Thrity Umrigar Read online

  It is impossible to communicate all this to my father. The few times that I have tried he has turned to me with worried eyes, as if I have become one more problem in his life that he will be forced to solve. I know only too well the other pressures on him and do not want to be part of the problem. So I say nothing. Or I say it obliquely: at the dinner table I will suddenly ask the adults if they know of a place where I could get my Michelangelo print of David framed to hang in the living room.

  I brace myself for the inevitable answer: ‘There’s too much dust from the textile mills. Any picture on the wall will have to be dusted every single day and you know how lazy the servants are.’

  So I sit in the pictureless living room, with its solitary calendar from Batliwalla and Sons being the only thing hanging from the walls. I notice that even the calendar does not have a picture on it. Someday, I promise myself, every room in my house will have pictures on the wall. And I will buy fresh flowers once a week. Someday.

  I sit crouched like a tiger, biding my time.

  Fifteen

  MRS BEATRICE D’MELLO HAS THROWN me out of her physics class yet again, so that I have now spent five days in a row in the hallway. Most days it is a badge of honour to be kicked out of Mrs D’Mello’s class but today, Mother Ignatius had passed me in the hallway, raised her eyebrows when she saw me leaning against the cream-coloured walls and said,

  ‘Out in the hallway again, eh, child?’ and I had felt my face flush at the injustice of it all. I wanted to explain how Mrs D’Mello had a vendetta against me, how she kicked me out of class at the slightest provocation, how she would ask me question after question until she threw me one I couldn’t answer and then ask me to leave the room. But Mother Ignatius was already walking away.

  There was a time when Mrs D’Mello was genuinely fond of me though it seems so long ago it’s hard to remember. There was a time when she laughed at all my jokes and would even allow me to interrupt the class by turning on my pocket transistor radio and listen to the cricket score when India was playing Pakistan.

  In seventh-grade, I was the first girl to come to school with a pocket radio. It was a yellow Philips radio that Babu had bought for me. The radio made me feel connected to the legions of cricket fans who brought the city to a virtual standstill when there was a test match going on. Bombay, when gripped by cricket fever, was a transformed city. White-collar workers called off sick in record numbers. A middle-aged businessman in a white Impala would think nothing of rolling down his car window and asking a street urchin if Sunil Gavaskar was still at the bat. Strangers walked up to each other and asked, ‘What’s the latest score, yaar?’

  Firecrackers went off all across the city whenever Bedi bowled another batsman out. During the India-Pakistan matches, the Muslim shop owners at Bhendi Bazaar would hand out sweetmeats each time an Indian wicket fell, while nearby Hindus glowered at them. A panoramic view of the office crowds at Churchgate or Flora Fountain would have shown men and women leaning slightly to one side, pocket transistors glued to one ear. The air filled with the crackle of these radios, the rapid-fire voices of commentators Vijay Merchant and Lala Amarnath rising and falling like ocean waves. No war, it seemed could bring Bombayites together the way a test match did and if I had to be at school and away from the excitement, the least I could do was carry a pocket radio.

  I would turn the radio on low, flip open my desk top and lay it on top of my books inside the desk. Every few minutes, I would cradle my head in my hands and rest my ear against the desk. Then I would whisper the score to the girl sitting next to me, who in turn would pass it to the next person until the whole class knew. For a few days, Mrs D’Mello watched me go through this elaborate charade. Then she said, ‘Okay, child, let’s do this. I’ll let you listen to the radio every once in awhile and you can tell the whole class. Then we go back to our studies, eh?’

  I thought she was the coolest teacher in the world.

  But the friendship between Mrs D’Mello and myself was short-lived. It ended the day my classmates and I were standing in the hallway during a class change and I made what I thought was a brilliant anthropological observation. ‘Hey, do you notice how much Mrs D’Mello looks like a horse when she laughs?’

  I said to Anita. ‘Such big teeth she has.’

  Anita gulped hard. Her eyes grew big as she stared at a spot over my shoulder.

  I turned around. Mrs D’Mello was glaring at me, her eyes narrow and mean. She had a tremendous scowl on her face.

  My stomach dropped.

  ‘I…I…It was a compliment…I love horses…I didn’t mean anything bad…’ I stuttered but it was too late. Mrs D’Mello had turned on her heel and was marching into the classroom.

  Thus began my long and lonely exile in the hallway. Most days, I was fine with it, would walk out of the classroom with a swagger, making sure that everyone noticed the novel I was carrying to keep me company in the hallway. But today, embarrassed by Mother Ignatius’ words, I am fuming about the unfairness of it all.

  It is lunch recess and about seven of us have decided to go across the street and get a plate of pyali, a spicy mixture of potatoes and beans. On the way back, Tasneem decides to buy some boras, the red, tangy berries, and slices of raw green mangoes dipped in salt. The old street vendor deftly slices the mango and I stare at his small, sharp knife. ‘I swear, yaar, if I had a knife I’d go and kill Mrs D’Mello right now,’ I say almost to myself.

  But Anita Khalsa hears me. ‘I dare you,’ she says immediately.

  ‘Dare me to do what?’

  ‘I dare you take a knife and go up to Mrs D’Mello and say the words, “Mrs D’Mello, I’m here to kill you.”’

  The other girls crowd around us. My mind is working fast.

  This is my chance to once and for all be the undisputed holder of the title of Mad Parsi.

  ‘What’s the bet worth?’ I ask.

  And they think for a minute. ‘One LP,’ Rukshan says, knowing my love for music.

  ‘Not enough, men,’ I say. ‘This could get me thrown out of school, for God’s sake. No, this is worth at least four albums.’

  That stops them for a minute and I’m almost hoping they will back out. But then Anita says, ‘Yah, we can all chip in the cash, so what. Okay, four albums.’

  I gulp hard, wondering how I manage to get myself in these situations. Nothing to do now but see this through.

  Tasneem’s first-floor apartment is adjacent to the school and we decide to go there to borrow a knife. She decides not to run up to the apartment, convinced her mother will be suspicious if she looks her daughter in the eye. ‘Ma, ma,’ Tasneem yells from below and when her mother appears at the balcony she asks her to toss us a knife.

  ‘What you need a knife for, beta?’

  Tasneem thinks fast. ‘For biology class, ma. We have to cut up a frog.’

  Even from this distance we can see Tasneem’s mother grimace. But she goes inside and returns with a knife wrapped in newspaper, which she throws down at us after asking us to get out of the way.

  So there is no way out now. My last hope, that Tasneem’s mom would smell a rat and refuse us the knife, has faded. The presence of the knife makes the dare seem more real. As we walk back to the school and climb the two sets of stairs that lead to the teachers’ lounge, word spreads, so that a procession of about fourteen girls is now following me. I hold the knife, still wrapped in the newspaper, and try to think of how to extract myself from this situation in a way that will fulfil the spirit of the dare and still let me save face. And then it comes to me: while the others wait outside the glass doors of the teachers’ lounge, I will walk up to Mrs D’Mello and say loudly,

  ‘Mrs D’Mello, I’m here to kill you.’ But here’s the tricky part, here’s where I will prove myself more wily than Houdini—I will also add, in

  a voice soft enough for only Mrs D’Mello to hear, ‘Don’t worry, this is just a joke.’

  It does not occur to me that Mrs D’Mello, who has hated m
y guts for more than two years, may not think much of this joke.

  I feel confident of my secret plan as we march toward the teachers’ lounge.

  More confident than the others, it turns out. As the group sees that I am determined to see the deed through, the enormity of what could happen begins to dawn on them. We are at the end of the hallway that leads to the teachers’ lounge when Tasneem chickens out. ‘Ae, come on, yaar. This is going too far. If my mother finds out what I wanted the knife for she will make mincemeat out of me.’

  Mary pipes up. ‘Yeah, we’ll all get into solid trouble. And after what happened only two weeks ago, none of us can afford to get into any more trouble, no?’

  We all know immediately what she’s talking about.

  The troubles that Mary is referring to began with a song. It was a song I had written in tribute to our school’s patron saint, Claudine Thevenet, and was sung to the tune of The Osmonds’

  I’ll Be Your Long-haired Lover from Liverpool.

  We were to have performed this song at a special assembly being held at a nearby Catholic school but everything was running behind schedule on that day and Sister Ignatius instead gave up our block of time to the graduating tenth-graders and we returned to school without having sung our song.

  What happened next took me by surprise: A strange brew of hurt pride, teenage angst, mass hysteria and bubbling hor-mones erupted in spontaneous combustion, so that the entire class was shedding tears of indignation by the time we returned to school. As the song’s creator, I was initially flattered by the outrage its non-performance had provoked and then I was shocked by the hysterical outpourings of forty very emotional girls. I had never seen my friends like this. Most of the time, we tried to outdo each other by being cool, unemotional and devil-may-care. At first I tried to reason with them but when I noticed that I was the only one who did not believe that we had suffered a great injury, a terrible insult, and that we were continually being oppressed, patronized and humiliated by the graduating seniors, I, too, got swept up in the tidal wave of emotion.

  Two hours later, an unsuspecting Mother Ignatius asked us to gather in our assembly hall to practice the song for next day’s performance. Since we had not had an opportunity to sing today, she declared, we would perform the song during tomorrow’s school assembly.

  Boycott. The word spread quickly throughout our ranks.

  We would not participate in today’s practice and we would not perform tomorrow. It did not occur to any of us to communicate our hurt or our new decision to Mother Ignatius. We took our places in the stands as usual and when Mother Ignatius asked Mary to come take her place at the piano, she complied.

  Mary was older than most of us because she had repeated several grades. She was a tall, athletic, Anglo-Indian girl with straight brown hair and beautiful grey eyes. It was well known that Mary was one of the school’s handful of charity cases and it was rumoured that the family has fallen onto hard times because her father was a drunk. But what Mary lacked in scholarly abilities she made up in her cheery willingness to help and she was a favourite with many of the nuns.

  Mother Ignatius raised her baton. ‘Ready?’ she said. ‘All right, Mary, give us the opening chord.’

  We remained motionless. Mary sat perched on the piano stool, her head bowed.

  Mother Ignatius looked surprised. ‘C’mon girls, let’s get to it. Let’s try again. Ready?’

  The big room was silent. Mother Ignatius turned toward Mary. We could tell she was struggling to hold on to her patience. ‘Okay, Mary. Let’s hear that chord.’

  But Mary bowed her head even further, so that her chin was resting on her chest. Mother Ignatius looked from her to us. It was obvious that she had no idea what was going on and it occurred to me that one of us should fill her in but the atmosphere in the room was suddenly so charged, we were all so caught up in that web of defiant silence, that I was afraid to move.

  Mother Ignatius was not afraid to move. With a few deft steps, she was standing before the piano. ‘Play, Mary,’ she said softly, and when Mary did not move, she repeated, ‘Play, my child. Play the piano.’

  Mary sat with her head down. Mother Ignatius stared at her for a few moments. ‘Get up,’ she said suddenly.

  Mary stood but her eyes were averted. The rest of us looked on helplessly, holding our breaths. ‘Look at me,’ Mother Ignatius said…‘Talk to me. Tell me what is going on.’

  Her words fell on deaf ears. ‘Look at me,’ Mother Ignatius repeated, her words precise as bullets this time. And the next minute, a bullet landed, as her right hand flew over Mary’s face in a slap.

  We gasped. Mary and Mother Ignatius both flinched and looked stricken. And then, all hell broke loose. ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair,’ Anu began to wail, sounding like a police siren. Anu was a short, homely girl from a conservative Hindu family and most of us avoided her because it was well known that Anu was a snitch and a tattletale. Anu’s uncharacteristic outburst had a mesmerizing effect on the rest of us.

  Soon, everybody was talking and crying and yelling all at once.

  Mother Ignatius took in the situation. ‘Okay, everybody back to your classroom,’ she said crisply. ‘I still have no idea what’s going on but will settle that later.’

  But Mother Ignatius had made a wrong calculation. Being left alone and unsupervised in our classroom only gave room for the hysteria to grow. For a moment I thought I was the only dry-eyed girl left but then I caught Patty’s eye and she gave me a quick, bemused look as if to say, What the hell is going on here? I shrugged in reply.

  ‘We have to do something. We cannot let ourselves be treated like this by those senior girls,’ Barbara was saying and now I was convinced that the sun has risen in the South today. Barbara was Mrs Pinto’s daughter, an obedient, goody-two-shoes type, who spoke so softly it sounded as if she always had laryngitis.

  But Barbara’s little speech had an effect on me and gave flight to all my fantasies about youth power and student revolution. Seize the moment, seize the hour, I said to myself.

  ‘Okay,’ I yelled decisively. ‘Here’s what we will do. Let me quickly draw up a signature petition and we’ll personally deliver it to Mother Ignatius.’

  All forty of us signed the petition. All forty of us moved like a dark cloud of angry bees from our classroom, made a left turn and walked the short distance to Mother Ignatius’ office.

  I knocked on the door. She looked up and smiled, as if she was happy to see me. I felt a sudden rush of affection for her, which I tried to suppress. I remembered the many conversations Mother Superior had had with us, conversations where she had shared parts of her life both before and after she became a nun, talks which had removed some of the mystique that surrounded the nunnery and made us look at the white-clad figures less as space aliens and more as flesh-and-blood human beings.

  ‘You girls can ask me anything,’ she had once said to us in one of her informal talks.

  A dozen hands went up at once.

  ‘Why did you become a nun, Mother?’

  ‘Is it true that all nuns were jilted by their boyfriends and so they joined the convent?’

  ‘Do you miss not seeing your mummy-daddy?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Is it true you are bald?’

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  Mother Superior had raised her hand, laughing. ‘Girls, girls.

  One at a time.’

  And she told us about how long and thick her hair had once been, how it had been her pride and joy, an object of vanity, really. How her boyfriend—yes, she had had a boyfriend—used to compliment her on her hair. And no, she wasn’t quite bald now but yes, she’d cut off her hair after she’d joined the convent because it was easier to manage under the habit and all and also, because it had been a source of pride and vanity and God did not like pride. ‘So off it came, chop-chop,’ she smiled.

  I had felt an inexpressible sadness when she told us about her h
air. I couldn’t decide if what she had done was foolish or admirable.

  But now, standing outside her office, I casted these sentimental memories out of my head. ‘May we come in?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ she replied but then jumped up from her chair with a start as all of us walked into her small office, crowding her.

  ‘What is this?’ she said, and I was surprised to hear a tremor in her voice. Her body stiffened and her eyes darted around the room. ‘How dare all you girls march into my office like this.’

  The day was getting away from me like a tumbling roll of yarn. ‘But, Mother, I just asked you if we could come in,’ I replied in confusion. Mother Ignatius looked more angry than I have ever seen her. What’s worse, she looked—scared . And then it dawned on me: Mother thought this was a sit-in. She thought we were here to surround her in her office and not let her leave.

  I was about to explain when Anu came to my rescue. ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair,’ she wailed and despite the charged atmosphere, I wanted to giggle. But then I heard it from behind me, a wall of sound that was pushing forward.

  It started low and deep like a growl and then got high-pitched.

  Everybody was talking all at once and what was really astounding was that girls like Anita Khalsa, who had made a reputation for themselves for being as tough as nails, were sobbing as if they were at a funeral.

  ‘You slapped Mary,’ Barbara cried and Mother Ignatius flinched and took a step back as if to escape the accusation in Barbara’s tone.

  ‘Will somebody please tell me what on earth is going on?’

  she said…But most of us were too hysterical to talk. Mother looked around the room helplessly. Her eyes finally fell on me, one of the few remaining dry-eyed girls in the room. ‘Thrity? Can you tell me what this is about?’