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  When my father introduced me to the Boarding sister, Sister Philomene, she embraced me with her plump arms and whispered, don’t worry my dear, I am here to look after you... She was about fifty and had on her pale chin two scraggy hairs. Her round face was serene and her smile tender. Tears came to my eyes out of gratitude. When my father got into the car and vanished round the corner I followed Sister Philomene to the Boarding house which was half a furlong away.

  A twelve-year-old girl in a striped frock was standing beside the gate looking out. Come, Raji, called out Sister Philomene, meet another newcomer, Kamala... Raji looked as if she had cried a lot. Her eyes were red and held only misery and mistrust. But she accompanied us to the Boarding. It was a circular structure, two-storeyed, with a garden where instead of flowers grew only tapioca and a well at the back shaded by a guava tree.

  The garden gate which was kept locked always, faced the road and a hotel which sold among other things ice-cream which the girls bought, stealthily climbing over the wall in the dark. Sister Philomene had another nun to assist her in her duties. This was an unpleasant person who thought it her mission in life to catch the children guilty of sins both of omission and of commission and to take them to the Mother Superior for appropriate punishment. Her mouth watered and her currant-like eyes glistened when anyone was found dozing during the study-hour or talking to her neighbour. The children hated her.

  When I first walked in, the Anglo-Indian girls seated in the hall stopped their sewing and began to sing: “She had nothing under when she came,” and I wondered why they laughed looking at me. Then an older girl got up and came towards me. I am Sarada Menon, she said, I am going to be your room-mate.

  She took me to the northern room on the ground floor which had an adjacent dressing-room and a jasminevine growing beside the window. I was given the widest bed, the one beside the window. There were four beds in the room. Raji was to occupy the one next to mine. Besides the three of us there was a thin fourteen-year old called Meenakshi who looked like an El Greco painting. Sarada was the prettiest and being the oldest became our guardian willingly. She shared with us the sweets that she had brought from home. Raji refused to eat anything. What is the use being homesick, asked Sarada. We have to stick it out here until the December vacation.

  Sarada was one who had grown up in Singapore. She had stylishly cut dresses which reached only to her knees revealing the slight bandiness of her calves, which only made the legs more arresting. She was reserved, talking only to her teacher and to her room-mates. A second-class boarder from Goa fell in love with her and kept pestering her with tender notes and tenderer glances until Sarada lost her temper and shouted at her.

  The lesbian admirer came into our room once when Sarada was away taking a bath and kissed her pillowcase and her undies hanging out to dry in the dressing room. I lay on my bed watching this performance but she was half-crazed with love, and hardly noticed me.

  11

  The Convent

  My room-mate Raji was the only daughter of a wealthy medical practitioner and a pampered child. It was for some lessons in discipline that she was sent by her parents to the boarding school. But she believed in teaching the nuns a lesson and somehow punishing them for ‘their holier than thou’ attitude.

  The assistant boarding mistress scolded Raji whenever an opportunity presented itself, which was as often as twice a day. Raji sulked nearly all the time and opened her mouth only to mutter profanities about the stern nun. I wish she dies, said Raji one day, before she took up her Bible for the nightly prayer.

  My room-mates nicknamed me Ulba and began to pamper me with little gifts of sweets and ice-cream. They wanted me to get for myself better clothes and forced me to write to my father in Calcutta asking for a silk frock for my tenth birthday.

  They did not know how it hurt my pride to do such a thing. I knew well that I would fall in my father’s esteem by revealing desire for fancy clothes. They came from a background very different from mine. They thought it normal for children to wear good clothes and tie satin ribbons in their hair. They wanted to see me look as pretty as their sisters and cousins who were of my age.

  My grandmother used to send someone or other once in two months to bring me to Nalapat for a week-end. When after one of those short stays I left home, my escort was my grand-uncle’s youngest brotherin-law. My grandmother wanted him to get for me from the citybazaar some cloth for the frock which I was to wear for my birthday.

  My grandmother could hardly afford to buy me silks. The sum she gave him must have been meagre, for the uncle told the shop’s salesman that he wished to be shown some inexpensive cloth, something coloured but not too fancy. The salesman pulled down on the counter, bales and bales of beautiful poplins with prints of flowers and animals.

  Is there nothing cheaper, asked my uncle in a loud, carrying voice and the people walking along the road, slowed down to see what was going on. I want for this child something really cheap, shouted the uncle. I felt humiliated. I wanted like Sita to disappear into the bowels of the earth. Finally some printed mill-khaddar was brought out which suited our pockets. A blue on white design which cost us two and a half rupees.

  When it was shown to my room-mates they hated its coarseness. Poor little Ulba, they said. But I comforted them by telling them that the frock from Calcutta would anyway be reaching me before the birthday. On the eve of my birthday they took me out for shopping, saying that Sarada needed to get some gift for her cousin Satyavati.

  Then to my utter amazement I saw the loveliest fabrics laid out on the counters, and my eyes took in with a wild greed the flamboyance of the colours, and the gleam of the midday sun on the silks and taffetas.

  If you were Satyavati which would you choose for a dress, asked Sarada. After a long pause during which I touched the softness and the cool of the silks, I spoke: this one in heliotrope of course. It had clusters of small white flowers. Sarada bought it, and, then exhausted by the day’s rounds, we returned to the school. When I woke up on my tenth birthday my room-mates sang the Happy Birthday song to me and presented me with the beautiful cloth I had chosen for Satyavati. Then the tears came, and I wept hiding my face in Sarada’s hair. You will look so pretty in this violet-coloured frock, said Meenakshi.

  The Mother Superior had sent for me, and the message frightened me, because I had arranged for some ice-cream to be smuggled into the school over the wall that evening. But when I went up to her room; she only handed me a packet of embroidered handkerchiefs and wished me many happy returns of the day.

  The Calcutta frock arrived a month late and as it was chosen by my busy father’s secretary it turned out to be terribly oversized. I put it away in my black box under the towels and the bed-sheets.

  The assistant boarding-mistress was harsh with Raji when she fell ill. She accused Raji of malingering and plotting to evade the first term’s tests. Raji was so upset by the lecture that she cried and began to vomit on to the floor. I was in tears too. I was extremely fond of Raji who was disdainful towards all but very kind to me, and I felt afraid that she was going to die. She had looked yellow and wan for a week. She had taken no food at all for several hours. I had coaxed her to drink some buttermilk but even that she had thrown up.

  Don’t worry, Ulba, said Raji, I am going to be well as soon as I get out of this purgatory. That evening Raji’s parents came to take her away. Her father diagnosed the illness as jaundice. I helped her pack her things. Won’t you return when you get cured, I kept asking her. No I will not return to this place, Said Raji. But I have written down on the walls of the lavatories some things for the nuns. After I leave, please go and read them. But do not tell anyone that I wrote the stuff...

  After Raji had left, I suddenly became lonely. She was the only one who liked to whisper in bed at night after the ten o’clock’s silence-bell had struck. Both Sarada and Meenakshi were obsessed with their study. They thought it was a waste of time chatting about the vagaries of the nuns. Raji had once dragged
me to a windowsill at night and had helped me to climb the ledge to peep into the nun’s dormitories. She found the sight of their bald heads very amusing. We used to giggle endlessly whenever that particular memory came up.

  I read the message Raji had scribbled with charcoal on the privy walls. It said that the assistant boardingmistress was an ape and that instead of brains her head contained only some dung and dogshit. Raji also wrote that the nuns were finally to meet with a gory end, for they could not, however much they tried, hoodwink the all-seeing God.

  12

  The Boarders

  On holidays there were three study sessions for the boarders. One hour in the morning, two hours in the afternoon and one hour between seven and eight in the evening after supper. All that was expected of the students was total silence.

  The nun in charge of the session sat sewing but slyly watched the girls who dared to raise their eyes from the books to look at one another. On fortunate days we had the mild Sister Thecla who never bothered about what was going on, but read her book or mended old veils, without once looking up from her work.

  The girl who sat near me one day at study was fifteen and was called Annie. She kept reading and re-reading a letter and when she saw me glance at her, she whispered that she wanted me to read the letter that she had received from a boy. A rich and handsome boy, who was very fair and tall. He is always pestering me with such letters, Annie said, frowning.

  I read with amazement that the boy considered Annie the most beautiful girl in the world and that he wanted not only to hold her in his arms, but also to kiss her passionately on her full lips. Do not be so cruel to me sweet Annie, the lover had written, give me a chance to prove my love for you... What do you think of this, asked Annie. Isn’t audacious? I nodded.

  I studied Annie’s face with a new interest. She looked very plain to me. She was thin and her skin was swarthy and blotched with acne. Her teeth were in bad shape. Her hair was oily and hung in two scraggy plaits. This was the girl whom the rich boy adored so blindly. I felt sorry for the boy. But all I said was that she ought to try hard and love him back in return. Do you believe in love, asked Annie and without letting me reply, she shrugged her shoulders and said with a smile, after all you are only a little child, how can you be expected to know what love means...

  When I told Sarada about Annie’s love she grew angry. You must not talk to that horrible creature again, she said. During study, sit close to me or near Meenakshi. Don’t mix with riff-raff. But Annie did not leave me alone even for a day. She used to call me to the bathhouse in the afternoon on Sundays only to lean against the wall and talk to me about her lover. She showed me yet another letter in which he had progressed in his ardour to such an extent, that he wrote about the round smooth breasts of Annie which he was dying to touch. I was shocked. Didn’t I tell you, asked Annie, didn’t I tell you he was a worthless lecher? He does not love me. He only wants my body...

  And I glanced at Annie’s breasts which were flat and un-appetising. Ask him not to write again, I said. Tell him that you will report him to the Mother Superior.

  One day Annie called me aside and showed me a bruise on her upper lip. He bit me, she said, and bewildered, I asked, who bit you? That one, the rich boy who loves me, said Annie in a whisper; he climbed over the wall and came to my bed last night when all of you were asleep. This is awful, I said, you must report to the Mother Superior at once. One day he will kill you. Annie gave an enigmatic smile. You are too young to know what love means, she said, but you are the only one I can trust with a secret...

  During the third term, Annie was expelled from the boarding school and the nuns gave out no valid reasons. She left early in the morning before any of us had woken up, carrying with her all her books and clothes. An uncle had come in the night to take Annie away.

  Later, Sarada told me that she was living in a world of make-believe and that all the love-letters were found to be in her own handwriting. Meenakshi laughed, but I felt some kind of loyalty towards Annie and kept silent. Good riddance, said Sarada, combing her long hair, she was a bad influence on our little Ulba.

  There were three kinds of boarders in the convent. The first class boarders, who were given a breakfast of cereal, eggs and toast, meat at lunch-time, snacks at tea and pudding after supper; the second class girls, who had only cereal at breakfast, rice and fish curry at lunch and no pudding at supper: the third class boarders, who got only a gruel made of maize in the morning, rice at lunch and gruel again at night. Worse off than even the third class boarders were the orphans who cleaned the lavatories, swept the droppings of the turkeys and the dead leaves from the kitchen yard, chopped firewood, helped in the kitchen and ate only two meals of gruel a day.

  They wore white and exuded the smell of rancid coconut oil which they had applied to their dusty hair. The orphans were nearly all the time busy filling up the wooden tubs in the many bathrooms meant for the boarders and the nuns. This tired them out so much that they hated drawing water from the well for their own baths. They therefore bathed only once a week.

  The oldest orphan was a 70-year-old lady called Rocky Marian who went to the bazaar with baskets to buy the provisions for the cuisine-house. Whenever she came on the scene the turkeys chased her, making loud friendly sounds, and she spoke to them in Malayalam in a quavering voice full of affection. They are calling me Ammachi (Mother) said the old lady one day, pointing to the gawky birds. The cook laughed, and her laughter resembled the cackle of birds. She was called Felicitas and was respected by all the orphans. It was within her power to give them an extra ladle of gruel if they pleased her. She was weedy and emaciated. Her teeth looked like rusty nails, being pointed, and discoloured by the betel and tobacco she chewed the whole day long.

  After each vacation each of us brought from our homes sweets and fruits and banana-chips. Once my grandmother had sent with me a bunch of ripe yellow bananas which disappeared from our dressing room at night. It was obvious that someone very hungry had eaten them, creeping into our room while we were asleep, for we found the peels lying outside the window.

  I did not want anyone to know of this petty theft but the assistant boarding-mistress somehow got wind of it and decided to make a huge fuss. After the prayer she told the children that St. Anthony was going to turn the culprit insane within three days. For two days we went around looking for signs of lunacy in others’ faces.

  Finally, at dusk, a terrified girl went up to the plaster statue of St. Anthony in the chapel and began to sob hysterically. The nuns prayed to the saint and begged him to spare the young girl in view of her tender age. She was a plump girl, fond of eating and apparently the convent’s niggardly rations did not satisfy her hunger. She was let off with a gloomy warning from the Mother Superior. She developed convulsions soon after and went home for good.

  The obsession with sin destroyed the mind of several girls who were at the beginning of their adolescence, normal and easygoing. If there was a dearth of sin, sin at any cost had to be manufactured, because forgiving the sinners was a therapeutic exercise, popular with the rabidly virtuous.

  13

  17, Landsdowne Road

  When I fell ill at the boarding and later developed a rash, the nuns decided to send me home. They chose a middle-aged spinster named Ponnamma to be my escort. Sarada powdered my face, trying to conceal the pink spots, and tied up my hair in a pony-tail with a broad yellow ribbon. Ponnamma took me by bus, and all through the journey she kept explaining to the other passengers that the rash was not measles but only a mild allergy that I picked up after eating shellfish. The bus conductor was friendly towards us and kept calling Ponnamma “sister” although he was meeting her for the first time.

  When I reached Nalapat my grandmother rose in surprise to greet me. It is only measles, said Ponnamma. Your brother is already here, said my grandmother, he has measles too, he arrived from his hostel yesterday. She took me up to the middle room where my brother Mohandas was lying in bed reading H.G. Wells
. His face seemed mottled with the red rash. You have come too, he said, giving me a smile. It was the usual thing for us to fall ill at the same time. As children in Calcutta, fever attacked us only simultaneously so that we enjoyed the spell of rest, painting pictures together, seated on our sick bed and sticking stamps in our albums. If ever I had a personal hero in my childhood it was my brother, who stood first in every class and in every school he went to, and bagged all the prizes. He could draw fine caricatures of the national leaders and write humorous articles. Whenever he made a speech his voice could with its fine modulations control his audience, and swing them into his way of thought. He would have made an excellent politician, but he turned to medicine and later became a successful surgeon...

  I used to tell my brother that I would take up law. I had heard that lawyers made enormous amounts of money and lived in style, keeping more than three cars and a pack of servants. I loved opulence and luxury. Perhaps this was the reason for my choosing the roles of queens and princesses whenever we decided to stage a play. I liked the bewitchment of gems, silks and perfumes. In all my day-dreams I saw myself as a bejewelled empress who controlled the destinies of her countrymen. Some kind of a Noor Jehan. I hated to see myself as I really was in mirrors which threw back at me the pathetic contours of my thin body and the plain face with the protruding teeth.

  When we were separated, my brother and I, I felt alone and lost, for between us even in the silence we shared was a pure kind of communication, an interminable dialogue that went on and on like that of the wind with the earth or of the sun with the trees. Each drew sustenance from the other’s unspoken support. I wrote two letters to my brother but they were stilted and dull and he did not care to reply. The nuns used to censor the letters we wrote before they were sent for mailing. They compelled us to write that we were very happy at the boarding and that every day we prayed to God for the well-being of our relatives. My brother must have thought that I had lost my mind, reading my idiotic letters. He must have wondered what had happened to my social conscience, my political sense and my curiosity.