This quite long novel set in India in the 1970s is an odd mixture of boarding school story, murder mystery and coming of age story of young, inexperienced teacher Charu but it doesn’t really follow the tropes of any of these genres.
Twenty something Charu who was born with a disfiguring birthmark on her face she calls a ‘blot’ takes a job teaching at a girls’ boarding school in Panchgani, a high scenic area a few hours out of Bombay. She is inexperienced but wins over some of the girls with her teaching of Macbeth, but soon she comes under the sway of a white teacher, Moira Prince, known to the girls as ‘the Prince’ or to Charu as Pin. Pin is wild and the girls steer clear of her but her freedom from convention is attractive to Charu, and she becomes involved with Pin and her friend Merch, a poetry reading, drug-taking man who lives an idle life above a dispensary in town, occasionally teaching at the school.
But no sooner do we get to know Pin, and she has started an affair with Charu, than the Prince is dead, seemingly murdered and thrown off a cliff. The rest of the novel is involved with solving this murder, in one way or another, but quite tangentially.
The middle section switches to the point of view of three of the school girls who were in the vicinity of the tragedy on that wet and windy monsoon night when it occurred. They saw something (including Charu running down from the spot) but are not sure what it all means. They begin investigating, and the main girl, Nandita, who has always liked Charu, is given a dangerous piece of evidence that will point the guilt in a particular direction.
In the last third of the novel we return to Charu’s point of view, the attempted suicide of her mother, and an old humiliation of her father that has diminished the family is revisited. We get to see Charu’s extended family, their meddling and their support, and the pressure put on women to conform. Meanwhile Charu returns to Panchgani and there are arrests and threatened violence, and nothing about the Prince’s death is as simple as it seemed.
All this makes it sound like it is a plot-driven novel but it’s not really. It’s really, I think, the author’s recollections of her own time at a girl’s boarding school and her exploration of how a person who doesn’t fit in, navigates her way around her family and society. What is wonderful about it, for a non-Indian, is a lovely insight into Indian culture that is a far cry from the stereotyped Raj or the gritty urban take on poverty and corruption. I loved the detail of the school still, in the 70s, run on British lines and the unspoken but evident divide between white and brown, the feel of the monsoon and the landscape, and the descriptions of food and family life. It’s a baggy, voluminous tale but the experience of another world is very enjoyable.