Miss Mathanghi, an ancient and dour twenty-five, waits for the shuffling and gossip to peak. The last girls are just entering as she launches into the morning’s prayer, some twelve couplets from the Bhagavad-Gita, which she bellows line by line, and which the girls yell back. She does this once through with the entire classroom in some semblance of chorus. She then sings out each line a second time, looking at the ceiling or out the window. At the end of the line, she points to a student, who must repeat it alone. Sita is among the first; she gets perhaps half of her line right. That is typical for her, but today she has an additional distraction: she is smiling a calculating smile at her sister, implying that Janaki will be chosen and that she should be scared.
Janaki is scared. One of her standard-mates is selected, a little girl like her, who has only begun school that day. She just gapes at the teacher, who stares back a second before rolling her eyes and pointing to a second-standard. Janaki feels herself petrifying and turning red; perhaps, she thinks, perhaps she can blend into the brick floor. Perhaps the teacher will see only an empty space, an empty uniform starched stiff enough to stand alone.
But there is the pointer, aimed at Janaki.
And Janaki responds, repeating the entire line perfectly. Or so it sounds to her, but then it always does. But yes, it’s true: the teacher is nodding, surprised, approving. She sings out the next line and the next, the final line of the prayer. She indicates Janaki for both of them. Janaki repeats them. She looks cautiously at Sita, expecting her sister to be shaking in triumphant hilarity while Janaki makes a fool of herself, but Sita is gaping at her jealously and looks away when Janaki turns to her.
The first class of the day for the youngest girls is arithmetic; the first exercise is writing the numerals one through ten. The teacher props a slate near the front of the classroom and writes, “1, 2, 3.” “Those of you who can, copy this. Those of you who can‘t, well, then we will know you can’t!”
Janaki thinks she can do this. The first figure on the board looks like a walking stick, the next an ear, with a dangling earring blowing out in the wind, the last like a bird, tipped sideways to round a corner in flight. She thinks the teacher has been too hasty in making the drawings and does her best to make each figure more realistic and accurate.
If only she could stop the tears that keep blurring the image in front of her, the job would be much simpler. She can’t seem to stop herself from thinking about the calves and cows, who must be feeling lost without her there to instruct and reassure them. And Vani-will she even bother to change her story when no one at all is listening? Worst of all, Muchami is walking home alone. He’ll be leaving any time now, his head heavy with questions he can ask no one. Three tears plink onto her new slate and she wipes them off with her skirt quickly before anyone can see. But when she blinks, swallows and blinks again, the design she worked so hard to produce is also gone, and she has a smear of chalk on her navy blue skirt.
Meanwhile the teacher has given a reading assignment to the second-standards. The third-standard girls have been asked to write out multiplication tables.
“I’m so looking forward to reading Sita’s times table-three days ago she wrote all the figures so small no one but she could make them out. I’m sure they were all absolutely correct,” Miss Mathanghi says in a tone implying the opposite. Her face is grim as concrete.
Sita, already seeing red due to Janaki’s recent triumph, bends to her work with a grimness bordering on the teacher’s own. It’s not the only way she resembles the teacher. Sita has a talent for hurting people, but she has learned a lot in Miss Mathanghi’s classroom.
Miss Mathanghi is making her way back to the first-standard girls. She has a small waist and low hips behind which clings a flat bottom. Her skin is greyish and her shoulders so rounded that her trunklike arms give the impression of emerging more from the front than from the sides of her torso. She has taught these classes for eight years, more than long enough to know that, in this tender phase, she need do little more than look at the first-standards to set them aquiver with fear and self-consciousness. Janaki, though, is a harder nut. She is not, as most of her classmates are, fixed desperately on the teacher, searching her in vain for signs of approval or affection. She is weeping, which is common, but, despite the tears, seems fully absorbed in the scene she is elaborating on her slate.
Janaki’s slate shows a small flock of 3’s, headed by a fantastic bird of prey. She is sitting back from the slate so that her tears drop onto her skirt and don’t interfere.
Miss Mathangi chooses her approach instinctively. “You don’t turn the world, Janaki.”
The little girl sits up, as though the currents running between her brain and spinal cord have suddenly increased in voltage.
“Either you do as you please,” the teacher continues deliberately, “which is to say, the wrong thing, or you do what I have instructed you to do, that is, the same thing as every other girl in this classroom.”
It hadn’t occurred to Janaki to look at what the other girls were doing. Now she looks around. Most of the children have done a passable job. Janaki looks at the brief and unattractive marks on their slates, and the detailed, dramatic tableau on her own. She’s confused. She automatically looks to her sister. She knows, though she doesn’t realize it until she’s already turned her head, that she will see the usual cruel gloat. Even that, however, is reassuringly familiar at the moment.
But then a far more reassuring figure appears. Could it be? Muchami is silhouetted in the doorway. He stands and doesn’t say anything, just moves a little, side to side, to draw attention.
All the girls crane to see him, tipping forward onto the knees of their crossed legs, though not rising. Miss Mathanghi glances at him and asks, “What?”
He holds out his right hand, a string tied into a loop hooked across his palm. At the other end of the string dangles Janaki’s shiny new tiffin box.
“It’s Janaki’s lunch,” he explains gruffly and looks furtively into the classroom, searching for her face.
Janaki is frozen, fixed on him, but her eyes dart to her teacher and back.
“Mmh!” Miss Mathanghi grunts and jerks her head toward the door to indicate Janaki should go take her lunch.
Janaki slowly rises and goes to the door, uncertain of how she should take her lunch from him. Why is he carrying it like that? She holds her left hand out as if to take the string, but he holds the tiffin box up and frowns to indicate she’d better take hold of it. She carries the box to the lunch corner as Sita starts to laugh, and soon the whole classroom is in gales, hysterical from the tension of the classroom.
When Janaki sets the tiffin box down, Sita yells, “Touch the water, touch the water!”
There is a jug of water in the corner by the tiffin boxes, and Janaki tips it with her left hand so that she moistens the fingers of her right, a ceremonial washing of the hand polluted by contact with cooked rice. As she does so, she looks over to Muchami.
Who is not there.
She drops the neck of the jug but catches it by the lip before it falls too far. The girls who see this gasp and then start laughing again as Janaki runs out the door and after Muchami. She throws her arms around his legs and clasps her face to his hip, clinging with the strength of immature fruit to the stem. Muchami pries her off: fruit drops away when it’s ready, but unripe fruit can also be plucked and ripen on its own.
“Oh, Janaki-baby.” He stoops toward her. “Don’t you love school? What did you learn today?”
Janaki doesn’t answer. Her small body strains toward him so that the second his elbows relax, she sticks herself again to his leg.
“Have you had enough for today already?” He knows he probably shouldn’t even be asking, but he, too, had been wondering how he would get through his day without her. “Okay, just today. You can come with me.”