Tell It to the Trees (11 page)

“So sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you,” I stammered, feeling foolish, feeling like I do when I say something that annoys Vikram, makes him look at me as if I am ridiculous.

“No, no, I’m not offended at all!” Anu stopped in her tracks and caught my arm. “Why should I be?
I
apologize for sounding like I did. It’s just that, for a moment there, I thought I was back in India, all those ammas and aunties checking me out as a prospective bride. You know what I mean, right?”

I smiled and nodded. “Yes, I do. They grab you by the chin and turn your face this way and that, ask you all kinds of things about private matters, as if you are for sale or something. They used to do that to me all the time.” And then Vikram came along, asked nothing, and like a fool I married him. Of course I don’t say this to the bright, sparkling woman who has arrived at our door.

“Checking to see if you have grown an extra ear or are hiding a mole.” Anu chuckled. “So, tell me, Suman, where in India do you come from? Village, tribe, caste, sub-caste, etc, etc.”

“I am from Madras, down south, near the sea.” I was silent for a few minutes, thinking of a narrow gully, the shadow of an ancient temple that was still, always, superimposed on my dreams. “And you? You are also hailing from the south, I think?” I couldn’t catch the little Indianism before it slipped out of my mouth. “I mean, you come from the south? From your name it seems so.”

“Hailing from is much more interesting, I think,” Anu said. “I hail from Tamil Nadu on my father’s side and Bengal on my mother’s. They met at university and I am told it was love at first sight. I think my poor mother died a little bit when my father did and she’s gone rapidly downhill since then. Now she hardly knows who we are. She is waiting to end.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” I said. “It must be very difficult for you.”

We had stopped at the front door. “Would you like to come in and have some juice or cold water? Then I can take you to the back-house.”

“Juice would be lovely, thanks.” Anu trailed after me into the kitchen. She peered out of the window at the green wilderness outside. “No kitchen garden?”

“We had a very nice one before. My mother-in-law, you know. She has green fingers, everything she put in the ground grew. Such huge zucchini and tomatoes—even
after squirrels and the birds got their share, we had so much. I tried to keep it going for a while, but I am not very good at it. Now I have given up. Only some herbs and chilies I plant.”

“Does your mother-in-law live here with you?”

“Yes, she is old, and can’t move. She had a stroke a few years ago. But her mind is still very sharp—although after her stroke, sometimes she wanders. Poor thing, she has her good days and bad ones also.”

As if she knew we were speaking about her, Akka called out from her room. “Suman, is she here? Our tenant?”

I gave Anu an apologetic look. “She likes company. Is it okay? You will come in and say hello to her? If you don’t mind, of course.”

“I would love to meet her,” Anu said enthusiastically. “I like old people. They have the most amazing stories, the rich material of a long life.”

I nodded. This woman was determined to find stories under every stone, it seemed to me.

Akka beamed at us and patted the bed beside her chair. “Come, sit, talk to me. It is a long time since one of Vikram’s friends visited.”

I excused myself. “I have to hang the clothes, Akka. I left them lying outside in a bundle in the basin.”

Akka waved impatiently at me. “Tchah! Sit for two minutes, nothing will happen that hasn’t happened already to those sheets.” She turned to Anu. “Did I hear you say something about stories? I could tell you plenty.”

“In that case, I will be here every day,” Anu laughed.

I made for the door. “Oh no! Look at the time! The children must be wondering why I am not there.”

“Suman, Varsha is old enough to bring her brother home from the bus stop on her own,” Akka said firmly. “For goodness’ sake, she’s thirteen. I don’t know why you need to go every day all the way there and wait. It is not as if there are twenty confusing roads from there to here! Sit. They will be all right without you.”

“They will be upset,” I insisted. “Hem expects me to be there. And Vikram is particular about it.”

“He can stop expecting for one day. And we won’t tell Vikram. You spoil those children, give in too much to everything they want. Sit, I say, I will tell them it was my decision.” She turned back to Anu. “Now tell me about yourself and why you want to sit in a hut in this Jehannum all summer.”

Anu did not complain about anything. Even when she entered our glorified shack—for that is what it really is—she was full of enthusiasm.

“How pretty it looks,” she said, noticing the effort I’d taken to turn the place into a home of sorts with colourful cushions and good pots and pans, which I’d bought when Vikram took us all to town for our weekly groceries the Saturday before. I even found some ancient fashion magazines inside an unused cupboard, which I assume belonged to Vikram’s first wife.

Anu was like that—never failed to say something
kind about everything I did. In those warm summer months she would come over often, to chat or tease Akka, her voice bright and happy as she talked, or potter around in the back garden while I cooked in the kitchen. At first we never told Vikram about her visits—neither Akka nor I—we had a pact of silence about certain things. I don’t know why Akka kept quiet, but I did because I didn’t know how Vikram would react. He might have objected. It wasn’t included in her rental contract, he might have said, to be entertained by her landlady. And somehow Anu had understood that she was not to mention her visits either. I had worried about Varsha reporting to her father, the way she is given to doing, to get a pat on the head from him, his approval. We all do it. Anything to avoid his anger. All of us carrying tales to him about each other, falling over ourselves to be in his good books, I as childish as my stepdaughter.

In the end it was Akka who came up with the idea of telling Vikram, if he asked, that she was responsible for Anu’s visits in the afternoon. “I’ll tell him I don’t feel very safe alone in the house when you go off to fetch the children,” my mother-in-law said, patting my arm one morning when I was helping her with her bath. “I’ll say it is comforting to have Anu here with me. He won’t object to that, you’ll see.” By the time the summer holidays began, everyone had gotten used to Anu’s frequent presence in the house, taking tea with Akka. In any case, even before that it never came up, and now it does not matter. Akka is in hospital, tethered to her bed by
intravenous tubes, lost inside the ruined corridors of her brain, waiting for death which hovers over her, fills her lungs with rattling stones, her eyes with grey mist.

And Anu is gone.

Anu’s Notebook

June 10
. The Dharma house is truly isolated. The only inhabited building for miles around. The neighbour’s place, the abandoned-looking structure I passed on my way down Fir Tree Lane, has been lying vacant since its owner’s departure a few years ago. Suman is worried, I think, that the wilder local kids from Merrit’s Point come out to smoke and drink there—there are no doubt some tough kids in this area.

My cottage, or back-house as the Dharmas call it, is a small, bare studio with windows on one wall, a kitchenette with an ancient stove and a stained sink, a bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed tub, and a wooden table where I work. Fanning out in all directions around it are trees and shrubs and creeping undergrowth creating a cool, greenish-gold light which I find soothing. Suman tells me there is nothing beyond the surrounding trees except more of the same. I intend to explore farther as soon as possible.

This morning I woke early, headed out for a walk down that bald lane and stopped by the lake. The dark
green surface of the water was stretched tight, like skin on a drum. Insects hummed up in black swarms from the jumble of vegetation rimming it.
Plip-plop
—a fish or a frog leapt out of the water, was suspended in light for a moment, a scaly, shimmering angel, and fell back in. Rings of water pulsed away from that small movement and I expected a northern naiad to rise out dramatically.

In the afternoon I bumped into the children Varsha and Hemant.

“Hello, how are you?” The girl is always polite.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I replied. “I spent the morning beside your lake. It’s lovely.”

“It’s not our lake,” the girl said.

“There are dead bodies in it,” the boy added.

What an imagination! “How do you know? Have you seen any?” I asked.

The child gave me a serious look. “Varsha said.”

Even in the short time I’ve been here—and I don’t see the kids that often—I’ve discovered it is Hemant’s favourite response to most questions.
Varsha said
. The two of them are stuck to each other like halves of a clamshell.

The lane, the lake, the trees and the mountains, the abandoned house, the main road—that pretty much defines our immediate surroundings. I am not complaining. This is what I wanted: isolation, time to think and write, silence. The silence, especially, is astonishing. I can hear my own breath even in the middle of the morning. Tonight I stood outside and stared up at the vastness of the night sky with stars spilling in grand
chaos in every direction, so close I feel I can reach out and pluck them like jewelled fruit. I imagine Vikram’s father, Mr. J.K. Dharma, who built this house, standing here much as I did, squinting up at the sky, his head cocked as he listened for sounds and hearing only the wind in the brooding darkness of the trees and the bullfrogs striking up their deep contrapuntal croaking. Perhaps the silence filled him with contentment. In India he must have grown up in a house packed with children and relatives, in a city crowded with sounds, and longed to get away from it all. I could make up anything about this unknown, unknowable man and it could be true. In a landscape such as this one, wiped clean at regular intervals by the snow, histories are surely re-created a hundred times over, memories minted anew, and nobody minds or cares.

June 15
. I have set up a schedule of sorts for my day, starting with a walk in the morning, sometimes catching up with Suman and the children on their way to the bus stop at the T-junction where the highway meets Fir Tree Lane. Then I settle down at my desk to write for three or four hours, regardless of whether the creative juices are flowing or not, break for lunch, sit down again at the desk, then take a break for tea with the Dharma women. If Akka is feeling well and Suman isn’t too busy. Without the discipline, I might not get any writing done at all! A nap, some more work or not, and then it’s time for bed.

Now my car is back from the service station, I sometimes drive into Merrit’s Point for a coffee and groceries. The small town has a tentative, ephemeral quality to it, as if it knows in its bones that the mountains clambering over each other to peer down at it from all sides will someday slide down and obliterate it, or that winter one year in the near future will never leave and we will be conquered by snow at last.

A long time ago it was a thriving community, I’m told, famous for its copper mines. The tiny local library has some good photographs of the founder, Alfie Merrit. The pleasant young librarian, Laura, told me that according to legend, Alfie thought he was on the trail of gold. He hacked through wild roses and brambles that climbed in thorny tangles along the edges of pine forests, crossed jewelled lakes and nameless mountains, followed by a few other fools all dreaming of great wealth. There was no gold, but they found copper, which dried up within ten years, moved to lumber, which they chopped down faster than it would grow, and ever since, still waiting for the earth to regenerate itself and reveal more treasures, the town has slipped ever deeper into obscurity. Each year, Laura complained, more and more people, the younger lot especially, pack their bags and move to busier towns and cities and never return except for the funerals of the ones they’ve left behind. I said I’d noticed that the single main street that runs through the town is crowded with grey-haired grannies and grandfathers scooting around in wheelchairs, or pushing themselves painfully along with
their walkers. And outside of town, abandoned houses dot the empty landscape like dead flies, shuttered windows gazing sightlessly at passersby.

The town is, to be honest, a grey place now, although Mrs. Jellinek, one of its inhabitants, feels otherwise. She seems to be—or thinks she is—the la-di-dah, high-mucky-muck of Merrit’s Point. Last Friday, I bumped into her almost as soon as I pulled up in the parking lot of the post office. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and looked like a stringy chicken in clothes, I thought meanly, and immediately felt ashamed since she was prancing along quite happily.

“My nephew is coming to visit this afternoon,” Mrs. Jellinek said, wrapping bony fingers around my wrist firmly. “He’s a big shot in Vancouver, you know. Engaged to Violet Williams—do you know the Williamses?”

I shook my head, mystified. Why on earth would she expect me to know the Williamses! “Also big shots?” I hazarded, since it was obvious that Mrs. J. associates only with that variety.

She opened her eyes wide. “Oh yes, my dear, Very Important People. Very Old Family. Rooted. My nephew is blessed, you know.”

“I am sure,” I said.

“He is coming here to invest in property.” I could see Mrs. J. was climbing onto a favourite hobby horse and was about to start rocking away for all she was worth. “Mark my words, this town has gold written all over it. You better get yourself a piece of the pie, dear.” She leaned closer
and whispered, “I have some land you might want to consider.”

She is not the only colourful character in town; there are a few more. The coffee shop, for example, is run by a vast man named Bradford. He has grey-blond hair receding from his forehead in a C-shaped curve and creeping down the back of his neck like a hairy question mark. He dresses like Elvis Presley and occasionally entertains his customers by singing for them. Rather well, too. He told me quite seriously that he is a reincarnation of Elvis and was offended when I laughed. He is a chatty fellow, full of interesting little tidbits about people and events in the little town, and since his café is the only one that serves half-decent coffee, I always go in when I am there. He has three employees: two girls around seventeen or so and a younger boy, Nick, who helps out on weekends.