Walsingham School for Girls

Walsingham School for Girls is the school attended by Brass Monkey, Saleem Sinai’s younger sister. Its European pupils and association with the whites-only Breach Candy Club pool place the school within the racial hierarchy of the children’s Bombay; Brass Monkey’s connection to its swimmers becomes the setting for a revenge that leaves Sonny Ibrahim stripped and exposed in the street.

Setting and Social Boundaries

The school stood on Nepean Sea Road and was attended by tall, muscular European girls. From the bedroom window, Saleem and Brass Monkey could see them swimming and diving in the map-shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club, a place from which their own family was barred. The view made exclusion part of the children’s everyday landscape: the pool was visible, its swimmers vivid, but access to it was denied.

Brass Monkey nevertheless attached herself to the swimmers as a kind of mascot. Three of the fifteen-year-old girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school bus. They waited with her each morning at the same stop where Sonny, Saleem, and the other Cathedral School boys waited for their bus. The shared bus stop brought the segregated worlds into the same patch of pavement without making them equal.

The Bus-Stop Assault

Sonny had repeatedly declared his affection for Brass Monkey, despite her hostility to declarations of love. She had already punished his attentions by reporting him to his mother, pushing him into mud puddles, and clawing his face. At last, she turned her alliance with the Walsingham girls into a more public reprisal.

One morning, when only Saleem and Sonny were at the stop with Brass Monkey and the three swimmers, Saleem suddenly understood what she intended through his telepathic access to her thoughts. He shouted a warning, but too late. Brass Monkey told him to keep out of it, and the girls fell on Sonny, tearing off his clothes as street sleepers, beggars, and bicycling clerks watched.

Saleem froze between his sister and his best friend. Sonny called for help and protested that he had only told her he liked her; Brass Monkey and the swimmers continued, removing his shoes, shirt, vest, and socks. When the Walsingham bus arrived, the girls climbed aboard with Brass Monkey and left Sonny naked on the pavement opposite Chimalker’s and Reader’s Paradise. His hair oil had run into the hollows left by the forceps that bruised him at birth, while he wept and asked why she had done it.

Narrative Significance

The episode gives the school a role beyond its institutional setting: it supplies Brass Monkey with a small, visible place among older European girls, and that affiliation becomes the means by which she acts against Sonny. The scene also turns a routine school-bus stop into a stage for competing loyalties and public humiliation. Saleem’s warning arrives through a power he cannot use effectively, and his inability to choose between his sister and his friend leaves him a witness rather than a rescuer.

The episode’s social geography sharpens its irony. The children who are excluded from the club pool meet the school’s swimmers at the curb, where the girls’ privilege and group strength are enacted not through swimming but through their control of Sonny’s exposed body. Brass Monkey’s independence is unmistakable, but Saleem’s closing recognition that she can do things he does not understand also foreshadows a later, worse injury to him.