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Authors: Nayana Currimbhoy

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She felt the life drain out of her, knowing that
she could not do it now. She could not commit this act that she could not even
name now that the girls had seen them both. She knew that all she wanted was
here, in Panchgani. She knew how strong and true it was, the urge to have her
daughter dead. She should arise and walk back. But she did not have the
strength. She felt as if she were grounded to the rocks by roots that pulled at
her from the cave inside the mountain.

And then she knew it was fate when she saw the
marked girl behind the jagged rocks that circled the needle. She knew that her
witness had come. She arose and walked slowly up to her child and blessed her,
and then, with a blind eye to the marked witness, she walked down the hill.

She turned as she came to the bushes by the lake.
It is fate, she thought, as she waited. It is in God's hands now who lives and
who dies. I am His instrument.

If the Prince and I had walked down the road
together, perhaps the principal would have lain dead beside the cave that night.
But I played my part, I turned and walked down alone, and Miss Shirley Nelson
pushed the child of her loins off the cliff.

She could be a secret mother now forever. No one
she knew would ever know how she was connected to the Prince. She felt she
walked down the aisle to meet her new clean life.

But the story had begun to leak even as she turned
the corner to the municipal park. The letter had left her room. With this turn,
the stakes were higher. She was now to be exposed as a secret mother
and
a murderer. And so she stayed in her room all day
and all night, waiting to steal the letter back from her neighbor, the Hindi
teacher.

But the letter, slippery as an eel, swam away, and
the story became the front-page news. And now she wanted to live. Now that the
First Sin had burst forth into the sun, it was revealed to her as moth-eaten and
musty. Now she wanted to live. Survival trumps self-image.

And so she took me into her hands. She picked me up
like a pink plastic doll, she used my love for Pin to wind me up. In the
hospital room she played the martyr.

You have taught me that my sin
was not loving her. And for this, I must suffer
, she had said to me
in the hospital room, rubbing her hands in deep sorrow. Playing on my love for
Pin, pushing the envelope of her sainthood, showing she was ready to be punished
for a crime she did not commit. Hoisting me up on a pedestal for loving her
daughterâyou are special, she said to me.

She pretended to cry, but she was rubbing her hands
in glee. She would say nothing, she would stay above the fray and make the
marked fool clear her name for her.

As it turned out, Raswani did it for her
instead.

Poor old Raswani, dying in jail, turned completely
insane, not even recognizing Miss Henderson, who had visited herâHenderson told
Nandita who told Akhila who told me over chicken chow fun. “It was so
depressing,” Miss Henderson had said. “She was as mad as a hatter when she
died.” And poor Pin, without a chance to straighten herself out.

All so that Miss Shirley Nelson could take her fat
bottom back to England and dream of the mountain school that she had once
ordered, a place where brown, bandaged teachers had padded around her like
pets.

The Princes must have saved her. We'll take her
away, they could have told her father. We'll look after her, and no one will
ever know. We will adopt the baby and Shirley. Shirley will live like a clean
woman in the world. You need never worry about her. No one is to know. We will
never come back here, they might have said. The child must have always been
wedged between them, though.

It was the loneliness that could have driven Nelson
to do it, made her write the letter to me, the marked fool. If she did not tell,
it must have seemed to her that she did not live.

I saw her playing obsessively with confession. I
imagined her, night after night, writing confessions instead of praying. Many,
many confessions, to many, many people. And then she burnt them. And now only
this remained. This cryptic note, gothic as the act itself, a riddle that would
always leave a little room for doubt.

I was pacing from bookshelf to balcony in a shaft
of moonlight.

If I had comforted Prince when she came to me, if I
had walked up to Pin at the needle, or waited until she turned to walk down and
walked down with her, she might have lived. A whole different life, it would
have been, for us all. Not better, necessarily, just different.

I felt my blot awakening. The blot and I had been
at peace these past twelve years. It was mostly quite calm. It broke out and
became red and sore and spread into my upper cheek sometimes, and then I rubbed
it with Ayurvedic creams and mostly forgot about it. The blot, I thought, had
waned. But now it began to prickle and then to creep and crawl and then to grate
and it came back to me as if it had never left.

Baba had gotten me flannel mitts in the days of the
cow-dung bandage. They itched my palms, I hated them the first night, but I
could not take them off without waking Baba. My mittened fingers could not untie
the naval knots that I refused to learn from him. And so I had to scratch my
palms, and the outside of my bandage, on an anger and appeasement basis. I
realized much later in the night that scratching my hands distracted the main
itch. And so I began to put the mitts on every nightâeven after the cow-dung
bandage was abandonedâand I curled up in my bed furiously scratching my palms. I
managed to mostly eliminate night itches that year. Mostly, but not completely.
I always slept with the mitts under my pillow. Until Panchgani. But it was
desire that spread through my body then and sucked the juices out of the blot
and left it dry and shriveled. Sleeping, but, I knew now, not gone. I found I
was rubbing and rubbing and rubbing my blot in Merch's moonlit room.

I shook Merch awake. I switched on the light,
thrust the paper at him, and then snatched it away when I realized he would not
be able to read it without his glasses. I read the poem aloud, twice, without
comment or explanation.

“It's all over now,” I said, lighting a cigarette,
pacing up and down as he fumbled. “Can you imagine, after all these years? It's
all over now. And no one knows but you and me.”

Merch rubbed his eyes and reached for his glasses.
He blew on each lens, polished both carefully with the edge of his nearly white
khadi kurta, and then put them on and looked at me gravely. “What's all over?”
he said. “What?”

Glossary

Ayi:
Mother.

Ayah:
Maid.

Auntiji:
The suffix
-ji
is tagged onto the ends of names or titles to denote respect.

Baba:
Father.

Babalok:
Children.

Badi Bhabhi:
Older brother's wife.

Banya:
Businessman.

Beta:
My child, used as endearment.

Bhabhi:
Brother's wife. Also tagged onto names of women to be used as a term of respect.

Bhajiyas:
Fritters.

Bhakris:
Flat bread.

Bidi:
Cheap Indian cigarette; tobacco rolled in a local leaf.

Brahmin:
The highest caste in the Hindu caste system.

Carom:
Board game played by four people.

Chal:
Come on.

Channa:
Roasted chick peas, eaten as snacks.

Charas:
Grass, pot.

Chas:
Buttermilk.

Chi:
An exclamation denoting something gross. Like “yuck.”

Chowk:
Courtyard.

Chudidar:
Indian dress consisting of long tunic and tight pants.

Dal:
Lentil curry.

Diwali:
Hindu New Year.

Dupatta:
Long scarf worn over Indian outfits.

Dhobi:
Man who washes clothes.

Dhoop:
Evening cleansing of home with incense.

Gajra:
A string of fragrant flowers, worn in hair.

Ganja:
Grass, pot.

Ghat:
Mountain range in western India.

Hawaldar:
Policeman.

Hindi:
Indian national language.

Idli:
Puffed rice cake, a south Indian staple.

Jhansi ki Rani:
The queen of Jhansi, famous for her valiant role in India's first war of independence against the British in 1858.

Katori:
Small steel bowl.

Kerala:
State in southern India.

Khadi:
Rough, homespun cloth.

Kheema pau:
Mince and bread.

Khichdi:
Rice and lentil, overcooked until it is soft and mushy.

Kokam kadhi:
Sour curry.

Kurta:
A long, loose shirt with embroidery in front. Traditional Indian clothing worn by men and women.

Maharashtra:
State in western India (Panchgani is in Maharashtra).

Maharashtrian:
A person whose mother tongue is Marathi.

Mahtari:
Old woman.

Majli:
Middle.

Malayalam:
Language spoke in Kerala, a state in southern India.

Mali:
Gardener.

Marathi:
Language spoken in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in western India.

Masala Chai:
Spicy tea.

Methi:
Particularly pungent smelling spice used in pickles.

Nani:
Maternal grandmother.

Pallu: The end of the six yards of sari.

Paan:
Betel leaf with condiments, chewed after meals.

Police chowki:
Police station.

Paanwala:
A person who sells paan; stalls selling cigarettes, sweets, and paan are a fixture of every town and village in India.

Parsi:
A small, distinct community in India consisting of worshippers of Zoroaster who migrated from Iran.

Puri:
Fluffy fried bread.

Puja:
Hindu prayers.

Rajesh Khanna:
Film star who was very popular in the 1970s.

Rani:
Queen.

Sari:
Indian national dress.

Shivaji:
A hero who used guerilla warfare in the Western Ghats in the seventeenth century.

Sita:
Wife of the god Rama in Hindu scriptures. Was captured by the demon god Ravana because she did not stay within the bounds of the “line” drawn by her husband.

Supari:
Sweet betel nut, sold in small packets and chewed like gum.

Sigri:
Brazier with coals.

Tuck:
Boarding school word for snacks.

About the Author

N
AYANA
C
URRIMBHOY
grew up and attended boarding school in India before moving to the United States in the early eighties. She lives in New York City with her husband and their teenage daughter. This is her first novel.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Credits

Cover design by Emin Mancheril

Cover photograph Â© Robert Harding/Masterfile

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Louis Simpson, “As Birds Are Fitted to the Boughs” from
The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940â2001.
Copyright Â© 1955, 2003 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

MISS TIMMINS' SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
. Copyright Â© 2011 by Nayana Currimbhoy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition July 2011 ISBN: 9780062092243

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Currimbhoy, Nayana.

Miss Timmins' School for Girls : a novel / Nayana Currimbhoy.â1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-199774-7

1. Young womenâIndiaâFiction. 2. BrahmansâFiction. 3. English teachersâIndiaâFiction. 4. Girls' schoolsâIndiaâFiction. 5. BohemianismâFiction. 6. Panchgani (India)âFiction. I. Title.

PS3603.U7748M57 2011

813'.6âdc22

2010035526

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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