Miss Timmins' School for Girls by Nayana Currimbhoy

bobbed just above her knees as she danced.
    The Scottish Dancing Competition was also known as the mid-monsoon dance. It was on July 10, almost a month after my first dinner at Sunbeam. The school was in a fever pitch of excitement on the evening of the competition. The top tier of Panchgani residents trooped in wearing just-pressed jackets and saris. The senior boys from St. Paul’s, in long locks and red blazers, filled the gym with the smell of their sweaty socks. The convent girls sat next to them, blushing and giggling. The big news at the back of the gym, where the dancing girls were lined up in their formations, was that Shobha had a new boyfriend, and he was sitting in the front row. The gym served also as our auditorium and had a good-sized stage at the far end. The Scottish dancing, however, took place on the gym floor, with the audience seated in rows on the edges of the floor, and on the stage. At the front of the stage sat the three judges: a nun from St. Mary’s Convent, an Anglo Indian master from St. Paul’s, and Mr. Billimoria, principal of the Parsi school, whose culture was considered more attuned to the finer, Western arts and music.
    It was when the girls bobbed in, their toes perfectly pointed and their chests puffed out like Scottish Highlanders, that it struck me just how bizarre the school was. No wonder I felt I was swimming underwater. Not only had the missionaries created a British boarding school in this corner of India, they had even managed to create the Victorian boarding school of their own childhoods.
    I saw Pin sitting with Merch at the back of the stage. In Indore, when I pored over Femina and Eve’s Weekly , dreaming of the lives of the models that lounged across those pages, it was their sophistication I yearned for. And though Merch and Pin were too eccentric and ungainly to be glamorous, this same sophistication glowed around them, pulling me into their orbit.
    I was intrigued by Pin’s past. I had pieced it together by now, from scraps dropped by Merch, Hendy, and Sister Richards. I had assembled the skeleton of her life. Her parents had been traveling missionaries. They went around the country holding prayer meetings in schools and camps run by the same Presbyterian mission. Her father was a very persuasive preacher, and the prayer meetings often turned into teary, emotionally fraught conversion marathons. Moira grew up in Nasik, attending the mission school there. At fourteen, she was sent to boarding school in England.
    â€œThat’s where she must have learned all her bad habits,” said Hendy with a suggestive sniff, though she did not deign to specify the habits.
    Every time I heard something new about her, the dark side beckoned.
    I was learning to decipher her many moods. It was her mood that always drove our evenings. Merch was the harbor. I had no idea what he did with his days and nights—Sister Richards told me that he wrote for the district newspaper and was a stringer for the Poona Herald , though he said the last story he wrote was in 1968, when two Irani boys had kidnapped a girl from St. Mary’s Convent—but I imagined him, always, in his room, ready to draw us into his special world.
    Pin had times when she carried a dark cloud on her head, those nights when she smoked silently in the corner with her eyes glazed, and we played chess or talked softly in a glow, Merch and I, of books and exotic places we would visit in our lives. There were some nights, though, when she was just plain angry. On those nights, it was target practice. Anyone was fair game. She slashed everyone. Raswani, the Hindi teacher who had pronounced her to be wicked that day in the staff room, was a spying, conniving psychopath. Malti and Beena were silly blind mice. Jacinta was an empty little potlet, Susan a frustrated cow, and all the teachers “fucking spinsters.” But on those angry nights, it was mostly Miss Nelson she ranted against. “That