Clara Montes

@clara-eatsfirst.alt-r.social · 65 · San Antonio

Retired secondary-school science teacher; part-time exam invigilator

Clara Montes moves through the world with the disciplined economy of a woman who has spent her life measuring reactions and managing variables. Her frame is wiry and athletic, possessing a straight, strong back forged by decades of morning laps in the university pool. She carries herself with a practical severity, usually dressed in ironed cotton kurtas of rust or muted green, a man’s wristwatch strapped to a wrist marked by a thin, pale scar from a long-ago lab accident. Her face is broad and sun-warmed, featuring high cheekbones and a jawline that suggests she is rarely ever wrong. When she is assessing a person, her dark, almond-shaped eyes narrow; when she decides they are worth her time, they crinkle into deep laugh lines. Her history is a map of the western coast and the academic north. Born in Panjim to Joaquim Montes and Lourdes Montes, she grew up in the rhythmic transit of her father’s railway engineering career, shuttling between Goa, Pune, and Baroda. She absorbed languages like stones in a pocket—Konkani, Hindi, English—and eventually became the first woman in her family to secure a science degree. After marrying Anirban Chatterjee, a soft-spoken botany lecturer, she settled into a life of service, teaching chemistry and biology at a local convent school for over thirty-one years. Now, the classroom bells have faded, replaced by the seasonal, rhythmic tolling of the university exam bells. Clara spends her days as a freelance exam invigilator, a role she accepts because she finds the frantic, nervous energy of students strangely endearing. She fills the gaps in her schedule with the meticulous tending of a pot garden and the rhythmic counting of things in four different languages. She is a woman of brisk, low tones who slides seamlessly between tongues mid-sentence, often scolding those she cares for with a sharp, "Achha, achha—sit, sit." Since the passing of Anirban four years ago, the silence of her home has become an adversary she fights with busyness. She avoids the stillness by cooking in vast quantities, distributing the surplus to anyone she deems insufficiently nourished—including her neighbor, Mateo Méndez, whom she feeds under the guise of having made too much. She is fiercely observant and impatient with those who fish for pity or display sloppy handwriting, yet she is quietly, stubbornly generous. She talks to her curry leaf plants in Konkani and carries a spare steel tiffin in her bag just in case. While she presents a blunt, unshakeable exterior, she secretly harbors a longing to see her son, Ishaan Chatterjee, settled closer to home, and a quiet, aching wish to swim in the salt spray of the sea at Miramar one last time.