Miss Timmins' School for Girls (9 page)

It was the beginning of August, and we had about a month to go before the end of the monsoon term. All through this time, Ayi's letters came as regularly as the rain. I read them in a minute and tucked them away.

All the years of growing up, I hid only my dreams and fears from them—my actions were as clear as glass. I went to school, I studied, I played chess, I had two friends who were as mousy and as middle-class as I was. In college, I wore bright dupattas and hugged my books to my chest like all the girls. I saw Hindi movies and hummed the popular songs. I did not talk to the boys, and the phone in our house hardly ever rang.

As I stepped deeper into this swirling world, it was not my dreams, but my actions I now hid from the world. I could think of very little to write. The long nights I had spent composing my letters I now spent dreaming, or reading the new books that Merch gave me. As if in response, Ayi's letters grew shorter, sometimes only five tight lines on the top of the green inland letter. But they came in like clockwork, twice a week, and I did not pause to think about them.

I was living in some kind of trance. I had been thinking of it as a hemlock trance ever since I taught the poem to standard nine.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains . . .

“Anyway, Miss, we should be allowed to try hemlock. Otherwise how are we expected to understand the poem?”

“Keats says
as though
of hemlock I had drunk,” I shot back. “For you, Shobha Rajbans, it will be sufficient to be able to dispel the dullness of the senses.” I had understood by now that a quick retort—even if flawed—was the best way to move onward in the classroom.

The telegram jerked me out of the trance. I was left gasping and blinking in the harsh light of reality. I went to the post office that evening to make a call home and sat in the dimly lit trunk-call section for two hours. “No connection, Miss, due to rain,” said the trunk clerk. So I spent two days in a dither. But Ayi Baba are fine, I reasoned. Otherwise, I would know. On the third day, a letter followed. Ayi had written the letter the day she left. It seemed she had made a sudden decision to go to Kolhapur, but did not explain.

It has not rained much in Indore this year, and it is still very hot. I have decided to go to Kolhapur for some time. Please write to me there. I will come and see you soon.

Yours,

Ayi

That was all.

Mostly, Ayi wrote form letters. Every letter always had two or three lines about Baba.

Your Baba is keeping good health. He has gone to the regional chess tournament with Prashant.

Your Baba has developed a bad cough and has been laid up in bed for a few days.

But this time, nothing. She did not ask about me, or my Sunbeam dinner of the week, either. She did not say why she was going to Kolhapur, though there could have been a hundred reasons. Things happened at a hectic pace in the Kolhapur branch. Every year, marriages, babies, scandals, sickness, deaths. And every so often, without a reason, a gathering of the sisters from all their mofussil districts. She did not mention any of these things. Just,
I am going to Kolhapur
. But I simply folded and tucked the little worries, and went back to my exciting new world.

Merch had casually handed me
One Hundred Years of Solitude
one gray evening while we were deep in the arms of the big rain. “You might like it, after a while,” he muttered, rubbing his stubbly chin. I started it that very night. I followed Ursula, followed the whispering of her stiff, starched petticoats through the labyrinthine novel, and fell in love again.

“
Macondo is Panchgani
,” I wrote in a note to Merch when I returned the book via the hospital ayah, who scuttled medicines and notes between the nurse and Dr. Desai's dispensary.

We had always been a reading family. Baba was a science and history reader, and knew everything about a lot of things, especially the Second World War. “Why read about things that did not happen when there is so much to know?” he would always ask, shaking his head as Ayi and I devoured fiction. Ayi and I read many of the same books. We read all the popular fiction of the time, the murder mysteries, the sexy romances. Secretly, I read
Valley of the Dolls
and
Peyton Place
, and I thought I was daring. When I came to Panchgani, I had reached the tumultuous period romances. My favorite books were
Gone with the Wind
and
Frenchman's Creek
.

But
One Hundred Years of Solitude
wove a spell that is still with me.

“
Everything else I have read has paled
,” I wrote to Merch.

“
It is because we have been reading the novels of the pale
,” he wrote back. He had a small and spidery handwriting that was almost illegible. With that note he sent me
The Book of Imaginary Beings
by Jorge Luis Borges. Merch only made comments after I finished a book. I knew he revered Borges. I read a few intriguing lines from a story and put it down meaning to pick it up again, but I could not sustain interest in it. I felt somehow inadequate, but Merch refrained from comment. I did read
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino and loved it, as he did. All those cities of the mind seemed to have been conjured up for a man just like Merch.

Merch held the view that the only reality was fiction. “This includes, of course, movies and music,” he assured me, just in case books might leave me wanting.

Ten

The Comma

O
ne evening a few days later, I was walking out through the main gate, going to the bazaar—to Panchgani Stores, I remember, with the main intention of buying toothpaste—when I saw a white Ambassador car shudder into the school. The girls gathered around to look at this unscheduled arrival. Out popped my immaculate cousin Padmaja, her uniformed driver opening an umbrella over her head. Padmaja, one of the Timmins cousins, was four years older than me. She had been a sporty girl, and I saw her name on an unbeaten high-jump record from 1964. She did not see me, but walked straight into Miss Nelson's office, the pallu of her sky-blue sari neatly pulled over her head to keep her hair dry. She floated in like a cloud. I ran behind her, the blood pounding in my brain.

“Padmaja, my dear, you look well,” beamed Nelly, striding out from behind her desk. “I hope everything is fine back home,” she added, as she saw my anxious face bobbing into her office.

“Your mother is in Kolhapur and wants to see you,” Padmaja turned to me and said. I knew something was wrong; I knew Ayi had been counting the days to come and see my school. “
You can show me all the places you go to
,” she had written in so many of her letters, adding always, “
I look forward to meeting the Wagles
.”

I looked at Padmaja, frightened, raising my eyebrows. “Oh, she's just a little tired from her journey,” said Padmaja. “Miss Nelson, can I please take Charu from you for two or three days?” she pleaded, smiling up at Nelly with confidence. Padmaja the perfect. She was bright, popular, and pretty. Everyone liked her. “She has the family looks,” the aunts would coo. “Looks so much like Shalini. Could be her daughter.” I hated her. At least she didn't have the Chitnis green eyes. Ayi's green eyes were a family heirloom. They missed a generation and were only passed down through the daughter. “Charu's daughter will have green eyes,” the aunts would say, and I would feel a sad wind passing through them. “And who knows if that girl will even get married” rode on the tailwind. “Best to do it early,” I had heard them tell my mother. “Girls look their best at sixteen. Get her engaged straight after school, and then let her study for a few years before getting her married.”

It was Thursday evening, and so we agreed that I would be back on Monday morning for school. I packed my bag and consigned a note through hospital post to Merch explaining the reason for my absence from the weekend's festivities. I felt quivery and nervous as I left, but instead of thinking of my mother, I was praying I would run into Pin while going up, so I could at least smile at her and see if she smiled back. Yesterday, she had walked away from me in a huff and had not even looked back. It had been our very first terrible moment, and I wanted to make it up before I left. But no such luck.

In the car, Padmaja explained that my mother had not really gotten out of bed since she had come to Kolhapur a week ago. She lay facing the wall and cried all day.

My ayi, not getting out of bed? My ayi, who never lounged and was always dressed in fresh saris with the pallu pulled firmly back? My ayi, who was always bathed and oiled and fragrant before anyone else in the house was up?

“Do you know why?” I asked, thinking that perhaps something of the dark past had reared its head and snapped.

Padmaja shook her head. “We called in Tai,” she said. My mother's oldest sister thundered in and seized all matters in her fat, capable hands. She went straight into the last room, the visiting daughters' room, where Ayi lay with her face to the wall, and closed the door. She emerged an hour later. “Menopause,” she announced to the huddle of women in the courtyard. “Let her cry a little,” she decreed. “She has been through too much. And she has kept it all in, all these years.”

They began to encourage her to go up to Panchgani to visit me, but she just shook her head. Sometimes she wept loudly, so that her sobs could be heard through the house. Yesterday, Tai had gone in to confer with their father. It had been decided to get Charu to Kolhapur.

“That will cheer her up. We all know you are everything to her,” added Padmaja. She was reassuring and quite kind. Actually, she had always been quite kind in the offhand, unimaginative way of the favored. When I came to Kolhapur in the winters, Padmaja the glamour girl would be there on holidays from Timmins. She had a generally superior air, which I now recognized in the girls at the school. In the evenings, the driver would be summoned to take her to the club, where she played tennis. At twenty-one she had married the right boy from the right family and now had two children, in the right order. Milind and Malini. First boy, then girl. Her path was always straight and sure, and I always held that against her.

For the first time, I was grateful for Padmaja's shallow kindness, her lack of curiosity about me. I was glad she left me alone the rest of the car ride. I wanted my ayi back. It was a physical pain, deep inside my stomach, that grew and filled my whole body so I could hardly breathe.

“I wanted to tell you everything before, so you could compose yourself,” said Padmaja, adding softly, “You must be strong in front of her.”

Kolhapur was close, only a three-hour drive from Panchgani. Dinner was just over when we reached the house. Tai waddled in, her sharp breasts preceding her. “Oh, Charu, you have become so thin, like a stick,” she said, and clasped me to her bosom, the points of her 48D cups digging into my chest like sabers. “Come, she is waiting for you.”

But my ayi walked out to me, looking ten years older in the dim corridor light. The fumes and the fragrance of the dhoop hung in the air. Her cotton sari was crumpled, her hair stood out of her bun in white wisps, she walked with a stoop. “Charu,” she said. “Charu,” my name, was swaddled in love and sadness. She hugged me, hugged me hard. We were Maharashtrian Brahmins, reared to be aloof, self-contained. We did not draw comfort from our hugs. For the first time, I held her tight. She felt soft and crumbly in my arms, like a Shrewsbury biscuit, I remember thinking, though the Timmins life was already a world away. We are the same height, my ayi and I. Both five feet three inches. But she had always felt taller to me. That day, I was taller; I could feel the bones in her thin shoulders.

We ate a dinner of bhakris and potatoes in the bright white dining room, Padmaja and I, while Tai and Ayi sat and watched. And for the first time, in that house that had been so forbidding, it was I who told the stories while Tai and Ayi and, yes, even Padmaja listened. For the benefit of Tai, who believed that in good food lay the foundation of a good childhood, I told of what we ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, those dead vegetables and water-curry chunks of chewy meat and rotis—which they called chapatti—so thick and leathery that the girls said they should be better used for making shoes.

“Yes,” Padmaja laughed, “we used to say our food was first put in front of a goat, and if the goat did not eat it, it was given to us.”

I did not directly look at Ayi. I felt we would both burst into tears. But I was speaking to her, I wanted to make her smile. Tai looked on fondly, seeing the light come back into her young sister's eyes. Their own mother was a thin, quiet woman ground down from childbirth and the demands of her dominating husband. Tai was the oldest of seven children, and she was the family mother and matriarch. It was always Tai who went into grave discussions with her father—Dada, as the old man was called by everyone, including the servants—on all family matters. They would sit in the garden in the evenings, Dada with his pipe, his majestic Dalmatian at his feet, and later, Tai would relay the decision to the women as she saw fit. She lived in a pleasant house not too far away with a fair and pudgy husband, and one fair and pudgy son, both of whom were largely inconsequential.

“Come in, Dada is waiting for you,” Tai said to me after dinner. Though I imagined him always tall and erect, he too looked shrunk and bent that evening, as did the room around him. He was sitting on the sofa near the bookshelf in his white starched pajama kurta. He pulled out a large handkerchief from his kurta pocket and blew a loud honk into it. I realized with awe that he had been crying.

“Come here, Charu, beta,” he said, and I went to him, for once, without clenching my fists.

“Oh, she had the world at her feet when she was your age,” he said with sorrow. It hurt, as it always did, when we were cited for dragging her down, the husband with the blemished record and the child with a blemished face. And a girl, at that. They could not understand why god had given her this heavy burden.

But for once I did not cringe. “Her life hasn't been so bad, Dada,” I said, though timidly. I was speaking also for Baba. After all, we both loved her, we both needed her. He looked at me, he really looked at me, blot and all, for the first time, and nodded gravely. He was one of those who never looked at me. I do not know from where I got the courage, that day, not to flinch. Everything was different, even the house, smaller.

“It will be best if you take off from your job for a few months and look after her,” Dada said gruffly. “I will have Manohar speak to that principal of yours.” Manohar, a portly man with salt-and-pepper hair, was Dada's oldest son, Padmaja's father. His three daughters had gone to Timmins.

Ayi was in the visiting daughters' room with only the bedside lamp burning. She had taken off her sari, and was in her white blouse and petticoat. I had seen her so often oiling her thinning hair and then tying it into a tight little knot for the night. “Come, I'll oil your hair, beta,” she said with a catch in her voice.

She rubbed my scalp while the tears were tap-dancing around the dim room. Her hands on my hair. That was our umbilical cord. I had not even realized how I missed them. She too, she did everything slowly, she seemed to be remembering every stroke. We were walking down our lives together. I know we both went back to the day when it all started, the day we both wept in Bombay in the flat by the sea, before we left for Indore. Maybe it was all ending now, I thought wildly. I was so afraid, imagining all the horrible things that might befall our little family boat. But the knot that tied it to the shore had already been cut, the string was unfurling as I closed my eyes. She smoothed my hair into a shiny snake, and then wound it into a knot around her arm.

“I think I'll stay here with you for a few weeks,” I said.

“You will?” she said. I turned to face her, and I saw a spark of light in her transparent eyes. But she was too quick for me that night. She saw that I was not ready to do it, even before I did. The light in her eyes snapped shut.

“Sleep well,” she said in a flat voice as she opened the flap of her mosquito net and turned off the light. All my life, I have blamed myself for this, I have felt that this was the moment when I failed her. She needed me, but I wasn't big enough inside to help her then.

The dogs barked on, stretching out the night. My bed, cozy beneath its mosquito net, was at the other corner of the large room. In Kolhapur, the nights had always been sexy and long. I read
Gone with the Wind
in Kolhapur, lying in bed all day and late into the night, emerging in a daze for meals and outings, my mind pegged to the book. And then, awake, encased in dreams, watching the moon move against the net.

Although my ayi was suffering at the other end of the room, that night I understood that I was in love with Pin. But it's just a game, I assured myself once more, I am not like her. “Sometimes,” she had once said, “I feel I was put into this world to seduce straight women,” and she smiled with one side of her mouth.

Yes, she seduced me. She brushed her lips against mine in sudden tight corners, she threw me insolent smiles across a crowded room, she pulled my hair as I passed her in the staff room. I should be feeling shame and guilt and worse, dreaming so wild with a depressed mother in the room beside me. But I held a pillow to my stomach and longed for her, the air around her.

I wanted to go back and sit beside her on Merch's steps and run my hand through her hair. It was just yesterday, although it had drifted quite far away already.

I had sat beside Pin on the step, contrite. The stone was damp from all the rain, I could feel it through the thick cotton of my salwar. “I'm sorry,” I said.

She did not look up. Her eyes were red-rimmed. I could see she had been crying. She was angry with me, and she had every right to be.

I had coaxed and cajoled her into coming to the staff dining room for lunch. All sorts of business, such as announcements, plans, and duty-swaps were conducted at this time, and all teachers, including the day teachers, were supposed to attend. Pin never did. As I spent more time with her, I realized that she avoided Nelson.

I had been working on her for weeks, in subtle and not so subtle ways, trying to get her to come for lunch. In my grand plan, this was the first step towards social rehabilitation. I did it because I thought that if she calmed down and saw how easy it was to stick to the rules and be accepted, she would be less angry at the world. I thought, naïvely, that it was all as simple as that. And if I am honest with myself, I must admit that I thought it would earn me a brownie point. Miss Nelson would know I was a “good influence” on the wayward Miss Moira Prince.

In the end, Pin came to lunch to make me happy. Protocol was more relaxed at lunch, teachers straggled in and sat wherever they liked. I was about to sit down at the table on the far right with Pin when Miss Nelson walked in. I sensed Pin stiffen in anticipation of what she might say. Nelson walked towards our table, rubbing her hands. “Ah, Moira! Well, good afternoon, Moira,” she said with what I imagined to be a welcoming stress on the “good,” and a pleased expression on her wide face. I sensed Pin straighten up, fill out. I felt vindicated.

And then, Nelson turned to me. “Charulata, I need to discuss taking over some of Miss Debabushnam's classes with you,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder, ignoring the Prince. “She is going to be away next week. She has a family situation. Why don't you sit with me, and we can go over the details,” she said, guiding me to her table.