Thomas landed in Kerala soon after Our Lord’s Ascension. Who runs all of India’s good schools? Who cares for the poor?” She pronounced it as “pore” and then after a perfunctory pause, “We, Christians.”
Miss Wilson had a brother in Orissa who worked for a T.V. channel called DivineLite, which aimed to make Christianity more accessible through stories of everyday triumphs over greed, lust, envy, and such-like. Recent converts who looked jubilant – and prosperous – explained how Jesus had transformed their lives and urged others to find the same sustenance and joy. Every programme began and ended with a feature called “Prayer of the Day” during which the entire cast of DivineLite held hands, shut their eyes, and intoned a recently written prayer. For several days now, the prayer had been, “Let us put down the weapon of hatred and violence and put on the armour of love. Let us forgive one another and ask forgiveness from one another for the wrong we have done to each other and reach out in love to each other.”
One day, the T.V. channel’s office was picketed by a bunch of hoodlums shouting slogans calling for it to be shut down. Miss Wilson told us of the incident the next day. She had tried to reach her brother on the telephone, but he was too choked with fear to talk, she said. They had even been threatened with death. She looked preoccupied and worried and whispered urgently into her mobile now and then. She did not come to the classes to rap tables with her cane and shout “Quay-it”. Nor did she realise that the school bells were often being rung late because the chowkidar was more stoned than usual these days. Whenever I came to speak to her in her room, she shuffled papers or fiddled with something on her desk so that she would not have to look at me.
As things got worse in Orissa, the something invisible and dangerous which Miss Wilson and I had tip-toed around all this time grew in size until it took up most of the space. Despite my marriage and the change in my surname, I had never converted to Christianity. Michael’s parents had said they would accept me if I converted, but Michael did not want me to, and neither did his priest. Only if it comes naturally, Father Joseph had said, only when the time is right. In the weeks after Michael’s death he had asked me a few times if I would meet Michael’s parents: this great grief could be a time for healing and forgiveness, he said. But I thought they might blame me more ferociously now for the years of Michael that they had lost. The time for friendship is over, I had told the Father. The next week Father Joseph had relayed another request from them: they wanted something from Michael’s rucksack as a memento of their son’s last journey, a crumb from his final days. At that time, I was distraught enough to have handed them the entire rucksack, and all his other belongings, to stop them bothering me. But then too, Father Joseph had stopped me. “There is no hurry,” he had said. “Give them something later when you are able to look through his belongings. When it comes naturally. One day you’ll be ready, not now.”
Miss Wilson had none of Father Joseph’s wisdom. From the start she had made it clear that whereas I had a job, there were needy Christian teachers still unemployed. I was the undeserving beneficiary of Father Joseph’s influence in the church and she had no option but to put up with me. Now the world beyond was making matters between us too delicate and brittle to survive much stress. And as if there was a conspiracy, this was precisely the time when the election campaign in Ranikhet charged up enough for the political parties to look around for trouble-filled pots they could stir.
* * *
By the middle of August, the bazaar looked as if Diwali had come early. The narrow main street had acquired a glittering, latticed ceiling made of orange, green, silver and gold tinsel. Party symbols hung from it. Every day the bunting grew more ragged in the rain and wind, and the posters on the walls peeled with the damp so that the candidates’ faces grew more and more lopsided.
This was a national election, especially significant for our town because it was the first time a local, Veer’s new