Miss Timmins' School for Girls

Miss Timmins' School for Girls

High Upon the Mountains
In 1974, just three weeks before my twenty-first birthday,
I left my family and traveled halfway across India to teach
English and literature at Miss Timmins’ School for Girls. The
school was in Panchgani, an eight-hour drive from Bombay in
those days.
My father and I joined the school party at Poona Station.
Two train carriages carrying the banners Miss Timmins’ School
for Girls Traveling Party had departed at dawn from Bombay and
deposited the girls at Poona Station by noon. We had been instructed
to meet them in the First Class Ladies’ Waiting Room,
where we found the girls in blue-checked dresses eating sandwiches
and boiled eggs from brown paper bags. Their dresses
were flared from the waist, like umbrellas. Bananas were being
passed around. We were to go the rest of the way up the mountains
by road. After lunch, the girls were lined up and stuffed
into three red and yellow buses. Baba and I were told to get
into the middle bus by a dark lady in a white sari, no doubt a
teacher.
Baba was the only male on the bus. We sat apart, he and I,
like lepers on the last, bumpy bench. The girls looked back curiously
from time to time. The bus had a sullen air as it grunted
and groaned up the foothills outside Poona. Some girls were
sniffling. They seemed to be feeling as rough and as raw as I
was.
As we went deeper and higher into the mountains, up the
narrow winding road, the sunlight became slanted, and the air
thin and clean. The girls revived and started singing. Baba and
I sat quiet and erect, I near the window. Eventually the girls
swung into their school song.
High upon the mountains
Away from city clamor
By graceful trees surrounded
There stands our own dear school
On the bench beside us sat two sisters with short brown
hair, twins I thought. They sang loudly and soulfully, and completely
out of tune. Baba looked at me and we exchanged a brief
smile. We were both thinking of Ayi.
We revel in the leisure
The studies, sports, and fun
The beauty of the hillside
The breezes, rain, and sun
I knew the words by heart. I had spent a large part of that
summer in my room with the school prospectus, imagining
myself in its blurred black-and-white photos.

MISS TIMMINS' SCHOOL FOR GIRLS. Copyright © 2011 by Nayana Currimbhoy. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.