Black British (11 page)

While a nun was berating Anna, Lily amused herself by pulling Munju's plaits or generally clowning around, doing anything to break the tension in the air. It soon became the norm. As soon as a nun singled Anna out, she immediately looked towards Lily and included her in degrading reprimands. To cope Anna and Lily took to entertaining themselves by imitating nuns and making rude jokes about the Convent. Sometimes Peggy and I were included in the performance.

“Vhy are you so vicked vomen?” Anna thought she had a credible German accent, while she stood over us and wagged her forefinger or shook her fist.

Lily drew inspiration from
Little Orphan Annie
. Cowering exaggeratedly, she replied in a sham American gangster tone, “Awww Sister, I'm just a pore orfan,” adding a noise usually associated with what in the vernacular is called taking a dump.

Of course we laughed. Uproariously, enjoying behaviour that was never allowed elsewhere. Impressed by our own wit inured us somewhat to the nuns' verbal abuse. Unfortunately, to our detriment, we also learnt to disrespect them, so how were we to respect what they were teaching us?

Lily's teary outburst that evening was uncharacteristic for her so my parents knew they needed to address the issue.

“There's no dignity in being poor,” said my father. “Poor people have no power, they get pushed around and have no option but to accept it. However, Anna must stick with her education because in the long run it will benefit her. And, she must be allowed her pride. So please don't ask her to cry. You wouldn't like it if someone reduced you to tears on a regular basis.”

To Anna's great credit she never cowered in front of the nuns. She may have lost colour but she never lost stature, even when she was ridiculed for things well beyond her control. Suniti and some of the other girls had timid, worried eyes that appeared to expect, almost invite, rebuke and the nuns were diligent in accepting the invitation. Anna held herself tall.

“The school uniform is black lace-up shoes and white socks. N-o, n-o- n-o, n-o not…those things.” Outrage almost robbed Wilfred of coherent speech. But not of volume and freezing contempt. “Are you that stupid that you don't know, or are you just disobedient?” When Anna failed to reply she added with fearsome force, “Answer me please. Or are you rude as well?”

But how could Anna tell her that she didn't
have
a pair of school shoes anymore, that her shoes had fallen apart so badly no amount of mending with cardboard would help any further. Instead she had “borrowed” shoes from her mother. These were already a snug fit; socks would have made them unbearably tight. Besides, her only pair of socks needed washing but the previous day the municipal water supply that was rationed for most people had been cut off so the only water available had to be saved for the basics of life – drinking and cooking – not squandered on washing clothes.

How could Anna publicise her family's living conditions and display her shameful poverty for all the world to see?

So what did Lily do?

After morning recess, she and Anna appeared in class with one real sock, one lace-up shoe each and one pseudo sock painted on with chalk powder. While mass hilarity from classmates was gratifying, the nuns in their imperious way were not amused.

Every December I was treated to a crescendo, “The uniform is white socks, White socks, WHITE socks. Not,” with a curl of the upper lip, “grey with a green stripe.”

I refused to make eye contact while I ensured something totally different occupied my mind.

Didn't the silly woman know it's winter and cold?

Everyone knew (but apparently not the nuns) that the only affordable white wool available in Kanpur at that time was baby wool – not the four ply required for socks. Besides, since my mother knitted many socks she bought army-grey wool because it was the only one available in bulk. Hence grey socks. The colour stripe was to differentiate between which was whose.

Simple! Really! This time I didn't care if a note was sent to my parents. I was happy to let the adults fight it out among themselves.

Anna didn't have the luxury of choosing her clothes. She had to make do with what she was given, mostly other people's, sometime our, castoffs. If that worried her, she never let it show. She just continued to accept the dressing downs with apparent meekness, then make fun of the nuns later, sometimes quite openly. She exhibited an obstinate recklessness, an almost desperate abandon, behaviour that's sometimes found in powerless people who are bullied by the more powerful all their lives. It was almost as though she wanted the nuns to know she was laughing at them behind their collective backs in order to regain some control, and therefore status, in her own life.

Anna must have been extraordinarily clever. What I learnt by industry and application she appeared to acquire almost by intuition. When I struggled with idiotic mathematical concepts, she drew them in with the air she breathed. History came alive when she related events to novels we'd read, films we'd seen, concerts we performed.

She went on to study education at a tertiary level and taught secondary school science for seven years, keeping her distance from Convent institutions. During that time she saved enough money, and with no ambitions towards upward mobility, supported herself through medical school. She never married, never had children, claiming she had a profession to nurture. But I often speculate about the invisible mental scars she must have carried and wonder if she trusted herself to be a caring parent, given the role models that had paraded before her all her school life.

The nuns, of course, claimed Anna's achievements for their own, often touting with pride her rags-to-riches story as though their impact on her school life was the sole reason for her success. They claimed to have inspired in her the grim determination required to overcome adversity.

What they didn't do, what no one wanted to do, was ask a vital question. Not a family of raucous questions where the truth is obscured by noisy rhetoric. Not questions like what, when, which and how. But the sole, singular, solitary question: “why”.

Why did the nuns have to compound Anna's existing hardships with abusive and insulting behaviour? Privations must be easier to bear when they are God-made, without the added burden of human malicious intent. If Anna had been blind, deaf or missing another of her functions, the issue would have been between her and a tenuous concept – her God. But nasty human intervention that adds to already harsh conditions leaves painful scars on the psyche. The more powerless a person the more painful the scar. Scars that are difficult to obliterate, that live on in an obscure corner of a mind, ready to leap to the forefront whenever vulnerability raises its head.

The nuns appeared to live in blissful ignorance of the wounds left behind on Anna and, vicariously, on Lorraine, Lily and me, and perhaps many others.

Sanjeeva Verma, another one in the nuns' firing line, had a short, dumpy frame with a pale, flattish face, snub nose and lips that were so thin they were almost nonexistent. She also had a defensive manner. Where a confident person might add
How are you?
to a salutation, Sanjeeva had the unfortunate habit of attaching “I haven't done anything…” whenever a nun greeted her. She'd shrink into herself to be as small as possible and escape notice.

She was so cowed by the nuns' constant, rancid accusations that no amount of counselling against this frightened response had any effect. Though she could see the logic of a non-provocative stance, when the time arrived her nerve and good sense failed and she was back to square one.

Of course, that was like a red rag to a bull for many of the nuns, most of whom screamed, “A guilty conscience! You've got a guilty conscience!” It was beyond their ability to see that their repeated allegations against her whenever anything was deemed to be wrong, whether the fault lay with her or not, had conditioned Sanjeeva to an expectation of blame. Immediate defence became her reflex action.

I never knew why the nuns chose to vent their spleen on Sanjeeva. She was unattractive in general appearance but so what? Few of us resemble the Mona Lisa.

Perhaps she had inadvertently upset a senior nun and all the others felt they had to “join the gang” and support bullying behaviour. Maybe their own survival depended on espousing groupthink while they were confined within the convent walls. It takes courage to stand up to a crown; individual opinions can be too dangerous.

Or was it simply a blatant abuse of power? Were they so insignificant, so unnoticed in their earlier lives that the first taste of power – the power to control other's lives – drove out all other human emotions, including compassion and empathy?

Sanjeeva appeared to hero-worship me. She followed me around, cleaned my desk without being asked, laughed uproariously at my unfunny jokes and generally championed me.

Being totally unequal to the task of standing up for herself, she admired my ability to answer back. Lacking the maturity to understand her own feelings and the language to articulate them, she showed her appreciation of my behaviour the only way she knew how, in gentler, more subtle ways.

Like many others, she also recognised that while the nuns were occupied with me they left her alone. My being in hot water was her reprieve.

A few of the nuns showed infinite patience. It was never noted as incongruous that German nuns were teaching Indian girls to speak and write grammatically correct English.

“The pronunciation is gov'ment not gov-er-ment,” said Sister Ignatius to Amita. “Try saying it with the letters e, r and n silent.”

“Gov-er-ment,” said Amita obediently, happily, delighted at her accomplishment.

“No, dear!” corrected Sister Ignatius, “Gov'ment. Say gov, gov, gov,” and she snapped her fingers in rhythm.

“Gov, gov, gov,” came the smiling response, accompanied by spectacularly uncoordinated hand gestures.

“Good! Good. You
are
clever. Now say “ment, ment, ment.” More finger snapping.

“Ment. Ment. Ment.”

“That's good. Really good. Now say the whole word. Government.”

“Gov-er-ment.”

It didn't matter what Sister Ignatius tried, she never managed to convince some of the Indian girls that the English language included the absurd concept of silent letters.

“Why have a letter if it's not pronounced. It's pointless. If I were a letter
I'd
refuse to be silent,” was my opinion.

“It's a pity you're never silent,” came the acid rejoinder that wasn't praise.

Silent letters are futile. They serve no purpose other than to makes a language difficult to master. It must be an elite innovation, simply another tool to persuade oneself of one's superiority.

The other word that came under fire was “film”.

“It's pronounced ‘film. F-i-l-m.' Not ‘filum'. There is no ‘u' in the word.”

Somehow Ignatius never lost her cool. She persevered with a dogged determination.

“What does it matter?” I was irritated beyond words. “We all know what she means so why does it matter?”

“If you speak well you will always be able to hold your head high. People will respect you. Doors will open.” And since Ignatius sincerely believed this dictum she persisted in her endeavours to promote correct pronunciation, albeit with a German flavour.

These occasional bouts of leniency did little to mitigate mental scars, though my sisters and I got off lightly. We had the security of a comfortable, supportive home to cushion us from the worst of blows. However, witnessing regular discriminating and aggressive, sometimes passive-aggressive, behaviour left its own mark on us.

As the meal progressed that evening, my father continued, “All three of you have the advantages of a privileged background. You live in a big house that your family has lived in for generations. That in itself gives you confidence and a high sense of entitlement. You see respect as a birthright. Not everyone is so lucky.”

I stopped listening. I'd heard the
privileged so be thankful
speech so many times I could recite it. Besides, the atmosphere was abruptly burdened with what I knew Lorraine and Lily were thinking as silence replaced words that were too hard to say. We knew the fundamentals that made up who we were, our language, culture, religion, were incompatible with the emerging society that was the new India. From listening to conversation between our parents we knew the economic progress of the nation didn't match the population so there were not enough jobs for everyone. We also knew the time would come when dwindling fortunes would prevent us from maintaining our home, that forcible takeovers and imminent land ceiling laws would grind us into inconceivable poverty. Given the hostility of the local people our vulnerability was unimaginable. We knew the time was near when we'd have to leave Kanpur and our home that we loved so much.

It was another one of those things that was implied, never verbalised so never questioned or understood. But it hung around on the fringes of our minds, ever-present, like dust in a dark corner. Sometimes, like that evening, it spread its threatening tentacles like a dark monsoon cloud and overshadowed every thought, every word and every deed.

PART III

Christmas Time