replied crisply, ‘about time you told him where to stick those fine concepts of his.’
‘I’m not sure Binkie would like it either—you know how he seems to think my main role in life is to keep his mother company. Unless…’ Bubbles’ face was starting to clear. ‘The only place I can get away to without any of them in tow is my parents’ house.’
‘Delhi,’ Anita exclaimed, ‘now there’s a plan.’
‘No one can stop us from going to see our parents, I guess,’ Sam said slowly.
‘Be too bloody hot till November though.’
‘You weren’t thinking of December, were you? I mean…Lamboo’s invitation…?’
The three women looked at the letter, still lying on the table before them, and then at each other in the candlelight. Bubbles’ eyes suddenly looked like hollows in her head, and Sam, wrapped in her cream pashmina, was a sad and portly ghost. Anita shuddered, feeling uncharacteristically nervy. She was dying for a cigarette. ‘I’ve never been back there since we left school,’ she muttered.
‘Nor me,’ Sam said softly after a pause.
‘I’ve been past those gates, oh, I don’t know, at least a hundred times,’ Bubbles said. ‘Every time I go to Papa’s Connaught Place shop, in fact. And, you know, it’s like a bad habit, but I still cross my heart and mutter “Our Father” when I see the school church. But I’ve never once stepped through those gates since we left. I’m not sure I’ll be able to take it, actually’
‘Look,’ Anita cut in, sitting up and trying to sound more brisk, ‘I know there’s good reason for us never having gone back. But I’m not sure it’s really helped, y’know. Sometimes things just seem to get worse the longer you leave them.’
Her two friends were silent for a few seconds before Bubbles spoke up. ‘My therapist sometimes says I’ll only make real progress when those old issues are resolved…’
‘It’s more than that for me,’ Sam said. ‘More like…atonement.’
‘Well, if we don’t do it now, we never will,’ Anita said, taking Sam’s hands in hers. ‘I get some leave around Christmas, so shall we try to go together by, say, mid December? Let’s see what it is that Lamboo wants. We owe her that much. Time to try and lay some of those ghosts to rest.’
DELHI, 1993
‘Have you heard? We’re getting a new girl in class,’ Sam said, putting her satchel down on her chair to take out her lunchbox and flask of iced lime juice and position them carefully in the inner recess of her scuffed wooden desk.
Even Anita, slumped lifeless over Flaubert at the back of the classroom, looked up, shoving her glasses back up her nose as various classmates started instantly to quiz Sam.
‘Who?’
‘Where’s she from?’
‘I hope she’s not pretty, yaar.’
‘Or over-smart.’
In her usual calm manner, Sam ignored them all until she had hung her satchel on one of the hooks on the back wall and started arranging the exercise books on the teacher’s table into a neat pile. Finally, she said, shrugging, ‘Dunno, I haven’t met her yet. But Lamboo stopped me in the quadrangle to say that a new girl was joining our class to do her final year here. She wants us to be nice to her because she’s been recently orphaned, I think.’
There was another flurry of interest:
‘Orphaned! Bloody hell…’
‘Who’s an orphan?’
‘The new girl we’re getting, man, why don’t you listen!’
‘Christ that’s bad, poor thing.’
‘Where’s she coming from, Sam?’
‘One of the hill schools, Lamboo said—Mussourie, I think?’
‘I hope she’s nice. Some of these hill-school types think no end of themselves.’
‘Yeah, almost as though they’re little English missies…they wear stockings and hats and things. Imagine!’
‘Those hats are called “boaters”,’ Anita offered. ‘Actually it’s the hill stations that are the real relics of our colonial past.’ She looked around and saw that, as usual, her classmates were all ignoring her to concentrate on the crass and the mundane.
‘Whatever,’ Zeba growled from the bench next to Anita’s, ‘she had better not try lording it over us.’
‘Yeah, I really hope she’s nice.’
‘Of course she’ll be nice,’ Sam said, adding, ‘well, more importantly, we have to be nice to her. Must be awful to have lost both parents.’
‘Both together?’
‘Must have been a car accident or something.’
The conversation was brought to a halt by the clanging of the office peon’s iron rod on the brass bell in the quadrangle outside. The class shuffled to their feet as Mrs Menon, their teacher, sailed in, orange and black sari pallav fluttering after her.
‘Good morning, Mrs Menon,’ the class intoned.
‘Morning, morning…good weekend?’ The teacher smiled briefly before sitting down to unlock the desk drawer and pull out the class register. A few indistinct mumbles greeted her query but she had obviously not been expecting any replies as she looked up with a blank expression to take the roll call in a brisk voice.
‘Anita Roy?’
‘Present, Miss.’
‘Arpana Singh?’
‘Present, Miss.’
‘Ashwathy Pillai?’
‘Present, Miss.’
‘Bubbles Malhotra?’
Mrs Menon looked up and scanned the class over her reading glasses before repeating, ‘Bubbles Malhotra? Not here?’
A voice piped up from the back. ‘I think she’s coming, Miss. Must be late…’
‘She wasn’t on our bus this morning,’ someone volunteered.
‘Well, she’s always missing the bus. Last week we had to wait while she came running down the road with her two servants following her, one carrying her bag, the other her water-bottle,’ someone else said to general titters.
‘Enough, enough, let’s move on. Maybe she’ll come later.’ Mrs Menon returned to her ledger. ‘Damini Mehta?’
‘Present, Miss.’
As predicted, there was soon a kerfuffle at the door as Bubbles Malhotra stumbled in, red-faced and sweaty from her exertions. ‘Sor-ry, Mi-ss,’ she puffed, ‘missed the bu-s, Miss…’
‘Really, Bubbles, you must try harder than this to be punctual. This must be the third time already this month that you’ve been late.’
Bubbles performed a small apologetic shimmy, still standing uncertainly in the doorway while trying to catch her breath. Her indecision only seemed to annoy Mrs Menon further, who snapped, ‘Okay, come in, come in, what are you waiting there for now?’
Anita rolled her eyes as Bubbles flopped onto the bench next to her. Bubbles was in a right old state, her tie askew, socks sagging over grubby trainers and a pair of new zits ballooning on her chin. Anita listened to Bubbles wheezing for a few minutes as she recovered from having run up two flights of