Six Across, Belvedere

By Anita Kainthla

Belvedere is six across, six letters and of the six letters the third one is a 'Z'. This clue has me confounded because in my remembrance Belvedere is the name of a dainty princess living in a dreamy country called England, which in all likelihood, is always decorated with frills and flounces and where dainty princesses like Belvedere are sitting down for their evening tea with the accompaniment of cakes and muffins, in cozy armchairs with wildflower prints. This memory of Belvedere is from my childhood. But here Belvedere is acting as clue to a six lettered word which has two missing letters on one and three on the other side of ‘Z’ and is lying across a flat checkered square staring back at me like a stern abstinent nun in black and white. 

 ‘What?’ Belvedere has a synonymous counterpart? If it does then I was curious to know it. It would perhaps tell me more about Belvedere other than the fact that she was a dainty, cake and muffin eating princess. But the six lettered synonym of Belvedere that has two empty squares in front and three behind ‘Z’ looks like an old woman’s denture with missing teeth and makes me doubt as to whether Belvedere was really the name of a princess at all. So who or even maybe ‘what’ was Belvedere then? 

The crossword is the morning caffeine that gets me going.

‘Note’ is eight down and four letters. This one’s easy- a note is a memo. I fill out eight down with memo and that gives me the last letter of the six across, Belvedere. But even though I now have two letters out of the six, ‘Z’ in the third place and ‘O’ at the end, I’m unable to solve the six across. 

Close on the heels of encountering Belvedere during the morning crossword exercise there followed another instance linked to my childhood. This was my random running into Srikumar Sen’s ‘The Skinning Tree’ in an obscure book store in Coimbatore, in southern India. It is a big make shift sort of store which is always selling books at a heavy discount but has neither ever been shifted elsewhere nor even been reconstructed to a more permanent kind. I don’t mind or care either ways considering the fact that it's unbelievably large numbers of colossal stacks of books in every conceivable genre always makes me dizzy with delight. It’s a place I know I will always come to again and again but for then I restrict myself to buying about five books, out of which Srikumar Sen’s ‘The Skinning Tree’, is the one that I’m the most eager to read. Set in a boarding school in “Gaddi in the Ghor Hills in India, ‘The Skinning Tree’ won the Tibor Jones South Asian Prize for 2012. Most times I don’t trust blurbs and if I do read them it’s with generous amounts of skepticism. So I start reading the blurb to ‘The Skinning Tree’, with the necessary skepticism in place. The first sentence is longish:

“A child, who lives in his imagination at his grandmother’s house in Calcutta, is unable to cope with the real world when he is sent to a boarding school in northern India and finds himself involved in a tragedy”. 

This is as far as I go with the blurb; I ditch the rest of it. This is enough for me. The words ‘boarding school’, ‘northern India’ and ‘tragedy’ strangely are a summation of much of my own childhood.  Even if one was to dislodge these three words from their sentence they were sufficient clues to construct an important story of my childhood that had fogged up with 40 years of time dust that suddenly clears up in a matter of a few words. 

40 years ago I was at a boarding school in northern India and was witness to a tragedy so outlandish that sometimes I wonder if I’d dreamed it up or it had its own reality of blood and bones to it. The school I attended is the 153 year old Auckland House School at Shimla, the once summer capital of British India and now the capital of the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. The school has a junior and a senior section and when the bizarre tragedy unfolds I am in the junior section, which is called ‘Belvedere’. 

Many of the old buildings built by the British in Shimla are named either after the people that lived in it or the ones that had it built. Similarly Auckland House School is named after George Eden the 1st Earl of Auckland, who served as Governor General of India between 1836 and 1842. The school building first served as residence of the Earl of Auckland, when he bought the house for himself and his sisters in 1836. In1864 Rev. DÁquilar of Dalhousie conceived the idea of starting a school, and in1866 that idea was by put into action. Although the small cedar surrounded town of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh was the first choice for starting the school, on the insistence of the wife of Bishop Cotton the school was started at the Holly Lodge, situated on one of Shimla’s highest peak called Jakhu Hill. The school was curiously called The Punjab Girls School although its first batch of 32 girls was all European. Later when in 1868 Lord Auckland put up Auckland House for sale the school authorities bought the building and The Punjab Girls School was shifted from Holly Lodge and began functioning from Auckland House on 6th November 1869. Out of respect to its former owner it was decided that the building retain the previous owners name and that’s how Punjab Girls School came to be called Auckland House School. The Belvedere building was however acquired only in 1960 and made into the junior section of the school. Ten years after its acquisition I joined Belvedere in 1970 at the age of five. 

There was an unspoken understanding amongst the school attendees of the junior section of the Auckland House School, that Belvedere had in all probability been named either after Lord Auckland’s daughter, wife or sister. However the gap toothed synonym of Belvedere that I’ve come across in the crossword definitely doesn’t read like the name of an ancient Lord’s wife or daughter. I look up the Merriam –Webster online dictionary for the origin and synonym of Belvedere. Out of the six synonyms- alcove, casino, gazebo, kiosk, pavilion and summerhouse- the six lettered gazebo perfectly fits into the six across Belvedere. The origin of Belvedere in the Merriam-Webster is given as, “belvedere, is the ideal term for a building (or a part of a building) with a view; it derives from two Italian words, bel, which means “beautiful”, and vedere, which means “view”. Immediately I see that it made sense. Of course the Belvedere or the junior section of Auckland House School, separated from the senior section by a stretch of about 100 meters of concrete road, must have been the gazebo to Lord Auckland’s house. I had studied in Lord Auckland’s gazebo building all those years ago. Belvedere was then neither the name of his beautiful daughter or wife or sister; it was his beautiful building with a beautiful view which 40 years ago ironically became the site of an awful episode. 

There are several awful episodes in Sen’s semi autobiographical, ‘The Skinning Tree’, which takes me three days to finish and in the end I’m convinced that if I’d written a book about my school days it would have read exactly like ‘The Skinning Tree’ in essence. The rigid discipline, the uncompromising imposition of the rules of etiquette, the serious unsmiling nuns, the embarrassing punishments, the bullying, the entire gamut of tradition in mine and Sen’s north Indian boarding schools was identical. And what’s more, this tradition had remained unchanged even over the span of thirty years that lay between the timeline of mine and sen’s school days and several thousand kilometers that lay between locations of our schools. The Skinning Tree brings it all back and with it also the haunting story of my dorm mate, let’s call her Soumya. 

When I first joined Belvedere and walked through the entrance, the glistening dark brown banister slithering over an enormous spiral staircase sent shivers of a spooky fear all over my 5 year old body. The staircase led to tall ceilinged, cavernous dorm rooms and several other spaces enhancing the phantasmal that appeared to have made a comfortable existence inside belvedere. The loud thud-thudding of mine and the matron’s shoes, as we walked over the old hardwood floors added a beat to the eeriness and my clammy hands clutched more tightly to that of the matron’s. I looked up to seek out a reassuring smile on the white and black habited figure but her features were closed off and expressionless. So instead I looked down at my feet for strength till I was stopped and set beside my bunk bed and told that the upper rung was to be my bed. 

Soumya occupied the lower rung of the same bunk bed of which I was to occupy the upper one. She and I would to go on to become neither friends nor enemies as we were only dorm mates and not class mates. Soumya was two years my senior in school and she made her senior status clear on the very day I was assigned to the upper rung of the bed;

“Don’t step on my bed sheet when you climb up. Never wipe your feet with your towel. Never stand on your toes and try being taller than me”. Her speaking voice was base and slightly authoritative befitting a senior, but her singing voice was sweet and soothing like a friend. Even though we were all only five or six or seven year olds in the dorm, every Sunday afternoon mostly all of us very maturely gathered around Soumya to listen to her sing. The gathering of this attentive audience took place around mine and Soumya’s bunk bed, making our bed space a coveted spot. By virtue of my co-ownership of this coveted spot I collected the benefits from Soumya’s superfluous popularity, though not in her presence. I dared not incur the wrath of a senior and besides I did not want to jeopardize what little attention that I had begun to accumulate as it helped me to build up some confidence to battle my reticence. 

As Soumya grew in popularity I grew in self-assurance and slowly my dread of her seniority ebbed in little installments although it could never come to an end because there were specific lines one never crossed with ones seniors. Even if I was becoming more and more comfortable around her I wasn’t able to build a sociable relationship between us like other bunk mates had among them. Her large, bulbous, limpid eyes were evasive, her demeanor was secretive and her person jumpy leaving no space for edging in and forging even a loose tie of companionship with her. Although her popularity should have guaranteed her a more aggressive, brash and bullying persona she was incomprehensibly cautious and withdrawn. 

One year after I joined Belvedere war broke out between India and Pakistan. As six, seven and eight year olds, we were clueless about the politics of grownups and wars. At that age and during those times we were enamored by the mysterious rather than the violent and the war in our as yet unconditioned minds was a thing of mystery. We returned one day from our classes to this mystery and found huge ladders laid against the oval windows of our dorm rooms and several men in serious haste covering the windows with black chart papers. At night, the nuns in solemn whispers enforced silence upon us as we ate dinner sitting crouched on the floor in the middle of our dorms. Instead of electric bulbs that day the dorms were lit with candles that threw animated shadows on everything, making the hushed up atmosphere mysterious and exciting. In this obligatory silence our eyes exchanged adrenaline infused looks and the puckered corners of our little mouths broke into compressed grins, completely oblivious to the anarchy that brave righteous men were unleashing upon one another in the world. 

The next day we were given a name for all the black chat paper coverings and the essential silence of the previous night. It was called a blackout. Strict instructions flew out during the morning assembly about the necessity of maintaining silence at night, eating food in the dorm and not meddling with the black chart paper, otherwise the Pakistanis would know where we lived and throw bombs on our school roof. The mystery of war became imbued with fear and the black chart paper boarded Auckland House School looked ethereal and felt haunted. However, in two week’s time the mystery of war passed away and with it the blackout but another horror, that of stormy monsoon nights, was yet to be experienced. 

Being on the upper rung of the bed I was closer to the ceiling and right above my bed was a beautiful skylight through which I gazed at the stars on clear nights and dreamed of a world as I imagined it outside the fortress of the school building. On rainy stormy nights though, I never got a wink of sleep till as long as the deafening thunder released nonstop silver fangs of lightening across the clouded skies. I passed an entire monsoon in dread and sleeplessness but during one such turbulent night of the next monsoon Soumya climbed onto my bed in the thick of the storm and snuggled up against me. As baffling as this was I awaited Soumya’s explanation of it but she never offered any and I never gathered the nerve to seek one. We never spoke about it; it was something that just began to happen one night and continued happening whenever the rain beat against the skylight above my bed. 

Without being friends Soumya and I spent two monsoons in Belvedere as bunk mates who gathered keen audiences for musical sessions around our bed on weekends and snuggled in my bed on stormy nights. And when I was in my second year of autumn at Belvedere Soumya was gone just like that. After a comforting night of nestling in my bed with Soumya, I awoke to the shrill panicking voice of the matron intermingled with the softer notes of my dorm mates. The commotion was centered around mine and Soumya’s bed space as usual but this time it wasn’t musical;

“Where’s Soumya? Where’s Soumya?”These were some of the more enthusiastic girls bouncing on their toes to reach my bed and tugging at my bed clothes as they demanded an answer.

“Where’s Soumya”? This was the matron who was able to reach my bed without bouncing up but had the same question as the girls.

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s in the bathroom”. This was me, scared that this had something to do with the bed sharing between me and my bed mate and that if I was demanded an explanation about it I’d have none as it was for Soumya to explain it and now she was gone. But it didn’t come to that because no one suspected anything about the cuddling; everyone was only engaged in looking for Soumya. Looking for her in the bathroom, in the other dorms, in the sick room, in the refectory, in Miss Atkins’ office, in the play room, in the playground. She was nowhere. Everywhere there was only panic. 

‘How could she go? And where could she go?’ ‘Where are you Soumya?’ I was scared and I was guilty. I felt I was somehow responsible. I was seven years old, I did not understand what I had done wrong for this to have happened. 

‘Soumya please come back?’I closed my eyes and tried retracing my memory but I could only go as far as Soumya creeping into my bed and me falling into a fearless dreamless sleep on a stormy night. 

The monsoon had retracted over a month ago and even autumn had completed a whole month; the night that Soumya disappeared an occasional autumn shower tapped against my skylight as though signaling to Soumya to climb up into my bed and she did. The autumnal shower that night was gentle but what was scary was the fact that it was 31st October. It was Lord Auckland’s birthday, it was the day of ghosts. Auckland House School was redolent with ghost stories- there were stories of headless nuns walking the perimeter of the playing ground, of the apparitions of the European alumni bullying little girls, of the grand piano in the main hall playing itself and the piano stool bearing impressions of a skeletal bottom. But the scariest of all stories were the ones linked to Lord Auckland himself. Of all the numerous bizarre stories linked to him, the most frightening was the one in which Lord Auckland handed out blood filled mugs when someone went into the bathroom or poured mugs of blood on girls that went in alone to bathe. On 31st October no one ever closed the bathroom doors or went in alone. 

The matron, the teachers and Miss Atkins the house mistress of Belvedere explained Soumya’s disappearance as a kidnapping by some laborers working on a construction site right outside the school. Having woken up early Soumya walked down the wooden staircase with the creepy banister into the playground when the laborers vanished with her. But I suspected that story; I imagined Soumya as having an intense urge to use the toilet on the night of her disappearance offering Lord Auckland an easy chance to kidnap her. Whether it was the blackout of war or the disturbing stories of dead alumni, deceased ex-owners or departed nuns, the sinister sense attached to the school made my story more plausible, at least to me. 

For the three days that Soumya remained in disappearance I remained in sleeplessness. Fear, guilt and confusion generated pools of cold sweat that wet my bed clothes for three nights in a row. Sometimes I fell into short fits of disturbed sleep but every insignificant fragment of sound shook me awake in a fresh burst of sweat. If I kept my eyes open animated shadows played tricks with my imagination in the dark and if I shut them, sinister dreams sent me into uncontrollable shivers. ‘Where could she be?’

She was back three days later. The school authorities stuck with their story of her abduction by the laborers but I still didn’t believe it. Soumya was made to stand up on the stage during assembly for us to hear her tale of abduction narrated by one of the teachers eulogizing not only her singular courage in breaking free from her captors but her upright obedient character at all times. There was a painful scar under one of her eyes, which was paraded like a battle honor earned by her in her brave fight with the kidnappers. Soumya was not asked to speak for herself and even if she had been asked to speak, her stupefaction wouldn’t have allowed any words out of her. Her limpid bulbous eyes that I knew so well had changed from evasive to empty and when these empty eyes caught my gaze they just stayed there as though they’d ultimately found some comforting thing.

After Soumya’s reappearance we were bed mates all over again but I was so struck by nervousness that my resolve to get the truth behind her abduction weakened very quickly on seeing her. Autumn and its showers were now over as we were entering winter and no stormy night meant no bed sharing. But despite it being a quiet starry night sky Soumya quietly climbed into my bed, surprising me. In a few minutes she began sobbing and mumbling at the same time making it hard for me to understand much of what she said. Her sentences were suffused with hiccough-y sobs and all I got from them were bits; she was in a closet somewhere, it was dark, she was scared, maybe there was Lord Auckland but she wasn’t sure, she got hurt and that she was leaving the school soon. Even though I didn’t get the whole story, my hunch that the abduction story told by the school authorities wasn’t quite true was after all correct. Could it then be Lord Auckland himself who’d come for her on his birthday as he always did on 31st October, or was it one of the headless nuns or an alumni?  I never did get to know but in Auckland we took the stories of our dead as seriously we did those of the living. The next day in the evening Soumya’s parents came and took her out of school. 

By Anita Kainthla