4

I wanted to be alone. The TV address had achieved everything I’d hoped for, but I had no interest in the rain of questions that immediately followed. There were huge things I needed to figure out, and part of me had already guessed that, probably, time was short.

I’ve presented my speech before the cameras as one smooth performance, and at least on the outside — because I, and you, can view it on YouTube, not just on the official news clips but also on several jerky phone recordings made from various angles — it does remain fairly unbroken. But within me I remember vividly the sensations of grappling with so much! For instance, I’d only just begun to understand in Dhanuka’s office, and later verified during my brief chat with Tamal, how this new ‘ability’ to glimpse into minds was activated simply by looking at a person — and also that the glimpse deepened the longer I looked! That was how New Alipore and the address (probably) of Dhanuka’s rendezvous with her lover had come to me, just because I’d had nowhere else to look while she ranted.

And what the news-channel footage of me in front of FMHS won’t reveal, or else people will interpret it as merely the anxiety and hesitation of a first-timer, is the extent to which I was batting away — and trying my hardest to think clearly through — the dozens of fleeting images that assailed me with every face I turned to. Just to give a sense of how disorientating those minutes were, here’s an incomplete list of faces and moments that flashed past, and not in order either, and of course it was impossible for me to keep on speaking and retain any idea of which face had triggered what image.

I saw — and bear in mind these were reporters and camera-people supposedly paying attention to me, their hot story for the morning — a driver leading a young couple he worked for to a new flat he’d heard about from a friend which they might choose to rent. It was on Southern Avenue, past the Menoka cinema turning. I briefly saw the living, pleading body of a man being dragged by one leg along a road, accompanied by a crowd, followed immediately by an interview with a Muslim family who lived in an old haveli, an adjacent stable of which they had converted into a reading room for the neighbourhood to drop in and use. In someone else’s mind I walked behind a woman up a grassy slope, from where we had a view of an entire town — perhaps in Uttarakhand or Himachal(?) — just as the sun was setting. In a hotel room someone was very annoyed at his cameraman colleague for not having got on with his packing: what if there was traffic on the way to the airport? A seal showed up at one point, doing somersaults in some aquarium abroad, the beauty of which was eclipsed by a man yelling at a petrol-station attendant somewhere very much in India that he’d put the wrong engine oil into his fancy foreign car. And finally, look who it is — the Prime Minister himself, thundering at a large rally that the collapse of the flyover in Calcutta is a message from God to save Bengal from its current government.

And that assortment is a mere sample drawn from what I can still recall, though hopefully enough to demonstrate why addressing the cameras had felt even more like walking on a tightrope, and why afterwards I was unable to take questions from sheer tiredness. I had no control yet over what was happening to me; I lacked any ability to filter what I saw. But of course these TV guys weren’t going to politely fade away and leave me alone just because I’d announced an end to proceedings; and if I stayed there any longer I would either have a very public meltdown (which would have been a gift to the Jalans, who’d insisted on my unfitness to be any kind of counsellor) or start babbling what I was seeing and freak everyone out, and then be forced to explain and give away my new secret before I’d had a chance to understand most of it myself.

My resignation came in handy right then. I suddenly found myself saying to the reporters that since I was not returning to FMHS, I’d better collect my things from my locker and the staff room. Of course there was nothing urgent that needed picking up: it was merely a pretext to re-enter the school compound so I could give them the slip through that side gate. And I had no intention of going to the staff room either, because I could see the same chaos of facing an assembled crowd overwhelming me once more.

The superbly helpful Tamal, along with his main-gate colleagues Kamraan and Mitrada, did a great job of closing the gate behind us as Dhanuka and I walked towards the office entrance, Dhanuka so subdued and stunned that she would probably have offered me a raise if I’d sprung it upon her right then. We were strolling along like two old friends past the parents’ shelter when I broke into her stupor to say that in fact I was off to the side gate because I had stuff to do. If my things weren’t bothering anyone, I’d pick them up later.

I noticed Sheela walking towards us from the office steps but signed to her with a raised arm to remain where she was. Even from this distance, I could picture her pouring Dhanuka a long neat lime-flavoured vodka. This was no mind-read, by the way, rather an open secret among the staff: the second cupboard on the right-hand side of Dhanuka’s office contained a bar-fridge and an array of soothing spirits.

‘And if my things are in the way, feel free to put them in the second bedroom of the New Alipore flat. I’m not far from there and can pick them up one Saturday afternoon.’ It was absolutely irresistible to say that, once the image had come to me.

‘Dhanuka, I’m never returning. I have hated working for you, although the students and some other colleagues have made it all worthwhile. Left to myself, you fail my ten-minute test as a human being, which is that I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes on a plane seated next to you. But even you have found happiness with someone and, amazingly, make them happy as well, and far be it from me to disrupt that, which is why I want my dues sorted out and transferred to my account with minimum fuss by the end of the week. You were going to suspend me anyway, so from my perspective the question of a notice period does not arise. And any kind of trouble at all, any leaks to the press or bureaucratic hold-up that I can trace back to you, I’m going to go straight to the media and leave you in shreds. You know me, seditious bitch that I am, so believe my threats! Next time I’ll show absolutely no mercy for the stunning quality of hypocrite that you are, always hitting us over the head at assembly about those fucking “friends of the school” who seem to have nothing else to do with their pathetic lives but phone you to report where they have seen FMHS girls in uniform “letting down” the school’s reputation, all the while yourself fucking a married guy. Jesus, Dhanuka, and you just suspended me for peddling filth!

‘Goodbye for good, which are the sweetest words I’ve spoken in a long time, and I didn’t know even at breakfast today that I would be uttering them before morning recess! We both never want to see each other again, right, which is why hands off all my friends or any kids who act as though they like me. I’ll stay in touch with all of them, and if you do see me again, I promise you that will be your last day at FMHS.’

And with that I stormed off, feeling like Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman running unassailably through some French battlefield. Now that’s an outfit Tamal would like to imagine me in.

There was another reason for the exhilaration-to-the-point-of-recklessness that I hope is coming through in the putting down of my words to Dhanuka (which are not some Walter Mitty fantasy, I promise). I’d just had my brightest flash of the morning while walking towards the office, and it wasn’t from peering into anyone else’s mind. Some incredible connections had formed in my head, perhaps simultaneously, or else following rapidly from one another, and suddenly I couldn’t stop dishing it out to Dhanuka at the same time as I desperately wanted to get out of there because there was someone I urgently needed to see.

Here’s what I had just realised — that Arati, Shivani and I were the same. Not in what had happened to each of us, of course, but in the strangeness of what we were experiencing.

The strangeness, and the truth!