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When the bell rang to mark the end of the class,
the be-fuddled teacher shut her book and fled the room before we
could even rise to wish her good day. We looked at each other and
nodded with satisfaction. Another successful class.

Two days later, we had another surprise waiting
for Mrs Pereira. She opened the classroom door to walk into a room
that had been mysteriously rearranged. We had moved the long,
vertical rows of desks to the back of the classroom and reconfigured
them so that all our desks were lined up horizontally in three long
rows. The ceiling fan spun madly over a room that was three-fourths
empty. And here was our tour de force—we had attached three
cloth sling bags to the ceiling fan, so that when it was on maximum
speed, as it was then, the bags whirled around like demons, the
mirror work on the green bag flashing in the noonday sun.

Mrs Pereira took in the rearranged furniture, the
almost empty classroom, with a deadpan expression on her face. But
she flinched involuntarily at the dangerously spinning bags, as if
they were a guillotine that would behead her. We giggled, and poked
each other in the ribs waiting for her to acknowledge our handiwork
or at least, to turn off the fan.

Instead, she moved her desk a few inches so that
it was away from the flapping schoolbags, flipped open the textbook
and buried her head in it. Chapter five, she intoned in a flat voice.

Anita and I looked at each other, crushed. The
moving of the desks was her idea, while the ceiling fan was mine. But
given Mrs Pereira's deflating reaction, neither idea seemed
particularly brilliant. I felt an involuntary, grudging admiration
for our teacher. And immediately vowed to come up with a trick for
the next day that would elicit more of a reaction.

Now, someone shuts the door to the classroom,
while another girl volunteers to stand guard to make sure there are
no teachers nearby. The rest of us stand in a circle around Anita,
who unscrews the cap on the ink bottle with a flourish and holds the
bottle up to her lips. The rest of us wince. ‘Anita, don't,
men,' someone says. ‘What if it's poisonous or
something?'

But Anita's cheeks are flushed and she has
that telltale gleam in her eye that tells us her mind is made up.
‘Didn't you pay attention in class today, girls?'
she says in a high-pitched, prim voice, wagging her finger at us just
like Mrs Pinto does. ‘Ink is made out of fish oil. And that is
good for you.' And before we can stop her, she tips back her
head and downs a third of the ink. She gags a bit but keeps drinking.

Watching her, I am caught between two
contradictory thoughts. On the one hand, I am seized with admiration
for Anita. On the other, I know that I will have to figure out a way
to outdo her to seize back the title of Mad Parsi.

But the thing that seals my admiration and
affection for Anita is what she does next. She tips her head again
and drinks some more. And then, she smacks her lips. That smacking of
the lips is what makes us break the dumbfounded, worried silence that
has gripped us and burst into cheers.

Anita grins. Her teeth are blue.

I am at a birthday party for my friend Diana, one
of the most popular girls in school. Bone-thin but wiry, she is, in
my mother's admiring phrase, an ‘all-rounder'—a
good student and a competitive athlete. The nuns and teachers adore
Diana because not only is she bright and intelligent, she is polite
and well-mannered. Also, she comes from Parsi royalty—her
father is a prominent doctor and hails from a family known for their
sophistication and cultured ways. So I know it is a privilege to be
invited to a birthday party for Diana.

The house is large with high ceilings and
cream-coloured walls. It is the kind of house that makes me want to
lower my voice when I speak. This house, these people are different
from my house and my family in ways that I can sense but not
articulate. Diana's mother is a soft-spoken, cultured woman who
is doing her best to entertain the boisterous group of sixth-graders
at her home. We play a variety of games like Charades and then it is
time to eat. Diana's mom turns to us. ‘Will some of you
go into the next room and carry out a few chairs? We need some extra
ones.' I immediately volunteer to help and follow two other
girls into the next room where Diana's older sister is sitting
cross-legged on the floor with some of her friends. As always, they
ignore us. A record is spinning on the player. I listen to the song
but it sounds totally unmusical to me and I don't understand
any of the words. I have lifted a chair and am carrying it out of the
room when I hear Diana's sister say, ‘I can't get
over this song even though I've heard it a million times. Just
listen to the lyrics. They're like a poem. I tell you, this is
the song by which the ‘sixties will be remembered.'

‘What's it called?' one of the
older girls asks.

Diana's sister sounds incredulous. ‘You
mean you don't know
The Boxer
?' she cries. ‘But
this song is going to be a rock classic, I tell you.'

I have no idea what they're talking about.
But the hair on my arm stands up and I am filled with a rush of
excitement.

Where I come from, nobody ever talks this way
about music.

Where I come from, a song is something to be
whistled along with and music is an impractical luxury, like flowers
and art and museums. Nobody I know has ever asked me to listen to the
words of a song. I love what Diana's sister has said, the
self-importance in her voice, the confidence in her tone, the way the
others nod solemnly, as if they're all part of a secret tribe.
Suddenly, I want nothing to do with the silly, childish girls who are
wolfing down chicken sandwiches all around me. I want to let myself
back into the other room and join the holy circle of the older girls,
I want to listen again to that song as intently as they are, want to
understand what the mumbling voice of the singer is saying, want to
be grown up enough and smart enough to say wonderful, inexplicable,
glamorous lines like, ‘This is the song by which the ‘sixties
will be remembered.'

But I am stuck with the chicken sandwiches girls.
I do not have the confidence to rise from the table and ask to be let
into another circle. Also, I know that like most older sisters,
Diana's older sister won't give me the time of the day. A
slow, sad feeling sweeps over me. Just as Miss D'Silva's
words had parted the curtains for me for an instant and provided me
with the glimpse of some other, wondrously complicated world, so have
Diana's sister's words. But then the curtain has closed
again, banishing me as always to the world of giggling schoolgirls
who sang
Born Free
and
A Spoonful of Sugar
, who said
inane, predictable things instead of inexplicable, outrageous
declarations that made my hair stand up in excitement.

A sour feeling of longing and loss lodges in my
stomach, so that I turn away from my half-eaten sandwich. ‘Are
you all right, Thrity?' Diana's mother asks and I nod my
head mutely, trying to not let my misery show.

I am different from these giggling girls at the
table. I know this now. There is another world out there, a world
where perhaps there's a corner for misfits like me. But how to
gain entry into that world is a mystery bigger than any that the
Secret Seven ever solved.

My Enid Blyton obsession has finally melted away
into adulthood but not without a last hurrah. It happens the day
Freny tells me gently that she thinks I've outgrown my beloved
author, and yes, even the Billy Bunter and Nancy Drew novels I've
been reading and that it was time I read something more appropriate
to my age, such as Mills and Boon romance novels.

I am appalled. What, give up my beloved childhood
friends whose lives I was more familiar with than the lives of the
kids I went to school? Peter, Georgina, Colin, Scamper, and Billy and
Bessie Bunter had kept me company while the adults were too busy for
me, running around as they were in their own private circles of
misery. To deliberately give up such loyal friends would be a
dastardly act of betrayal. I remember the countless hours I had spent
reading these novels to the point where I could recite entire pages
by heart—a feat that I used to perform regularly until the
evening my mother slapped me in the presence of the old woman who
lived on the ground floor. We had just returned from a parent-teacher
conference where Mrs Patel had complained about my habit of repeating
the very last thing that she said. ‘It makes the other girls
think she's making fun of me,' she'd said. ‘I
can't tell if she's trying to be a smarty-pants or not.'
And although I vigorously shook my head no, mummy decided that the
teacher's complaint was genuine and somehow linked to my
ability to memorize entire passages from books. During the bus ride
home she'd told me that both irritating habits had to stop
immediately and I had promised and so both of us were equally stunned
when I began to recite lines from
Last Term at Malory Towers
as
we as-cended the building steps. The door to the ground floor
apartment had flown open just as mummy's hand flew across my
mouth and for a moment I was too ashamed and appalled to cry. It was
the first time mummy had ever struck me in front of a stranger. She
began stuttering an explanation to the old woman on the ground floor
but I was running up the stairs, two steps at a time. But the slap
worked. From that day on, I lost my ability to memorize passages.
Most days, I didn't care.

But some days, it felt like a loss, like
forgetting a card trick you had known all your life.

So when Freny asks me to give up Enid Blyton, it
feels like another loss. We are in her and Babu's room during
this conversation and a garlanded picture of the prophet Zoroaster
hangs on the lemon-coloured wall. With a dramatic flourish, I walk
over to it, stand on my toes and touch the bottom of the photo frame.
‘I swear to God I will never stop reading Enid Blyton,' I
say. ‘These are the only books I want to read my whole life.'

Freny suppresses a smile. ‘Okay,' she
says. ‘But if you ever want to read anything else, just let me
know.'

Two weeks after this declaration of undying
devotion to Ms Blyton, I casually pick up one of Roshan's
romance novels. On the cover, a tall man with thick dark hair wearing
a loose white billowy shirt and tight black pants is sweeping a
slim-waisted girl with long red hair off her feet. Making sure that
Roshan is not around, I flip through the pages, stopping when I come
across a passage of what appears to be torrid love-making.

I am hooked. Hello, Brad and Luther and Hal.
Goodbye, Fatty and Peter and Colin. Goodbye, Georgina the tomboy.

Hello, Daphne the virgin.

J
ESSE HAS THICK BUSHY EYEBROWS that she
hand-plucks fiercely when she is trying to concentrate, a mop of wild
hair and a pair of pink denim jeans.

It is the pink jeans that makes us friends.

For some reason, the adults hate Jesse's
jeans, are offended by them, read into them things about the wildness
of her spirit and her untamed nature. The jeans make them think Jesse
is an unpredictable nonconformist who looks down her long Parsi nose
at their simple, middle-class ways, and since this is mostly true, it
makes them hate her. Nobody in our neighbourhood—where we all
lived and died by the all-per-vasive code of, ‘What will people
think?'—dares to wear pink jeans. Also, it is unheard of
for a teenage girl to care so little about her personal appearance,
to wear sneakers instead of high heels, to care more about books than
jewellery, to prefer silver to gold, to run her hands impatiently
through her short hair, instead of combing her long tresses. And to
make matters worse, Jesse talks openly of her many platonic
relationships with the boys she'd gone to school with, talks
about them with an easy casualness that has none of the simpering
coyness that usually defines the way girls are supposed to talk about
boys.

Rumour has it that Jesse had been in love with a
Muslim classmate and her scandalized parents had packed her off to
her grandmother's house in Bombay but if Jesse knows about the
rumours floating around her like a dark horde of bees, she does
nothing to refute them.

Instead, she speaks with great affection about the
small town that she grew up in and the liberal, progressive coed
school that she had attended. And in doing so, she pisses off the
folks in the neighbourhood even more. Most of the Parsi families who
can afford it send their children to Catholic schools, where we
flatter ourselves that we are receiving a great education at the
hands of the Irish and British nuns. But Jesse pokes fun at our
arcane, private school ways—how we are divided into different
‘houses' or groups named after different saints, how we
fight so zealously at the annual inter-school athletic meets, as if
winning medals for our school is the ultimate expression of our
purpose on earth. At her school, she tells us, her frumpy but
brilliant principal gave a prize to every student who participated in
a sport. And the prize itself was revealing—instead of the
militaristic gold and silver medals that we receive, the kids at
Jesse's school each received a ribbon. While we pay lip service
to homilies like, ‘It's not what you win, it's how
you win,' Jesse's school puts that in action.

But the greatest insult is that Jesse doesn't
seem as fawningly grateful about being in Bombay as we want her to
be. After all, we are Bombayites, residents of the greatest city in
India.

In our pride in our city, in our pity for anybody
who is not from it, we are as arrogant and insular as New Yorkers. We
want all newcomers to be cognizant of their good fortune at being in
Bombay, want them to pay homage to that fact. But Jesse insists on
continuing to talk about her sleepy little hometown—as we see
her small but bustling city—as if it was something to be proud
of.