the other servant families in their huts but on a mat in a tiny lean-to occupied by Jyoti-ma, the old widow in charge of collecting and washing all the students’ and teachers’ used sanitary cloths. Jyoti-ma snored, groaned, and coughed in her sleep, but I didn’t mind; it made me feel safe on dark nights.
Jyoti-ma was able to kill mice without even needing a candle to see them. She was also the one who helped me on the morning I awoke to find blood on my thighs. I was twelve, but with no understanding at all of what was happening. Jyoti-ma taught me how to tie long cloths around my middle and gave me an old bucket that I coulduse for soaking them. Of course I washed the cloths myself, as I did my dress, with water gathered from the courtyard pump.
I had shot up like bamboo just before my first bleeding, and after that, my breasts kept growing. My blue dress that once grazed my calves had become indecently short in length and tight across the chest. When the male staff began teasing me about it, Miss Rachael replaced the blue dress with a gray one from the charity collection. I was glad, because I wanted to look respectable for the one job at Lockwood I thoroughly enjoyed: moving the punkah in Miss Claire Richmond’s classroom.
I had become a fan puller whenever the electrical generator at Lockwood broke down. The first time the electric fans stopped and lights went dark, Miss Rachael shouted for me to go into Miss Richmond’s classroom. Her room was part of the oldest section of the building, with wooden fan blades attached all the way across the ceiling. These blades shifted back and forth, moved by the power of a servant sitting in the back with a cord tied to her foot. I enjoyed being in the back of the room, lazily moving my foot back and forth and observing pretty Miss Richmond, who gave her students real smiles and spoke in an accent as rich as her orange-gold hair.
The first six months I was utterly confused about the meaning of her speech. But as time went on, her vocabulary flowed into my brain without need for translation, and with my finger touching my dress, I traced the same words she wrote on the blackboard. And then I was reading: first the books for the littlest ones and then the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling, followed by Treasure Island and A Little Princess. Miss Richmond maintained a side shelf for borrowing what she termed pleasure reading ; almost every evening I sneaked one of these to the lean-to and brought it back in the morning before classes had begun. When I came across an unknown word, I memorized its spelling and investigated later in Miss Richmond’s Oxford English Dictionary . As I continued to study, I felt secretly rich: for each word I learned was something that could never be taken away.
I wanted to speak English, too. The Irish and English and Australians and Anglo-Indians all spoke slightly different-sounding variations of it; with so much confusion, I chose to pattern my English after Miss Richmond, the only English person I admired. In the back of her room, I whispered along with her; when I visited Abbas, who was cleaning and polishing the tongas in the evening, I repeated those phrases more loudly. He encouraged me with praise and small gifts, such as pencils and paper. However, he warned me to practice where the other servants would not see or overhear, for they could become jealous. As a result, after three long years at Lockwood, I could speak and read English. Yet very few knew.
I had grown accustomed to an almost-invisible existence until the day that changed everything. It was at the end of morning lessons in late spring of 1934, and although the electric generator had begun working again, I’d lingered in my fan-pulling corner to hear a few more sentences from A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Then Miss Richmond raised a discussion about whether young women living in a crowded school might like occasional solitude. If I had been one of her students, I
Jyoti-ma was able to kill mice without even needing a candle to see them. She was also the one who helped me on the morning I awoke to find blood on my thighs. I was twelve, but with no understanding at all of what was happening. Jyoti-ma taught me how to tie long cloths around my middle and gave me an old bucket that I coulduse for soaking them. Of course I washed the cloths myself, as I did my dress, with water gathered from the courtyard pump.
I had shot up like bamboo just before my first bleeding, and after that, my breasts kept growing. My blue dress that once grazed my calves had become indecently short in length and tight across the chest. When the male staff began teasing me about it, Miss Rachael replaced the blue dress with a gray one from the charity collection. I was glad, because I wanted to look respectable for the one job at Lockwood I thoroughly enjoyed: moving the punkah in Miss Claire Richmond’s classroom.
I had become a fan puller whenever the electrical generator at Lockwood broke down. The first time the electric fans stopped and lights went dark, Miss Rachael shouted for me to go into Miss Richmond’s classroom. Her room was part of the oldest section of the building, with wooden fan blades attached all the way across the ceiling. These blades shifted back and forth, moved by the power of a servant sitting in the back with a cord tied to her foot. I enjoyed being in the back of the room, lazily moving my foot back and forth and observing pretty Miss Richmond, who gave her students real smiles and spoke in an accent as rich as her orange-gold hair.
The first six months I was utterly confused about the meaning of her speech. But as time went on, her vocabulary flowed into my brain without need for translation, and with my finger touching my dress, I traced the same words she wrote on the blackboard. And then I was reading: first the books for the littlest ones and then the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling, followed by Treasure Island and A Little Princess. Miss Richmond maintained a side shelf for borrowing what she termed pleasure reading ; almost every evening I sneaked one of these to the lean-to and brought it back in the morning before classes had begun. When I came across an unknown word, I memorized its spelling and investigated later in Miss Richmond’s Oxford English Dictionary . As I continued to study, I felt secretly rich: for each word I learned was something that could never be taken away.
I wanted to speak English, too. The Irish and English and Australians and Anglo-Indians all spoke slightly different-sounding variations of it; with so much confusion, I chose to pattern my English after Miss Richmond, the only English person I admired. In the back of her room, I whispered along with her; when I visited Abbas, who was cleaning and polishing the tongas in the evening, I repeated those phrases more loudly. He encouraged me with praise and small gifts, such as pencils and paper. However, he warned me to practice where the other servants would not see or overhear, for they could become jealous. As a result, after three long years at Lockwood, I could speak and read English. Yet very few knew.
I had grown accustomed to an almost-invisible existence until the day that changed everything. It was at the end of morning lessons in late spring of 1934, and although the electric generator had begun working again, I’d lingered in my fan-pulling corner to hear a few more sentences from A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Then Miss Richmond raised a discussion about whether young women living in a crowded school might like occasional solitude. If I had been one of her students, I
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