Tell It to the Trees (10 page)

Part Two

ANU AND SUMAN

Anu’s Notebook

June 1, 1979
. I am here! And it is all I hoped for. Drove through the mountains for a few hours loving the fresh air blowing through my partially open window. A sign informed me that I was approaching Merrit’s Point, and within a few minutes the town centre appeared, heralded by a brief line of lamp-posts bedecked with flower baskets. I drove past a few small shops, a grocery store, a café, a church—and then it was finished—before I knew it I was on the highway again. I pressed down on the accelerator, pushing my rattling old car to greater feats of strength and daring, hurtled past darkly wooded patches loud with the chirr-chirring of cicadas and emerged into blinding sunlight. To the right of me the road hugged cliffs composed of scarred rock the colour of sunsets, to the left were fields of undulating green. In the distance the mountains—lavender and blue shading into gloomy purple and navy, smoke and carbon. Imperious, watchful. The jagged peaks still topped with snow.

I arrived at a T-junction and turned off the highway into Fir Tree Lane, a bit of a misnomer, I discovered, since there was not a single tree on it. It was a bald and ragged little lane, pitted and stony. I winced as my poor car bumped and ground and rattled over it, wheezing in exhaustion all the way.

A giant lake shimmered up suddenly, dark green with silver flecks where the sun caught on ripples. I passed a shuttered house, surrounded by weeds, a long stretch of broken-down fencing, and then I was at a gate with an incongruously ornate mailbox painted an iridescent green. My car rattled a few more times, sighed, shuddered and finally collapsed. I cursed aloud, climbed out and surveyed the emptiness stretching out all around me. A longish driveway curled away from the gate and ended at the Dharma house, which crouched low against the ground.

The earth sprawled warm and inviting as a lover beneath the sun. Somewhere an insect made a piercing call, like the high-pitched whine of telephone wires in my brother’s backyard in summer. A bee made straight for my face and I whacked furiously at the air, all my citygirl fears rising up—what if I was allergic to bee stings? I wished I had brought bug repellent with me. And antihistamines. And mosquito nets, and spears, and guns, and other things to protect me from this fearsome emptiness, this silence. Then I felt ridiculous. I had come here for the silence and the emptiness and now, within a few minutes, I was ready to run away.

Closer to the house, the scenery changed. A wild-looking garden rose up from the ground, with patches of yellow, pink, purple spreading out haphazardly in all directions. There was a shaggy clump of mock-orange shrubs in full flower, soaking the air with their fragrance. A giant peony, collapsed under the weight of massive magenta flowers, looked like a supplicant in a flouncy skirt praying on her knees.

A woman appeared from around the corner of the house and waved. She was wearing a sari—an incongruous sight in this landscape. I waved back, suddenly glad I was here, surrounded by all this untamed beauty, this quiet, about to meet a woman in a sari.

Suman

I remember when Anu arrived on a warm day in the beginning of summer. Winter was finally over, so my spirits had risen as a result. It was early in the afternoon. I was in the yard at the side of the house, hanging out the washing. I heard the low, uneven drone of a car as it approached the house and then a stutter and silence. A car door slammed. I realized it was probably our new tenant, Anu Krishnan—we had been expecting her earlier that day—though I wondered why she had stopped so far from the house.

It was Vikram’s idea to rent out the back-house. His hours were being cut at work, the company was bleeding money and might even close. Someone, maybe Joe Hutch, suggested that renting out the small cottage behind our house would bring in some extra money. I couldn’t imagine who would want to leave a bustling life in the city to stay in Merrit’s Point, but to my surprise Vikram had at least seven inquiries. People always want to run away from what they have, I suppose. Anu Krishnan said
she had been Vikram’s classmate at college, although he couldn’t remember her at all, and when a common friend told her about his advertisement in their alumni paper she decided to rent it for an entire year. She had paid us for six months in advance as an assurance that she would stay. I envied the woman her control over her life, her money, her future. It seemed she made the decisions, there was nobody she needed to consult. What would she make of me? I must be everything she wasn’t.

I could see the roof of the car glinting in the sun, beside our mailbox painted a bright green by Varsha and Hemant. They change the colour every year depending on Varsha’s current colour obsession. Hemant goes along with whatever she decrees. It bothers me sometimes, how much control my stepdaughter has over my son. Hemant told me once that he belonged to his sister because she saw him first. I don’t know what he meant, though he’s an imaginative little boy, given to strange thoughts. Besides, I am an only child, so I don’t really understand the pacts that siblings make, their secret world which excludes all adults.

I suppose I should be pleased that Varsha is so close to him. I am fond of her—but I am not entirely comfortable in her presence. She doesn’t resent me, I don’t think she ever has, and she’s ever eager to please. But she always seems to be watching me—I can feel those large black eyes all the time, even when she isn’t in the same room. When she was younger she would be glued to me, and on weekends, when she was home, I couldn’t leave the house
for even a moment without her following me or calling for me.

“Mama?” she used to shout, her voice panicky. “Mama? Where are you? Where are you?”

And what a fuss she would create over going to school! “Don’t want to go today,” she whined every morning. Or: “I feel sick.” She would vomit out her cereal to prove she was ill. At school, her teachers said she fidgeted and fought with other children, tilted her chair back so far that it crashed over, and then she would cry that she had a headache from the fall, was feeling dizzy, needed to go home. The teachers complained to me—or anyway they complained to Vikram—but I was as helpless as they were—she was not my child and I had little idea how to handle her. But when I asked Vikram what to do about her, he said in that cold, frightening voice he uses with me, “You are her mother, you have to deal with it. That’s why you are here.”

She will grow out of it, I told myself, trying hard to be a mother to the girl whose strange ways I could not understand. Her mother died, she is so young, she must still be feeling so insecure about it—as if that explained everything. And perhaps it did. I remembered how alone I had felt when my mother died. And how glad I had felt to have my Madhu Kaki. Perhaps the teachers thought so too. I think they worked hard to be kind to Varsha even though she must have tried their patience as thoroughly as she did mine. If I scolded her, she would complain to her father, who would in turn shout at me
for ill-treating her. Or he would smack her instead, depending on his mood.

Then one day I had had all that I could take from her and with some of my old spirit told her firmly that if she did not stop her nonsense immediately, I would go away. “You will not find me waiting for you at the bus stop, you will not find me at home,” I threatened. She turned white, the blood draining from her little face.

“Don’t you dare go away from us,” she shouted at me. “If you do, I will kill you, I promise, Mama, I will, I will.”

I laughed. “How can you kill me if I am already gone, Varsha?” I asked her, making her even more enraged.

“I will kill you before you go,” she said fiercely. I looked at her grim, tense face and was almost willing to believe her.

“What a thing to say, Varsha!” I was startled by her expression—so adult and a bit frightening, I have to admit. “If you kill me, you will still not have me here. I will be gone, so don’t say such silly things.”

“I’ll have your photograph on the wall next to my grandpa and we will still be a family,” she said.

I stared at my stepdaughter, baffled by her bizarre reasoning, which allowed her to think that a dead stepmother was better than one who had abandoned her. I thought it was Vikram’s fault. He had twisted the child’s mind. Then she smiled at me, radiantly, like the sun breaking through cloud gloom, and running to me, wrapped her arms around my legs so my momentary unease disappeared. A childish outburst, I told myself, nothing more, I should be glad
she cannot bear the thought of a life without me, that she has actually come to love me.

After that, though, Varsha stopped misbehaving. Her tantrums ceased, and except for her insistence on following me around—which is, after all, quite harmless—she is the perfect child.

The woman held out her hand and smiled at me. “Hello! I am Anu Krishnan. And you must be Mrs. Dharma?”

“Yes, but please to call me Suman.” I was suddenly conscious of my pronounced Indian accent which I have never managed to lose despite Vikram’s best efforts.
Why do you insist on talking like a village idiot? Make an effort, if you please
.

She had a chipped front tooth, I noticed. Olive skin, sweep of hair falling across a wide forehead, brown eyes, not much taller than me. She was smartly dressed in a summery shirt and tight jeans and had an air of confident strength about her.

I nodded towards her car. “Why did you leave that there? You can bring it in.”

“The wretched thing broke down. Probably ran out of gas. I suppose it is safe to leave it there? My bags are in the trunk.”

“Oh yes.” I nodded reassuringly. “Nobody comes here, so don’t worry.”

“Then I’ll go back when it’s a little cooler and get my things.”

“Vikram will help you.” I prayed that he wouldn’t be
angry with me for offering on his behalf. Even after eight years with him, I feel on shifting sands, fearful of his reactions to everything, anything.

We walked towards the house in silence and then she turned and smiled happily at me. “This is so lovely.”

She was very pretty, I realized. Her thick short hair was beautifully cut. Her skin glowed with health, her mouth shiny with a pale-coloured lipstick. I wondered what it was like to be her.

“I hope it will not be too boring for you,” I said self-consciously.

“Oh no! Just what I need. No distractions, oodles of space, and all this silence. I already feel I could live here forever. Perfect—complete isolation.”

I smiled politely. “You are taking some leave from work?” I asked. Was it possible to take an entire year off?

“I resigned. I need to think about where I am going. And to vegetate a bit. If it doesn’t work out, I can always pick up where I left off.”

Vegetate. What an odd word. Why would anyone wish to turn into a vegetable, I thought, be stuck in one place until somebody pulls you out or chops you up for the cooking pot? Although it’s true the woman couldn’t have found a better place in which to become a rooted vegetable—in Merrit’s Point, or Jehannum as Akka calls this town—the Urdu word for Hell, a place so deep that if a stone were to be thrown in, it would travel for seventy years to reach the bottom, with walls so thick it would take the equal of forty long years to cut through them.

“I am hoping to work on some stories,” Anu continued. “And this is the perfect place for it. No interruptions, nobody I know, nothing going on that I want to be a part of. Heaven!”

“That must be a nice thing to do,” I said vaguely. “What kind of stories? I mean, what will you write about?”

“I don’t know yet.” She shrugged. “That’s why I am here. To find material.”

“Here?” I laughed. “You think you will find a story in Merrit’s Point?
Nothing
happens here.”

“You
live
here, so it’s harder to recognize the stories even if they’re standing right in front of you. But I’m an outsider, everything is grist for the mill for me. All that I don’t know, or find strange, anything I wonder about, will turn into a story. At least, I hope it will. We’ll see.”

“What does your family think of this? Your husband? Are you married? Children?” I had not seen any markers of marriage—no rings, necklaces, bangles, nothing. But Anu was a Westerner, she had grown up here, in this country, not India, even if her ancestors came from there. I would discover that her signs and symbols were different, that she didn’t believe in any of those markers.

“Hah, the great Indian questions. I got asked them all the time when I went to India!” Anu gave a small, sarcastic laugh. “I was married for a year and a half but am not any longer, he was a jerk, and if you asked him, he’d tell you I was a bitch. No children, thank goodness, not that I have anything against them. I couldn’t be bothered with the diapers and breastfeeding and puking and all that
mothering stuff. I have one brother who doesn’t approve of me, but to his credit he doesn’t stop me from spoiling his kids—two boys who love and adore Aunty Anu. My mother is very old and kind of senile and in a nursing home. My father died a couple of years ago. I am forty-three years of age, and not looking for attachments for the time being. And yes, I admit, I must be crazy to have left a job with a fabulous salary, but I’ve always dreamed of writing stories, and so here I am, your tenant, hoping to have a book at the end of her stay. Or at least a draft.” She stopped, drew a deep breath, raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Anything else?”