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Book review: 'Miss Timmins' School for Girls'

Nayana Currimbhoy’s murder mystery is set in the rock ‘n’ roll, drug-snorting, free lovemaking 1970s, in Panchgani.

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Book: Miss Timmins' School for Girls
Nayana Currimbhoy
HarperCollins
506 pages
Rs399

If the title of the book makes you expect an Indian version of an Enid Blyton boarding school story, banish the thought, for Nayana Currimbhoy’s murder mystery is set in the rock ‘n’ roll, drug-snorting, free lovemaking ’70s, in Panchgani, a hill station influenced by the liberated lifestyle of neigbouring Bombay, and a very far cry from the innocence of Blyton’s world.

Charulata Apte leaves the protected cocoon of her parents’ home, in Indore, to join Miss Timmin’s School for Girls, in Panchgani, as an English teacher. The not-yet-21 Charu would have preferred being “a Bombay girl, with bell-bottom pants and foreign perfume floating in the breeze behind her” but her parents choose the cloistered Timmins’ school, so she can be “tethered” and “tended”.

But the conservatively brought up Charu gets neither tethered nor tended to. Rather, she plunges into a far wilder life than one of bell-bottoms and perfume. In no time, she is drawn into a passionate lesbian relationship with an English girl born of a missionary mother, and becomes one of a hashish-smoking gang. Soon after, she loses her virginity to one of the latter in an intensely physical relationship.

Purportedly, the book is about the death of the English girl, and the genre is that of a detective novel, with all the typical features (suspects, red herrings, investigation et al) which don’t quite hold together, as the momentum slackens after a point and the incidents get repetitive. But the characters that populate the story make for interesting reading. Whether it is the students hailing from complex backgrounds, and growing up in the liberated ’70s, or the dying breed of Anglo-Indian teachers, or the Rolling Stones-LSD-tripping youth, or the gaggle of fat Maharashtrian aunts — Currimbhoy has a sharp, humorous pen that brings alive the personae in a recognisable manner.

Life at boarding school is described as it really is, shorn of the pranks and fun that characterise Blyton’s stories. “Beneath the veneer of merriment and camaraderie, there was a layer of sadness in the school. An orphaned feeling in the pit of the stomachs. We had been snatched from the bosom of our families and left on this hilltop with no one to sing us to sleep or hear our frightened dreams ...Ramona had been a bed-wetter. I remember her being hit on the head by Miss Barnabas...” This is a down-to-earth depiction of life in a boarding school, lice and all!

The generation that went to school after the British left India will remember with warmth, and perhaps amusement, the Anglo Indians who hadn’t migrated to Canada and Australia. Matrons, nurses, teachers who were the bulwark of missionary schools in those days…

“There were four Anglo-Indian staff members…all descendants of British railway clerks who had married Indians many generations ago, and were proud of their blood. Anglo Indians married each other…and identified with the whites, not the Indians,” records Currimbhoy, who studied in an all-girls boarding school herself, and has clearly drawn greatly from her personal experience in fleshing out her story.

So, as a chronicle of the times, Miss Timmins’ School For Girls is engrossing; but as a murder-mystery, it doesn’t quite hold your attention.

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