The Schoolmistress

She finished the lesson.

That was the first thing he would remember, later. She looked at him in the doorway for perhaps three seconds, and in those seconds he watched everything cross her face: the shock, the grief, and something harder than either that looked very much like fear. Then she put it all away, the way you lay a precious thing in a tin trunk and close the lid, and turned back to the blackboard.

"Please wait outside, Mr. Lahiri," she said. "We have twenty minutes left."

He waited outside in the rain for twenty minutes. He would have waited twenty years. He nearly had.

When the girls came out, they streamed past him in a giggling river of blue skirts, staring. Meghla came last. She stopped two arm-lengths away, a distance he understood she had chosen with care, and folded her hands in front of her.

"You found the petition," she said.

"You put the pictures there."

"The girls draw them. It helps them remember whose name is whose. Some of them had never held a pencil before last year." She paused. "Yes. I put them there."

"You could have written to me. Any time in five years. You knew where I was."

"I did write to you."

"One line."

"It was enough," she said, and there was the first crack in her voice, quickly mended. "You came anyway."

"I came too late." He heard his own voice rise and could not stop it. "Nine days late, and he was gone, and you were gone, and there was a note in my own pen telling me not to look. Do you have any idea what that..."

"Yes," she said. "I do. I wrote it."

The rain drummed on the tin roof. Somewhere in the colony a radio was playing a film song, thin and sweet. For a long time neither of them spoke.

"The girls have twenty-nine days," she said finally. "Can you save the school?"

He looked at her, at the chalk on her sleeve and the pen behind her ear and the face he had carried in his head for five years, and understood that whatever was owed between them would not be settled today.

"Yes," he said. "Show me the deed."

The case took them through the whole of that monsoon.

She knew every family in the colony, every date, every rumour. He knew the law. They worked at a rickety table at the back of the school shed after lessons, a kerosene lamp between them and rain blowing in through the matting. At first they spoke only of the case: survey numbers, boundary lines, and at last the strange discovery that the developer's deed bore the stamp of a land office that had closed two years before the deed was supposedly issued. Then, slowly, as the evenings went on, they spoke of other things.

He told her about the city, the Coffee House, the courts, the long nights. She told him how she had come to Calcutta in 1948 with a teacher's certificate and a letter from the Sisters, and found work in a colony school because nobody else would teach there for what it paid. How she had become headmistress when the last one married and left, and because by then the girls would listen to no one else.

"They call me the Ferry," she said, with a small, rueful smile. "Behind my back. Because I tell them the alphabet is a boat."

"It suits you."

"It's what I am. A ferryman's daughter. I never stopped being one. I only changed rivers."

On the evening they found the forged stamp, they walked down to the Hooghly, because it was the only celebration either of them could think of. The great river was grey and wide and crowded with boats, and the lamps on the far bank were coming on one by one. They sat on the steps of a ghat a hundred times bigger than Shonapur's, at a careful distance, and watched the water.

"She came to see me," Meghla said. "Your grandmother. After the flood."

He went very still.

She told him all of it: the cane, the thirty-one steps, the offer of money, the anna. And then what the old woman had asked of her, and why.

When she finished, his face was white. "She had no right."

"She had every right. She was wrong about some things, but not about that." Meghla looked out at the river. "You would have chosen me, Ishan. That year, with my father gone and nothing in the world but a tin trunk, you would have walked out of that house and never gone back. And every time your father fell ill, every Puja you weren't asked home for, every letter your grandmother didn't send, you would have paid for it. And I would have been the price."

"I would have paid it gladly."

"I know. That's why I couldn't let you." She turned to him, and for the first time since the doorway her face was unguarded. "I didn't want to be the thing you gave up your family for. I wanted to be the thing you chose when there was nothing left to give up. I didn't know if that day would ever come. I still don't."

He could not answer. After a moment she reached into the cloth bag she carried and drew out a bundle tied with red string. He knew what it was before she untied it. Letters, thirty or forty of them, the envelopes soft with handling.

"I kept every one," she said. "I read them so often the folds wore through. I just never let myself answer."

They won on the twenty-sixth day. The judge, an old man who had been at school with Ishan's father, studied the forged stamp, looked at the developer's lawyer over his spectacles for a long and terrible moment, and dismissed the eviction with costs. Two hundred and forty girls were waiting outside the court in their blue skirts, under umbrellas, and the noise they made could be heard in the next street.

That evening Ishan walked out to Naya Gram one more time. He had something to say and had been rehearsing it for three days.

He never said it. The small serious girl met him at the edge of the colony, running, holding a yellow envelope. Her face was frightened.

"It came to the school," she said. "It's for you, but it's for Miss too. Both names."

It was a telegram. Ishan tore it open under the colony's one street lamp, with Meghla coming up the path behind him.

THAKUMA FAILING STOP ASKS FOR MEGHLA MAJHI STOP BRING HER BY THE RIVER STOP BABA