‘The Salt Doll’: A new edition of a 1978 work brings us a novel that should not have been forgotten

The last time I remember fainting was when I went to see my parents. I was taken to Aden to join them. My father looked like Hitler. He had the same moustache, the same jerky military ways. In my mind I called him the High Command, and in my diary I had him under the code HC. They lived in Crater.

I ran away to Steamer Point and tried to get onto a boat taking passengers to the P & O lying at anchor. The police on the quay took me home. When we arrived, my father raised his hand to hit me, and I fell in a dead faint. After several such attempts, they sent me back to India to a boarding school – for Grandfather was dead and to Grandmother I was just one of dozens of grandchildren. I did not last long in any of the boarding schools. I went to eleven, a new one each year.

At the first boarding school, the nuns wanted us to be truthful. If we told lies, they powdered quinine and rubbed it on our tongues. The nuns were Portuguese.

At the second boarding school, the nuns told us not to pluck mangoes. But the Indian priests told the Indian Catholics that it was no sin to pluck mangoes and they need not confess. There was a gap between what the Indian priests did not consider sinful and what the good nuns thought heinous. Caught between two subversive currents, we plucked mangoes.

So the nuns decided to mortify us. They passed a string through the mangoes and tied it around our necks and sent us to class. They thought the day scholars, who did not board with us, would laugh at us. Instead, we were a sensation. At recess, we sold a bite each to anyone who came along. Result? We got ill.

At the third boarding school, they did not want us to read anything that was on the Index. This stricture did not bother anyone else at the school, but it did me. It turned reading into a crusade, a declaration of independence. Not that I did not read for pleasure; till I was fifteen, what I loved most was fairy tales. But the censorship imposed by the Mother Superior impelled me to explore such forbidden material as Dumas, father and son.

I wrote a theme on The Three Musketeers and handed it in instead of my French verbs. The Mother Superior sent for my mother, whose favourite book was of course the blessed Bible, also on the Index! But my mother was overcome by the Mother Superior’s outrage at my philandering among forbidden books. She became sterner than the Mother Superior as I stood facing them in a closed room in the school.

As I looked out of the window, I saw the cemetery with all the crosses, statuary, and memorials cheek by jowl next to the Mother Superior’s room. One inscription began, “Greater love hath no man...” I was not penitent, merely appalled by my mother’s expression. I toyed with an idea – should I expose Mother? Did she not read the Bible morning and evening? Did she not quote from it, sometimes movingly, as when she’d say something like “My children like olive trees around my table?” But then followed this ritual.

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Kneel down. (I kneel down facing the low window and the memorials to the dead.)

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Repeat after me: I promise...

M: I promise...

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Never to read a book...

M: Never to read a book... (Surprise, indignation, voice

begins to crack.)

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Not approved by Mother Superior.

M: (Sobs, sniffles, omits first word.) ...approved by Mother

Superior. (Tears flow.)

MOTHER: Crocodile tears!

M: (Looking up.) Et tu.

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Mira has real feelings. No, she

has real feelings. (Kindly, very kindly.) You may rise.

M rises, not dubbed an initiate into the society of the spiritual elite but stabbed to the heart by this mother. It takes Mira years to realise that her mother is female incarnate. She has no shape or form; she is everything or nothing. She is fluid; pour her into any mould and she takes it. Set her in any group and she becomes it. Except that she is all impulse and all imagination, a child forever, to be brought up by her six children, each born at five- year intervals – with each child, she the mother again the child, reshaped and reared by the growing child, but as now, in the presence of the Mother Superior, superior to the child that raises her, by virtue of the very Presence in Front of Whom She Becomes It. Ideals and principles lie outside her nature. Shapeless as water, necessary as water, these were the good moments, but what about when she becomes pure air, beyond touch?

Lest I forget, I was that day given an imposition of a thousand lines: “I must not read anything not approved of by Mother Superior.” I learnt to write with four pencils tied together. No one can decipher my handwriting to this day – I did too many impositions.

One day, in a mood of defiant experimentation we stood, some of us, on the tennis court, in the sun, with sliced onions in our armpits. We ran up a temperature and were sent to the infirmary, stinking and in a fever, but happy to have exercised our freedom, by however tortuous a manner, to be at the place we wanted, with the choicest of our companions, away from the world we suddenly found impossible to accept.

At the fourth boarding school, the principal’s name was something that sounded like Sistermaryabilliya. We called her Billy for short.

Everyone except Billy knew this. That year there was a new teacher for us. She wanted me to ask Billy’s permission for something, since I was one of Billy’s favourites.

“I will fix it with Billy,” I said.

“What’s that you said?” she asked sternly.

“I will fix it with Sistermaryabilliya.”

“You did not! You called her Billy Cat!”

I was silent.

She thought for a while and said: “Go and tell the

Reverend Sister Maryabilliya that you called her Billy Cat. Right this minute.”

The class gasped. Billy had a fierce temper. She usually used the back of a brush to correct the wayward. And since she was very short of stature, she usually jumped into the air, and the brush landed on our outstretched palms, and if we withdrew our hands and she lost her balance, the number of brushes were multiplied. We had learnt to leave our hands stretched out like cadets presenting arms to a state guest.

As I was leaving the room, Miss Diaz called me back. She, even she, shuddered and said, “All right, you may go and report to Sister Germana.”

I got to the chapel and rang for Sister Germana, one-two-three-pause-one, the bell for Sister Germana. Who do you think popped out of the door? The fearful Billy. She asked what I wanted. I stammered. Billy was kind. She had always been especially kind.

“Whath du you wanth?” she repeated a second time. “I want to see Sister Germana.”

“Whath du you wanth?” a third time. I cast about. I did not want to push my luck any further, and try as I might I could not think up a story, and there was that fleshless Miss Diaz with her determined jaw at the back of my mind.

“Sister,” I said clearly, “by mistake, I called you Billy.”

The blood rushed to her square Portuguese face. Her collar seemed to choke her. Her eyes popped out.

“I donth untherstanth whath you are saying. I donth wanth you to come here for no gooth reason. I will make you thake your thrunk on your headth and go thown the hill!” With that she slammed the door on my face.

I was an instant heroine with the entire community. All sorts of nuns – Indian, European – that evening strolled around the playground holding my hand, making me tell over and over what I said, what Billy said.

I was with Canossian nuns once. They were wonderful, but once in anger I wished beautiful Sister Casanti dead. The following week they led me into a chapel, and there was beautiful Sister Casanti laid out with tuberoses in her hands, laid out in state for all to mourn, on a raised coffin, in the middle of the chapel.

I shrieked and fell in a dead faint.

No one knew why.

Excerpted with permission from The Salt Doll, Molly Daniels Ramanujan, Women Unlimited.