Thrity Umrigar Read online

  I felt a second’s panic at this open challenge. But then, I remembered my resolution from a few days ago and when I spoke my voice was even and thankfully free of the emotional tremor that it usually carried. ‘Oh sorry,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t think what you said was funny, that’s all.’

  Olga spat out a comeback and spent the next few days trying desperately to recapture her old glory, but the tide had changed. And I had had my first lesson in the power of transformative change.

  By eighth grade, I am one of the most popular kids in the class. The nuns love me because I come up with original songs to celebrate all their feasts and saint’s days, the teachers are fond of me because I spend the afternoon recess coaching the ‘slow’ girls in history and English and my friends show a bemused admiration for my willingness to never refuse a dare.

  And then Jenny arrives from New York.

  Eleven

  JENNY IS ACTUALLY THREE YEARS older than most of us but she has been placed in the eighth grade because everybody knows that the education she received in America is far inferior to ours. There are rumours that her brother in New York shipped her back to Bombay after finding her half-naked with her boyfriend, a rumour that immediately makes her seem like a goddess from a different planet. We all marvel at the incon-gruity of Jenny’s New York sophistication and her simple, elderly parents whom we see occasionally at school. Jenny’s parents are Catholics from Kerala and her mother is a shy, in-trovertish woman who barely speaks a word of English.

  Jenny is anything but simple or shy. With her American accent, her constant gum chewing and her casual slang, she is a colourful burst of glamour in the school where most of us have known each other for years. She is also very beautiful, with dark chocolate skin and thick jet-black hair that rests in bangs that come up to the edge of her large, black eyes. Unlike the rest of us, she is always popping candies and chocolates in her mouth but the sugar has not eaten into her large, white, perfect teeth. She talks differently than us, referring to the loo as the ‘restroom’ and ordering a ‘pop’ instead of a soft drink. She also drives the nuns crazy with her insistence on wearing her uniform short enough to display her muscular thighs. While the rest of us wear our white socks up to our calves, Jenny comes to school wearing ankle socks. Within weeks, we are all folding our socks at the ankle.

  Our first conversation is about music. In a fortunate happen-stance Jenny and I ride the same school-bus, she getting on about twenty minutes before I do. ‘Hey girl, I liked that crack you made in Mr Singh’s class yesterday,’ Jenny says to me one day, rolling her ‘r’ as she says ‘girl’, just like they do in Hollywood movies. ‘Say, somebody mentioned to me that you’re into rock-and-roll. What kind of bands do you like?’

  But when I say the Beatles, Jenny seems disappointed. ‘Oh yeah, they’re all right. But what about newer stuff, like, for instance, do you like Deep Purple?’

  ‘Yeah, I like him a lot,’ I lie.

  Jenny looks embarrassed. ‘Um, actually, it’s a group.’

  I feel my ears turning red. I am convinced that this glamorous American girl who is three years older than I am, will have nothing to do with me after this, having seen me for the impost-or, for the wannabe hipster that I am. So I’m pleasantly surprised when I board the school-bus the following morning and Jenny hands me a copy of Deep Purple’sBurn . ‘Here,’ she says lightly. ‘I brought this in for you to borrow. Check it out and tell me if you like it.’

  I check it out. I like it. I ask her if she’d like to borrow some of my albums and she offhandedly says she’ll get off the school-bus with me one evening and check out my collection. I am charmed by this casual informality that does not wait to be invited. It is so different from the stifling, rule-bound society that I am used to.

  But when Jenny accompanies me home one evening, I can tell immediately that the adults don’t like her. My mother seems taken aback by how much more mature and physically developed she is compared to most of my gawky friends.

  Mehroo seems perturbed by Jenny’s apparent lack of manners.

  Unlike the fawning, nauseatingly polite stance that my friends and I adopt when we visit each other’s homes, Jenny is polite but reserved. She does not spend much time chatting with the adults, wanting instead to go into the living room and start spinning some records. And when we get there, she turns up the stereo to as loud as it will go. My stomach muscles clench as I brace for what’s coming. And sure enough, Mehroo is in the room a few minutes later, covering her ears with her hands, and shouting to be heard over the music. ‘It’s too loud,’ she shouts. ‘I’m sure the neighbours on the ground floor can hear it also. I cannot do any work in the other room.

  Turn the volume down.’

  But instead of apologizing profusely Jenny merely fixes her dark eyes on Mehroo. ‘That’s all right, aunty,’ she says. ‘We’ll just shut the door.’

  Mehroo looks as startled as I feel. Ours is not a family where individual privacy is valued enough that we can go around shutting doors on each other. Indeed, the only time we shut doors is when we are in the bathroom. But Jenny looks blissfully unaware of how revolutionary her words are and after giving me a, ‘What kind of creature have you dragged home?’ look, Mehroo leaves the room.

  Jenny immediately gets up and shuts both doors to the living room. I keep my face deadpan and my manner as casual as hers but from the inside, I’m a mess of emotions—aware that Mehroo will be hurt by this gesture and that mummy will use it to bolster her instinctive dislike for Jenny but also feeling the kind of triumphant freedom and carefreeness I have never experienced before.

  It is the first of many such experiences. Two things are clear to me soon after I meet Jenny: One, most of the adults I know do not like her and are made uneasy by her presence. Two, they are unaware of the opposite effect their advice of my not getting too close to Jenny is having on me. Their dislike of her makes me seek her out even more because I can finally experience the dual pleasures of pissing off the adults and the heady feeling of defiant freedom that being with Jenny gives me. My friendship with Jenny makes me feel connected to America, pulls me out of the narrow pathways of my own life and transports me to a distant, almost fictitious, land of youthful energy where the idols of authority are being toppled everyday.

  But first, Jenny and I have to grow in size. The two of us alone cannot take on all the forces against us—the nuns and the teachers at school, my family, even my schoolmates who are scandalized by her frank stories about her steady boyfriend in America with whom she ‘did things’ and stories about how a classmate at her New York high school had thrown a bottle of ink at the teacher he had been annoyed with. I think the ink story scandalizes us more, growing up as we are in a society where teachers are revered as mini-gods. Anyway, we are soon joined by two other friends—Patty, a Catholic girl whose brothers had settled in Australia and Yasmin, a girl from a progressive Muslim family. Now, we are a band of four and ready to take on the world.

  The school has a sickroom—a small room with a single cot where we could go and nap for a few minutes if we were feeling unwell. The room has a stairwell leading up to a door and one day Jenny decides to push open the door to see what lies behind it. She discovers an attic where the nuns store their belongings. But there is enough floor space for three or four girls to sit quietly and talk in hushed whispers (through the walls we can hear the low murmur of the nuns’ voices as they moved around in the nunnery) while they pass around a cigarette. Patty also makes a discovery that convinces us that we were destined to discover this room for our clandestine meetings—lying on the floor next to the neatly packed cardboard boxes is half of a coconut shell, which made for the perfect ashtray for the ashes from our cigarettes. The dry shell is our talisman against getting caught, our good luck charm. And indeed, we would never be caught red-handed although Mr Narayan, the math teacher, often flashes me his alert, eagle-eyed look when I traipse into his class after one of our sessions.

  There are a few narrow e
scapes. One evening after school has ended for the day, Jenny has a brainwave—instead of walking all the way to the girls’ restroom to light a cigarette, perhaps we can sit on the floor in the back of the classroom and smoke there. I have the good sense to suggest that perhaps we should light only one cigarette at a time, to keep the smoke down. For a few minutes we smoke in peace. Then, we see Sister Hillary walk by the classroom and duck down, hoping she hasn’t seen us. But Sister Hillary, a quiet, slow-moving nun who, rumour has it, is mildly retarded, has spotted me and is making her way toward us. The burning cigarette is in my hand and it is too late to stub it out. I jump to my feet and rush to the front of the classroom, trying to keep Sister Hillary away from the others. I hold the cigarette behind my back as I face her.

  ‘Ah, glad you haven’t gone home yet,’ she says. ‘Wanted to talk to you about the stereo.’ I groan inwardly. The school’s stereo system is Sister Hillary’s pride and joy, one of the few tasks that Mother Superior feels confident assigning to her dim-witted charge. Because my love for music is legendary, because I was forever sitting in class banging away on imaginary bongo drums, I am the only girl that Sister Hillary trusts to handle the stereo system at socials and other functions. She does this with all the ceremony and dignity of a mayor handing the keys of the city to an honoured guest. But the downside of this is that every chance she gets, Sister Hillary engages me in arcane discussions about the proper maintenance and handling of her precious stereo system. Most of the time I don’t mind but now, with smoke curling from behind my back and the heat of the cigarette beginning to make its presence known to my fingers, I feel trapped under the gaze of Sister Hillary’s innocent, cow-like eyes. I brace myself for her to sniff the air in suspicion, to ask me what I am holding behind my back, to proclaim that where there is smoke there must be a cigarette, but she simply continues to talk to me. Behind me, I hear Jenny and Patty trying to smother their giggles. The cigarette continues to burn ever closer toward my fingers. Finally, I can’t take it any more. ‘Sorry, sister. Bad stomach cramps. Have to go…bathroom,’ I mumble and then sprint towards the bathroom before she can say another word. I pray to God that I don’t run into anyone else along the way.

  Not getting caught makes us bolder. A few months after meeting Jenny, I had refused to ride the school-bus anymore, preferring to catch a B.E.S.T bus. Tired of the daily dramas of trying to get me out of bed in time to catch the school-bus, Mehroo agreed. But not taking the school-bus means that I can stay behind with the other three at the end of the school day.

  Every few days, we collect our money together and head for the liquor store a few blocks away from school. For the first few weeks we take turns going into the shop and tell the man behind the counter elaborate stories of how we are running errands for our fathers, but it soon becomes obvious that as long as we have the money, he doesn’t care how old we are or that we are buying beer while still in our school uniforms.

  Hiding the brown bottles of beer in our school-bags, we head for Yasmin’s house because her parents do not get home from work until much later. Just before reaching her house, we stop by our favourite paanwalla’s stall and purchase three packs of Gold Flake cigarettes.

  And then we consecrate Yasmin’s religious, teetotaling, Muslim house by pouring our golden Kingfishers into glasses that have never held alcohol before. We play Abba’sFernando , Deep Purple’sSmoke on the Water and Wings’Band on the Run over and over again. We sing along, with Pat playing a feverish air guitar while Jenny pretends to pound on drums, her straight dark hair flopping along like Ringo’s. Greyish blue cigarette smoke fills the room while Jenny tries to teach me how to blow perfect smoke rings. I shape my mouth into the perfect O as she teaches me to, but somehow my rings look more like Cs or Ls. ‘Girl, girl, girl,’ Jenny says, shaking her head and displaying her dazzlingly white teeth. A lazy, languid feeling climbs up my legs and lodges in my stomach the more I drink. I feel ambition leave my body so that I no longer care about anything but how to prolong this mellow feeling.

  This lack of ambition shows up in my grades. By ninth grade most of the teachers are on the verge of writing me off for lost and mummy is beside herself, reminding me that the board exams that determine whether I graduate from high school are only a year away. Dad repeats his threats of getting me a job as a packer in a factory if I don’t make it through high school.

  But I don’t care. For the first time, I am discovering a world of pleasant oblivion, and it is a welcome respite from the prickly, nervous-making atmosphere at home. Also, there is the thrill of the four of us against the world, a kind of replay ofButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , going out with our guns blazing, going up in flames. After years of being the responsible, sensitive child who could always be counted on to do the right thing, I am revelling in being a bad girl and in becoming the kind of teenager that adults worry about. Being a bad girl is more freeing, liberating and infinite y more fun.

  Soon, the boys are a greater distraction than even the booze.

  There are plenty of boys at Christ Church school, which is a stone’s throw away from ours, but Jenny turns her nose up at them and says the are too young and immature for us. Of course we agree, because when it comes to sexual matters, Jenny is the undisputed leader. So Jenny hooks the rest of us up with friends of her current, college-age boyfriend and there are afternoons spent in dark movie theatres and much groping and touching and kissing. Then, Patty discovers that a cousin of hers is the deejay at a disco at Apollo Bunder and will allow us to spend Saturday afternoons in there for free, before the night crowd arrives. The cousin invites some of his friends and soon we pair up and dance a bit and then there is some groping and touching and kissing. It never goes much further than this, at least not for me, because years of propaganda about the virtues of chastity and how men don’t respect women who give it up too easily and the importance of being a virgin when you marry, all this propaganda has worked on me. Besides, the thought of becoming pregnant is terrifying and everybody knows that good girls don’t use condoms. So I make it a point not to come across as a tease, try to engage these boys in some conversation between the petting sessions, though sometimes that backfires because it is hard to go back to hot and heavy panting after you’ve asked someone what they think about the Emergency.

  My grades are also falling because of The Pact. The Pact says that all four of us will try to get more or less the same grades.

  It says that each time one of us stops writing in an exam, the rest of us have to stop writing also. This is how we will prove our devotion to each other. I am dimly aware of the fact, as I suspect Yasmin is also, that she and I have more to lose by agreeing to this than Jenny and Patty. It is understood that Jenny will eventually make her way back to the United States and that the rest of Patty’s family will soon be joining her brothers in Australia. But Yasmin and I will stay in India and be part of a mercilessly competitive educational system. We will have to make our way to college on the basis of our high-school grades and everyday we are bombarded with stories of kids who scored in the 99

  percentile and could still not get admission into the city’s top colleges. But I put these thoughts to the back of my mind and sign on to The Pact, although there are times when some lingering flake of ambition makes me hastily scribble a few more lines before I set my pen down when the others do.

  But when I get a lousy score on a literature exam, Greta Duke hits the roof. This time, I have gone too far.

  Greta Duke has been teaching us history and English since seventh grade. I was home nursing a cold the first day that Miss Duke introduced herself to my class but when I showed up the next day, the entire class was buzzing with excitement.

  ‘Wow, guess what?’ Brenda burst out. ‘Wait till you meet this new English teacher, men, you’ll love her. She’s not like any of the others. She is so funny and…’

  ‘Yah, and she looks young and active instead of like a shrivelled-up bora seed,’ Anita added.

  ‘And s
he said Shakespeare was really sexy,’ someone else interrupted, a day-old amazement still fresh in her voice.

  ‘Yah, she really said the word “sex”,’ Anita added. ‘Said the word many times actually.’

  ‘Hey, cool it, all of you,’ I said, superiority dripping from my voice. ‘Don’t forget, she’s a teacher. How cool can she be?’

  But I was wrong. Three seconds after Greta Duke walked into the classroom, I knew that I was wrong. With her curly, shoulder-length hair, the thick, silver bracelet on her wrist and her bright-yellow dress that she wore shorter than most teachers dared to, Miss Duke was different from the other, worn-looking, irritable teachers we were used to. And when she opened her well-thumbed copy ofA Midsummer’s NightDream and began reading from it, Shakespeare’s words suddenly came alive with colour and passion. We had grown up hearing about Shakespeare, were intimidated by the thought of studying him, but the way Miss Duke explained his poetry, the bard seemed as accessible and contemporary as Nancy Drew had seemed a few short years ago.

  ‘Well, what do think?’ she asked a short while later, looking up from the book. ‘So do you brats like Shakespeare?’

  ‘Yes, miss, yes,’ we answered in a chorus.

  Miss Duke flashed us a mischievous, toothy smile. There was a small gap between her front teeth that made her look like a naughty teenager. ‘Aw, you all just like him because of all the sex and romance.’

  We looked scandalized. Imagine a teacher talking so casually about sex. And actually making a joke about us liking sex, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘No miss, no miss,’

  we protested. ‘That’s not it at all.’

  ‘It’s the language,’ I said. ‘It’s just so beautiful.’

  Greta Duke looked at me as if noticing me for the first time.

  ‘You’re Thrity, aren’t you? I’ve heard a lot about you,’ she said enigmatically. The other girls looked from one of us to the other, jealous at this special acknowledgment. I shifted in my seat, not knowing how to interpret her words.