new school would save me, I was wrong.
Aunty Shilpa had told me that in India, white symbolized purity, innocence, and goodness. And that, I was told, was why our school monitor wore a white sari to school every day. But to me, she was anything but.
The monitor was a tall, thin woman with bony hands and a crooked nose, who answered to no one, other than the principal himself. Her face reminded me of a witch in one of my old storybooks, the one who almost had Hansel and Gretel for supper. She ran the school like an army boot camp. Even our teachers feared her.
On my first day, I followed Preeti to the schoolyard where the teachers and students were lining up in rows. On a silent cue from the monitor in front, everyone took a rigid pose and began to sing the national anthem, followed by what I later learned was the school’s official song.
The girls’ youthful voices rose in unison as they sang a cappella in harmony, the sound pleasantly bouncing off the school walls. I stood with my back straight and arms glued to my sides. I didn’t know the words to either song, so I put a serious look on my face like a soldier at attention.
When the singing ended, an uneasy quiet fell over the school grounds.
We must have been a hundred girls and teachers, but no one said a word. A few daringly shuffled their feet. Others glanced around anxiously. How strange it was to stand in silence, as the India I was beginning to know was notoriously noisy, a place where everything was declared at the highest volume, clamoring for the world to hear.
The girls stood quietly in their rows, stiff as the queen’s guards I’d seen on TV. Each skirt pleat had been ironed into knife edges. Each shirt had been perfectly pressed. Everyone had the same hairstyle, separated in the middle, done up in plaits, and kept in place with coconut oil, which I could smell all around me.
In contrast to the whitewashed military rows of the students, the teachers’ line in front was a dazzling rainbow of multicolor and sequins. While these new teachers of mine were striking, they were nothing like the larger-than-life women of the Uhuru market in Tanzania.
My teachers looked more like my mother—skinnier and shorter and more subdued. Their dresses weren’t made of the bold kanga of the savannahs but of satin-soft fabric from Asia. Draped in scarves and saris that flowed to their toes, these teachers sashayed in their rows, golden nose rings glittering in the sun. I watched them in rapture, dreaming of the day I’d get to dress like that.
The school monitor was walking down each row of students, stopping to inspect a pleat, a shirt collar, a hair plait. If anything was amiss, she rapped the girl’s knuckles with a long steel ruler, while the rest of the girls winced, thanking their stars she hadn’t picked on them.
She noticed me halfway through my row. Ignoring the other girls in line, she marched toward me, holding her steel ruler up in the air like a samurai sword. She stopped in front of me with a snort that echoed off the school walls. My heart started to beat fast and my palms began to sweat.
What does she want with me?
The other girls stood silently, eyes straight ahead. The monitor’s beady eyes looked me up and down and stopped to give a penetrating look at my hair, which I’d done up exactly like every other girl in school that day. Her gaze went down to my shirt. I was wearing one of Preeti’s old uniforms. Though Aunty Shilpa had ironed it the night before, it had become wrinkled from squeezing into and out of a crowded bus that morning, but Preeti had helped me get most of the creases out by hand.
The monitor’s eyes ran down my legs, widening as they settled on my feet. I had on my precious red-heeled sandals. These were the last things my parents had bought me and after all I’d gone through, they were what kept me grounded, what linked me to my former life. I only took them off to get into bed at night.
The school monitor pointed at my hands and beckoned me to give them to her. With a feeling of dread, I opened my palms. I heard the steel ruler hit before I felt the cruel sting. She hit me not once, not twice, but seven times.
Once the parade inspection was over, the girls got into small groups and wandered toward their classes, talking in muted tones. Preeti ran toward me and gave a gentle squeeze on my arm.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded, trying to hold back tears. The humiliation in my heart hurt far more than my throbbing hands.
“I’m so sorry,” Preeti whispered. “Should have checked your shoes. Taking care of you is my duty. This is my fault.”
I tried a weak smile and shook my head. “No, it’s fine,” I croaked. This had been my doing, not hers. And I’d paid the price.
The school bell rang. Preeti squeezed my arm quickly again before running off to her classroom. I knew she couldn’t be late. I couldn’t either. I turned around and walked to my classroom alone, my face flushed.
That was my first day.
More often than not, I found myself alone in the back of the classroom during lunch. Preeti tried to get me to join her during breaks, but I couldn’t stand the whispering of the others. My cousin, a year older than I, had been coming to this school since grade one. She was also a popular girl here. Her hair was shiny, and blacker than midnight. Her kohl-lined eyes were large and round, and the dimple on her cheek was as endearing as her nature.
Preeti knew what to say and do, when to say and do it, and to whom. And she was always reminding me: “Put that away, good girls shouldn’t eat in public.” “Stop skipping on the sidewalk. Girls don’t do that.” “That skirt’s too short. You can’t go out like that.” “Remember, I told you not to look at strange men. They’ll think you like them.”
There were so many mind-numbing rules, I couldn’t remember them all. Next to the poised and cultured Preeti, I was a bumbling, odd curiosity—strange and alien, like the ugly duckling, but one that would never metamorphose into something better.
Everyone called me “the foreign girl,” even the teachers. I thought I’d finally fit in, now that I was in India. I looked like everyone else around me, unlike at the international schools of Africa, but whenever I approached a girl to chat, others would stare and whisper, and some would point like I had chickenpox or something.
It didn’t help that the school monitor made me her primary target.
I left my red sandals behind and wore an old pair of white canvas shoes that belonged to Preeti after that first day, but she gave me no slack. If it wasn’t my shoes, it was my hair. If it wasn’t my hair, it was because I’d reverted to English, which happened whenever she came close.
My brain stopped working when I got frightened, and the only language I could articulate was the one I’d grown up with. But as far as it concerned her, I was disobedient, so the steel ruler came out again and again.
There was no place to hide, not even a quiet library like at my old international schools.
There was one dusty shelf in a dark corner of my classroom, so during breaks, I’d sit on the floor and go through the books, teaching myself to read in languages I hadn’t known existed a year ago. Since my father’s language was Konkani and my mother’s was Sinhalese, English was their common lingo. While I knew a few words of Konkani and Tamil and could understand simple sentences, I struggled in class. I wished I’d asked my parents to teach me their languages. I wished they were with me. I missed them badly. I even missed my old school.
But even those colossal African elephants couldn’t drag me back to my past.