in the abyss. “They say she died near a cave called Devil's Kitchen,” I heard Tai say to a circle of mourning women, her face grim. My scream echoed back up to me as in my dream. But by the next breath, I was perched on a ledge, with the emptiness around me. I did not look down.

I shifted my weight on the ledge, dislodging rocks that bounced all the way down to the valley. My slipper came off my foot and hurtled into the abyss. They will find it broken outside Shankar's den, just as they had found her body, I thought.

I knew I could not crouch like a goat in the wind forever. There was no other ledge in sight. No way to clamber up or down the steep rock face. Did Pin hang here suspended between life and death before she fell and broke her head? Did she feel as calm and clear as me?

Above me was a slanting shaft of the black rock face carved jagged with wind and rain. I found I could stand on the ledge and lean against it. I rubbed my face against the sun-warmed rock, and even though I was on a tiny cleft of the volcano, I felt safe. I put my ear to the rock and heard the echo of the wind inside the hollow mountain. I put my mouth to the cleft and sucked its secret air. The ancient air whirled into me, spinning through my body. I felt I could fly.

I realized with a surge of joy that I had stumbled upon the “missing” hole on the roof of Devil's Kitchen. As my eyes opened to the darkness, I could see a tunnel inside the cleft. I hoisted myself up with strength I never knew I had, and got my arms and my head into the gap.

No wonder the schoolgirls had not found the “other side” of the hole in the cave. They had searched the surface of table-land, when in fact it was over the cliff's edge! Surely I was in the hands of my emergency god, because I had fallen on the one ledge that actually had an exit. It is fate, I thought, I will crawl through the tunnel and end up on the folding chairs in Shankar's den.