“Black Lace" by Beena Kamlani

The knock on my door comes at 11:00 p.m. Too late for a social visit, or even for a reprimand. I am in bed reading, the lights dimmed. Husnara, my roommate, is fast asleep.

I go to the door and open it. It’s Sister Clementine. She always looks anxious so it is hard to tell if that pucker around her lips and her intense eyes are more so than usual. “May I come in?” she says. She is in full habit—coif, wimple, veil, tunic, black shoes. It is, then, a formal visit.

By now, Husnara is up too. Sister Clementine considers her for a minute, as if she’s debating asking her to leave the room, then thinks better of it and turns to me. “I need to discuss something very important with you.”

“Yes?” My own anxiety level is rising rapidly. There’s something strange about the way she’s looking at me, something fiery and dark at the same time.

“I understand Xavier has been talking to you.”

“Yes.” Husnara shoots me a warning look. “But we always talk. He tells me about the tigers around his village and his childhood. I enjoy his stories.”

“Don’t take me for a fool,” she barks. “I mean that he has been telling you other things. About the school and about us.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, after a moment’s pause, as if for reflection.

She produces a piece of paper. “This is your handwriting. I found it in the library. What are you up to?” she asks, her eyes narrowing.

My heart skips a beat. I had unthinkingly left behind a rough draft of a letter I was working on in the library. Husnara’s eyes are round; she’s blinking rapidly. Don’t tell her anything.

St. Francis Convent School was a boarding school for girls up in the Himalayan mountains. Close to Simla, in an idyllic spot called Summer Hill, the school was run by Roman Catholic nuns from Ireland. It had a hundred boarders, ranging in age from eight to sixteen. The head nun was Sister Bertha, a very tall, extremely white woman with the palest papery-white cheeks I’d ever seen. Unlike the other nuns, who were also Irish, she never blushed; her cheeks retained their white hue, and it was probably the most disturbing thing about her to us girls. We prided ourselves on being able to read them by the coloring in their faces. When embarrassed they went pink; when angry, red; when enraged, the color of oxblood. Sister Clementine was a different matter: she was Indian, and a very dark shade of brown. It was impossible to read her as we did the others.

Xavier was the headman of the village nearby. As tall as Sister Bertha, Xavier wore a khaki uniform with red badges on it. I had once asked him about the badges. He said they were given to him for his loyalty to the British—who had converted him to Christianity, and for whom he began working as a young boy. Xavier wore wire-rimmed glasses, which gave him a stern look. It was only a look—he wasn’t stern at all, at least not with me. His only other adornment was a flamboyant turban, which he wore with dignity and grace. Sometimes the turban was royal blue, sometimes red, sometimes a bright turmeric orange, but he always placed a bird feather at the center of the folds directly above his forehead. The feathers from mountain birds—snowcocks, quails, pheasants, monals, and even golden eagles—gleamed colorfully from the folds of Xavier’s turban.

His village supplied the school with workers who staffed the kitchen, the dormitories—they were cleaners, sweepers, groundskeepers, and general dogsbodies, hauling wood from the barn for the fireplaces, and water from the well nearby. He heard their problems—domestic and financial—and had set up a village trust to which all the villagers contributed a rupee or two to keep distressed families afloat in lean times. Xavier had often sought me out to talk about something or the other—a tiger cub had been found near the village, which meant the mother was close by. Some villagers were keen to kill it, fearing the mother’s visits. Others wanted to raise it. He was pondering the issue. It was a matter of village safety, not mercy or compassion, he assured me. “We have children too,” he said. I was stumped. Do you kill a potential threat before it becomes active or do you wait and see? No no, Xavier said. No wait and see. We will all be dead if we do that. He had advocated taking the cub to the farthest point of their territory by bullock cart. “We will leave the cub there and hope it never comes back. The mother will find it.” It was a wise solution. The cub never came back.

I had his words in mind when he came to me about three weeks ago. He asked if we could take a walk. He would pretend to show me some spectacular vistas from the edge of the school grounds. I walked with him. When we were at a safe distance from the school buildings, he produced some papers. “Read this,” he said.

I took the papers from him. They seemed to be some sort of contract. I read slowly and carefully, taking my time. When I got to the end, I saw thumbprints all across the bottom. “Whose thumbprints are these?”

“Mine,” he said. “And my wife’s.”

I looked at him in horror. “Xavier, do you know what you have signed?” I knew he didn’t. No rational person would have signed those papers. He said, “I trusted them. Can you please tell me what it says?”

In a nutshell, I told him what the contract had stipulated. “This says that the school will educate all your children. Is this true, Xavier? Are they educating the village children?”

“Yes, miss, they are. The bright ones are taken into junior school here; the less clever ones are sent to Simla by bus, to the local school there. It is a very good thing—our children are learning to use their talents, their skills. One day, they may all have the chance to be like you girls here. I don’t want our children to end up as we have. For generations we have served them—our wives, our mothers, our grandmothers and grandfathers have all worked at this school. Enough. Our children deserve better.”

I took a deep breath. “Xavier, this will not happen.”

He gave me an annoyed look. “Why? Do you think our children cannot be as good as you?”

“No, Xavier. It is not what I think. It’s what you’ve signed.”

Then I told him. In effect, he had signed over future generations of children, educated and well aware of their capabilities, to the school. “Yes, to help them find jobs in the work sector. To become professionals.”

“No, Xavier,” I said, as gently as I could. “To work as indentured slaves here, in the school.” I need not have put it so baldly, but I was seething. Xavier gave me a shocked look. His eyes were like hot coals. “What do you mean?” he said.

When I told him exactly what the contract stipulated, he stared at me in horror. “I have given them permission to take our children from us to work for the school as slaves? Forever?” He shook his head sorrowfully. He removed his turban and set it to one side. “I am not fit to be their leader. I will leave the village and face my destiny in the forests. Maybe the tigress will kill and eat me.” The golden eagle feather he had put in his turban shook in the breeze.

His head was bald. He looked like Gandhi in that light. I was shocked to see him like that, his lined face defeated, beaten.

There must be something I could do. I told him I would think about it. “Xavier, don’t worry. Your children will not suffer. Please don’t leave your village. You are a splendid leader. Without you, they will all fall apart.”

I was thinking about stories my father had told me about my grandfather, a judge and pleader. He had fought for journalists who bucked the British government in Imperial India and exposed the horrors of colonial rule. He had defended them pro bono, and with his brilliance sprung them from jail. “It is important to listen, and then to do the right thing,” my father said. “Everyone gets the opportunity, at least once in their lifetime.” I saw my moment had come.

Xavier stared at me. “Please put on your turban,” I said. “We will come up with something. We won’t let this happen.”

He looked into the distance miserably. Then he reached for his turban and placed it on his head. He straightened it and as it sat there, proudly, on his head, I told myself that everything had a solution. This one did too. I just had to find it.

Over the next few days, I thought of all the injustices that had been inflicted on us—the students and the servants of the school. My anger grew, became a slow-burning fire within me. Humiliated and made subservient, how could we ever fight back?

Xavier had asked the nuns for a paved road from their village up to the school. In the rainy season, it was hard walking up the slippery slopes. The men of the village were prepared to do the job for a nominal wage. Sister Bertha turned them down. “There is no money for it,” she told him.

While we ate scraps of fatty meat cooked in dishwater, stale bread, lentils that spoons stood up in, and burnt rice, our wonderful nuns, visions of saintliness, were dining every night on cannelloni and schnitzel, beef Guinness and pommes dauphine; tender shoots of lettuce and watercress graced their table; tiny tomatoes ripened in the sun garnished their salads. Breads baked to perfection perfumed the air as they were carried in baskets to a table laid with the finest Irish linens and set with Waterford cut-glass goblets. The expensive labels on the wine bottles, opened and releasing their aromas, spoke of their provenance. I had stepped into the room by accident and backed out of it, stunned. In the kitchen, later, I saw the cook holding up each glass to his lips and draining it dry. Some of the nuns clearly didn’t drink much, only to please. These nearly full glasses he drained, and then, high as a kite, began singing bawdy Bollywood songs as he washed the dishes. It was common to hear the sound of shattering glass from the kitchen at night.

Then the solution came to me, so obvious, simple, and clear. I must write to Rome, to the Pope himself. I began composing the letter in my mind.

At Bible Study class, Sister Bertha reads from the Song of Solomon. We all sit on our haunches in our neat grey tunics, white shirts and blue V-necked woolen jumpers. Our feet are in white socks and black Mary Janes. It is a perfect scene. A European nun reading to her brown charges, who are hanging on her every word. Her voice lingers over certain words—breasts, apples, cheeks, doves, gazelles, desirable—tripping off her tongue as though she were the rose of Sharon herself, and her adoring lord at her feet. I listen to her reading. There is no mistaking it. This is a carnal reading: “You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches. Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, and your kisses like the best wine that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth.” She looks up in rapture. “I am my beloved’s and he is mine,” she says. “What does the Song of Solomon, this magnificent rhapsody in the Holy Bible, mean?” She looks around the room. We are all puzzled. Her eyes are not seeking knowledge, but something else. Of course it’s me she settles on. “Laila, you tell us what you’re thinking.”

I fix my eyes on her, my hate growing with every second. “It is a song of carnal desire, of love. It is a lover pining for his mistress, his bride, his lover. It is a man addressing a beloved at the height of desire and the beloved responding from the same place.”

Furious, she rises from her chair. “How dare you blaspheme the Holy Book! You have a dirty mind,” she says. “It is a song of devotion, of duty. You have completely misinterpreted it.” I am given a punishment unlike any of the others she has meted out to me in the past. “You will sleep in the Tower tonight,” she says.

The Tower. The most feared, dreaded place in the entire convent. We had heard the horror stories—headless apparitions had been seen walking out of it, and the noises that came down the stairs often kept us awake at night, fearful yet curious. Clanging chains, thumping on the floorboards. None of us had braved the stairs to see what was really up in that room. Now I am to sleep in there. I can’t do it. I am terrified. I finally swallow my pride and ask for her forgiveness. “Please don’t make me sleep there,” I cry. She says, “Come here.” She asks me to kneel in front of her and bow my head. She lets me stay there in that position for what seems like an hour. Finally, she says, “You are forgiven.” The class erupts with whoops of joy. She is the savior yet again. Her mercy has saved me. I hate her with all my heart. I despise myself. I’m seething with humiliation.

One day, while we are in art class, she comes in, examines our work. One of the girls is painting a scene of Jesus with John the Baptist. She does not know what John the Baptist looks like. I am closest to the door. “Laila, go up to my room. There is an illustrated Bible on my bedside table. Bring it down, please.” She goes back to her inspections of the girls’ work. I run upstairs. At the entrance to her room, I stop. Then I take a deep breath and open the door.

The entire space is highly scented—the cloying fragrance of musk roses. It is an astonishing room. The sacred and the profane reside here in easy companionship. There is a sickly painting of the Virgin Mary on one wall. On the other, a man and woman, naked, lie in each other’s arms. There is a print of Michelangelo’s David in another corner of the room. I’ve never seen a full-frontal male nude before. I can’t help staring. It will make people laugh in later years when the question comes up: where did you see your first male nude? Then the killer response: in a nun’s bedroom.

Then I see the lingerie. Hanging from hooks beside the closet are black lace chemises—several of them, in transparent chiffon or some kind of silk with plunging necklines and thin straps—that make me feel I’ve walked into a den of lust and desire. I reach for the Bible on her bedside table and rush out of the room.

She sees me come in to class. Perhaps I’m imagining how her look lingers on my face. I hand over the book, hoping she can’t see my shock. I’m glad for my darkness. Can’t blush, thank god.

She knows I’m up to something. She has her eyes on me a lot these days. I affect a nonchalance I do not feel.

The playing fields are where we are every evening before dinner. There is one hour for games, half an hour to shower and get ready for dinner, Bible readings after dinner, then bed. I play baseball and basketball with the others but my heart is heavy. Xavier’s plight, the villagers’ plight, haunts me.

Sitting there in the library, I start writing the letter I have been composing in my head.

Dear Pope John Paul II,

I must tell you straightaway that we all like you very much. You are not the problem. But other things connected with you are. I am writing to you from Summerhill, India, a small place up in the Himalayan Mountains. I go to school at St Francis Convent for Girls here.

We have recently had some strange things happen. Our principal, Sister Bertha, told the headman of the local village here, which supplies workers to the school, that the school would educate all their children free. Xavier, the headman, put his thumb signature on the contract. He showed it to me after he had signed and submitted it. It said that the village’s children would be bound in perpetuity to the school as domestic workers. What this means is that their humiliation will be double—they will be domestics even though they are now educated and would be qualified for other things. It is a travesty as I’m sure you, in your wisdom and kindness, will recognize. Please send some of your people here to see what is happening. Our school’s health depends on it.

It was a rough draft. But Sister Clementine found it. She holds it up now, saying, “It is a good letter.” I look at her suspiciously. She is one of them and she’s applauding me? Husnara’s eyes are as wide as saucers. She can’t believe it either.

“Listen carefully to me, girls. There are all kinds of shady things going on here. It is better that you not know all of them. You know too much already”—she gives me a significant look—“and it is dangerous to know much more.” I look at Husnara, who looks as though she’s seen a ghost. Sister Clementine catches the drift of my eyes, and says, “Go to sleep, Husnara.” Husnara obediently pulls her sheet over her head. She’s had enough of it, I can tell.

Sister Clementine says, “I cannot do anything about what is happening here. It is a disaster. Sister Bertha is out of control. You will have to send this letter. I cannot do it—I am a fellow nun. When a student writes, they will pay attention.”

“Let me think about it,” I say, alerted by her eagerness.

“No,” she says. “It must go now. I will get the address of the order for you. And I will post the letter myself.”

Why is she so interested? She says, “As the only Indian nun here, I have had enough. They have humiliated me, and kept me away from serious responsibilities. It is time for regime change.”

Oh my god, I realize. She wants to be principal. But she would make a better principal any day.

I must square one thing away. “If you were running this place, would you tear up that contract so Xavier’s village children will be spared?”

“Of course. It is illegal what Sister Bertha has done. Our order must know and must create institutional change.”

The next day, I tell Xavier what happened. He nods and says, “Good.”

I clean up the letter a little more, Sister Clementine reads it and gives me the thumbs-up. We stamp it, seal it in its airmail envelope, and off it goes. We sit back and wait. I imagine a postman walking down cobblestone streets to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, where the Pope gives his blessings to people, and feel sure that something will happen. Xavier is perky and bright as he goes about his duties—fetching mail from the postbox by the front gate, and bossing the gardeners around. There is an oriole feather in his turban most days. He is devoted to orioles, so I know he must be happy.

We mailed the letter in March, 1981. Spring came and went. As we prepare for our summer holidays, everyone breaking up and going home, I fret. What if they come while we’re all gone? They won’t send a delegation when you girls aren’t here, Sister Clementine says. They like to talk to students, know how their representatives are doing in a foreign country.

We come back from the holidays and soon fall is here. It is a beautiful season. The trees glitter and break like stained glass windows when the sun comes through them. We watch winter’s shadows in sunlight striping the grass—cool turmeric stripes, the lemon gone from them. We are in piano class. Bunny Sinha is playing on the piano. Sister Williams holds up a metronome so Bunny can hear what she’s doing wrong. She’s tone-deaf, that girl. Why is she even in the class? She makes it through her piece. I have to play Ketelbèy’s In a Persian Market, which is difficult at the best of times. But there is Sister Clementine in the doorway waving her hand at me. Sister Mary looks up. “Yes, sister?” I am about to start playing.

“It’s for Laila. Can you come and see me when you’ve finished class?”

I nod yes, knowing what it’s about. They must have written back.

“They will be here next week,” Sister Clementine tells me breathlessly. Xavier is also there. He says, “It is a miracle. I have been at this school for thirty years and no one has ever come.”

Sister Bertha is confused and uncertain. It is clear she is not pleased by the news. She announces it at assembly. “Representatives of our diocese from Rome will be here to meet all you lovely young girls next week. It is an honor. You are all very lucky. I have never met them either.”

An entertainment program is prepared. There will be a play—Shakespeare’s The Tempest—and the school choir will give a performance. There will be special refreshments, like at the annual fête, and a festive atmosphere. Girls will be in uniform during the day but change in the evening into “home clothes,” as they were known, festive attire brought from home for special occasions. “They wish to have dinner with all the students,” Sister Bertha says, disbelievingly.

I am called to Sister Bertha’s office. “You will be confined to the Tower,” she says.

“What? Why?”

“You are not at liberty to ask any questions.”

“What?”

That was that. I am dismissed.

The Tower. I tell Sister Clementine what I’ve been told. “Oh, but you can’t be spirited away like that,” she says. “I’ll come up with a plan.”

The plan is this: I will wait in the Tower. Sister Clementine will think of something to lure one of the visitors away and up the stairs to the Tower to meet me. She has keys to the door. The truth must come out, Sister Clementine says.

I am sent to the Tower early one morning. It is the day they are supposed to arrive. For all our fears, it turns out there is nothing frightening in the Tower. Sister Bertha had made it seem like a place of horror to terrorize us. There are musical instruments, a trumpet, and some tambourines. In one corner, there is a closet and when I open it, sequined dresses and high-heeled shoes with silver bows fall out. There are trousers and men’s jackets and shirts. There are fedoras and fake cigars and men’s leather shoes. More of Sister Bertha’s cross-dressing garb, I conclude, slamming the door shut.

There are three of them. Two nuns and a priest. I see them come in. Everyone shakes hands. The Italians move quickly through the crowd. Sister Clementine is surrounded by so many nuns, she won’t be able to do anything to save me. I can see that. Cheese toasts, cocktail samosas, chocolate eclairs, orange squash, and lemonade are served to the guests by young girls from Xavier’s village. Our schoolmates have all dressed up in saris and they look beautiful. From high up in the Tower, I train Sister Clementine’s binoculars down on them, feeling very sorry for myself. How did I get into this mess? Nothing good would ever come of it and I would be locked up here forever as punishment.

I scream, I shout, I pick up a tambourine and clatter it loudly. I wish I could play the trumpet. At one point, I hear footsteps. I shout, “Help!” but it seems they can’t hear me. Or I have imagined it.

I am let out of the Tower the next day, after the visitors have left. “I should thank you,” Sister Bertha says, “for being behind the effort that brought our representatives in Rome to our school. They have never visited before. Now they will return with glowing reports of our progress here. Of the education of the village children, of the general contentment that resides in our community after Christ was welcomed in everyone’s homes and hearts. If you had not written, they would never have come.”

I realize with a shock that she knows about my letter to Rome. “Yes, Sister Clementine told me about your letter to the Pope,” she says, with a hover of smile, as if reading my thoughts. “You wrote to the Pope in Rome!” she says suddenly, as if struck by some sort of absurdity. She laughs mirthlessly; she has been witness to countless such bold, desperate moves, I feel sure, and has mastered the art of aborting them. I see the family dinner table back home in Bombay awaiting me—the junta of aunties. “She wrote to the Pope, you know?”—the rolling of eyes, the accompanying sniggers.

When I finally find Sister Clementine in her room, she shrinks from me. “You were playing me!” I said. “Why?” In the end, she rushed to save her own bacon. She wasn’t someone I should have trusted in the first place. Sister Clementine says, “It wasn’t me. It was Sister Violet. She was outside the door the night I came to your room, listening to every word.” I don’t believe her.

Xavier begins avoiding me. He cannot endanger his job and his people, so he has accepted their fate. He has stopped wearing bird feathers in his turban, I note sadly. Sister Bertha has a new title, conferring higher status and authority: Mother Superior. Those who have quelled dissent will rule the world, I see it clearly now; their suns will never set.

—

Beena Kamlani is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer whose work has appeared in Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIII, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Identity Lessons: Learning to be American (Penguin, 1999), Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin, 2000), The Lifted Brow (Australia, 2008), World Literature Today, and other publications. She was awarded a grant in fiction from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and her manuscript Wheel of Fortune won the Yeovil Fiction Award (U.K.) in 2017. Her website www.awriterslifereadings.com was created during the pandemic in NYC and features readings and reflections. She is completing a novel.