Tell It to the Trees (14 page)

“Oh Akka, that’s not funny,” Varsha groaned.

I giggled. “Not me Akka, not me, it must have been her”—holding my nose too to show I was not the one.

“Unh-unh, wasn’t me,” Varsha said. I could hear a smiling in her voice now. She tickled Akka and said, “It must be you Akka, nobody else here in this room.”

Akka cackled. “The loud fart makes the most noise, the medium one is neither here nor there, the quiet one it is that makes your life a stinking misery.” She tickled Varsha back and whispered, “Tell, tell the truth, who let it out? Not me, not me for sure. Aha! I know who it is, this little boy with a big stinky stomach.” It was an old joke that Akka said to make us laugh when we were sad. She’s told us a zillion times but I still like it. She waved the air with one hand and went
hee-hee-hee
like in the cartoons. She doesn’t have many teeth, Akka, and her mouth is gummy-pink open wide, and her gold bangles, she says two for my wife and two for Varsha when we grow up and get married, going
chink-a-chink
. Sometimes she got Mama to dress her up in the morning like she was going to a party, big shiny earrings, flowers in her white hair, and black stuff around her eyes to make them look big as a deer’s. She said it was fun and made us dress up too sometimes.

There are lots of comforters on Akka’s bed because she’s always shivering. Our grandmother says she’s always cold because her bones are filled with ice from having lived for too many years in Canada. What would happen if Akka turned too warm and the ice in her bones melted? Or if her bones cracked from the pressure of the ice
crick-crack
like the hearts of trees in winter time? When I tell my secrets to Tree and then I put my ear against it, sometimes I can hear its heart bursting apart from the water inside turning into ice then melting and freezing again. I thought maybe the water would flow out of Akka like many rivers, wetting Varsha and me as we hugged her tight, soaking our nice warm bed, messing up the floor. Then our Papa would come thundering down, his eyes red, his hands raised to smack us. He would never touch Akka of course. She was his mama. But I was scared because he would blame Varsha and me for the water from our grandmother’s bones that dripped down and made a mighty flood.

“He can’t help it because he has a demon in his blood, in his marrow,” Akka whispered. I could feel her old breath like a feather on my face. “Your father, from his own father he got it. It breaks my heart, it does it does.”

“Is it the demon that lives on that side of the gate, Akka, the one Mama told us about?” I asked. We were never to wander out beyond the gate especially after dark because a demon lived there who ate children for breakfastlunchdinnertea.

“No, this one is embroidered into the pattern of his
skin, it is coiled in his intestines,” Akka said. “A demon laid a curse on Papa’s father’s head when he was a boy, just like the wicked fairy in Sleeping Beauty.” She scowled ferociously. She is always angry when she talks about my dead grandpa. Varsha says it’s because he was mean to her. “Then the same demon laid an evil eye on your Papa because he was so good and handsome.”

So I see a large mean eye floating in the air above Papa’s head, shooting out wicked lightning bolts at him, turning him from a good child and making him an angry roaring demon man. What if the eye decides to look at me? Or Varsha? Maybe we will turn into a monster like our Papa. Then there will be nobody left to take care of Mama and me. Akka is way too old and pretty soon she’ll be dead, she keeps telling us so. “I shouldn’t be alive!” She wheezes and laughs in her voice that cracks, and she looks up at the ceiling as if god is sitting up there on the chocolate brown fan with the big fat light hanging from it. “Why is that fellow up there keeping me here? Hey you, do you hear, send me a ladder, it’s time for me to climb up or down, I don’t know and don’t care. All I want is that ladder. Too long too long I have been here. I am bored I am tired I am old. Hey you, listen to me!”

But another time Akka said Papa was the way he was not because of a demon inside him but because of the genes that came to him from his father Mr. J.K. Dharma. Genes are something you get from ancestors, like our house and money, and cut glass decanters and the green sofa that has a leg missing and has to be propped up with
a brick made of newspaper, and Mama’s jewellery which Varsha says is hers because she is a girl and girls get their mother’s stuff. I don’t think that’s fair since Mama is only her stepmother and she already has Real Mother’s jewels. But when I say so, Varsha gets mad at me. She says she will curse me with the evil eye if I ever ever
ever
again say that Mama is not hers. She will curse me and she will summon all the ghosts in the world to carry me away and torture me. “She is mine, you are mine, everybody in this house is mine, you miserable runt.” She screamed this at me. She scared me so much I decided to stay under my bed for a whole entire morning.

“Your Papa was a good boy,” Akka said bitterly. I watched the little drops of water that leaked slowly out of the corners of her eyes. They caught in the pouchy skin underneath, and then spilled down her cheeks. Varsha wiped them away gently, licking her fingers like she was licking away our grandmother’s sadness. “But he got his father’s genes, he got his father’s demons. That’s why he gets so angry, my children. That’s why.”

I don’t like thinking about demons torturing my Papa’s intestines, making him go crazy when he looks at us or at Mama. When he opens his mouth to yawn or laugh I wait for the demon to come out from inside of him in a puff of dark smoke. I’m sure I can see it moving around.

“Can’t a doctor cure our Papa?” I asked.

Akka said some illnesses have no cure except death. “When I see what he does to your mother, it hurts my heart.”

And I hugged Akka back because my heart was hurting too.

When we woke up, everything was okay again. Mama was in the kitchen. She was making scrambled eggs for us. Papa was sitting at the table all dressed and ready to go to work.

“Did you sleep well, my pieces of the moon?” Mama asked when we came into the kitchen. She smiled at me. She had a bruise on her face just below her eye. It was like a purple-pink flower.

Varsha said, “Yes Mama we did, thank you.”

I looked at my sister because she’d forgotten about the night time. “Mama, you got hurt.” I pointed to her face. “Papa, look!”

“Did I? Where?” She smiled at us all this time.

“On your face,” I said. “It’s a funny colour.”

“Really?” She shrugged. “I must have bumped into something last night.”

“Too much of an imagination, just like your mother.” Papa slapped Mama’s bottom and pulled her close to him. She touched Papa’s hair but her eyes looked at Varsha and me. Her eyes were trying to say something to us without words but I wasn’t sure what it was.

Then Papa left for work. When we were all dressed Mama walked Varsha and me to the bus stop at the end of the road, all of us wrapped tight, holding hands because the snow was blowing so hard. If we held hands we would be fine even if we couldn’t see anything and got lost.
Varsha said if we did get lost it would be together as a family and a family that sticks together succeeds together.

“Remember, don’t tell anyone at school anything, understand?” Mama’s voice was coming out of her muffler like it was all wrapped up in wool.

Varsha was kicking at the snow as she walked. She picked up a fallen branch and hit the air hard with it.
Flick-flickety-flick!
It sounded like Papa’s belt just before it lands on my skin when I’ve done something bad andletdowntheDharmaname, and I thought, Don’t tell anyone what.

Anu’s Notebook

August 22
. The children are just hanging around again today. They must be bored. No other kids to play with here—they don’t bring friends home. I think they’ve been snooping inside my hut; some of my things aren’t where I remember putting them. A few days ago, I returned from a trip to town to find my notebook open. I’m certain I’d closed it when I left the house. I must lock the door, which I don’t always remember to do—the emptiness of this place makes me feel I’m safe. Perhaps I’m being too suspicious, but they are an odd pair those two. I see them often roaming around the property. Their favourite spot seems to be a spectacularly tall old conifer some way off to the right of my house.

Yesterday afternoon I wandered up to them, curious about what they were up to. They had their faces pressed against the trunk of the tree, arms wrapped around it as far as they could reach. I think they were singing, or maybe chanting something in low tones. The
girl noticed me first. She leapt away from the tree and really glowered at me.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You can’t come here.”

“Why not?” I tried to sound mild, not offended as I was. “Nobody told me I was forbidden to go anywhere on this property.”

“Well, I’m telling you now, so make sure you don’t come here again,” she said peremptorily.

“Why? Is there something special about this spot?” I was not appreciating her ordering me around.

“Yes, it’s
our
place. This is
our
tree. You can’t come here. You can’t touch
our
tree.”

“Our
tree,” Hemant repeated.

The little boy is, as usual, glued to his sister. If I spot one, I know the other is not too far away. He never says anything without his sister’s permission, and when he does, it’s to repeat a bit of whatever she has just said, like a weird echo. They don’t like me, they made that quite clear the first day when I arrived, when they crashed into the room, scowling and furious. Even my bribes of pastries and other goodies that I take over to the house haven’t made much of a dent in their hostility. They gobble it up, thank me because they’re supposed to, and disappear off somewhere. They seem to blame me because their mother hadn’t gone to meet them the day I arrived, the pampered brats!

“We waited for you!” Varsha had said, glaring at her stepmother.

“I am sorry, Vashi.” Suman tried to hug the girl, who evaded her arms and continued to sulk. “I am sorry, it won’t happen again.”

“We waited and waited and Hem was getting really terrified something had happened to you.” Varsha sounded like a schoolteacher and Suman an errant child, and I wondered how on earth Suman allowed the little bully to push her around like that. Now I understand the family dynamic a little better, I realize Suman lets
everyone
push her around.

“You’re old enough to bring your little brother home, aren’t you?” I said in the kind of voice I use with my brother’s kids. I shouldn’t have poked my nose in since I was a stranger just arrived, but I guess I thought I was being friendly and aunty-ish. The girl obviously didn’t.

“Who are
you?”
she said, giving me a look that’s become familiar to me—a mixture of scorn and irritation.

“She is our new tenant, Varsha,” Suman said. “Anu Krishnan. I told you she was arriving today, don’t you remember?”

The boy had climbed onto his grandmother’s bed. “MY grandmother,” he said in a baby voice, kissing Akka’s face extravagantly.

I smiled at him and said, “Lucky boy to have such a wonderful grandma!” or some such, I don’t remember. I do recall with embarrassment that the girl irritated me so much I was ready to smack her. I reminded myself, as
I find myself doing practically every time I talk to her, that I am an adult and childish spite is not an adult option. The boy continued to stare suspiciously at me with those prominent eyes of his, as if he expected to catch me red-handed at something. But Akka seems genuinely attached to the boy and his awful sister. She stroked their heads and fussed over them and seemed not to notice they were ill-mannered brats. I was definitely not a part of the cuddly unit of three that afternoon—and when Suman started clucking about school and homework I decided it was time for me to leave.

The girl is a malevolent little spider with her bony face and arching, well-marked eyebrows above giant eyes. She wouldn’t be bad-looking except when she smiles—she reveals a set of sharp, irregular teeth which resemble the coconut scraper my grandmother used to bring along with her from India when she came to visit us. I wonder why her parents haven’t bothered to get them fixed. Once her teeth are straightened out, she might end up looking like her gorgeous mother Helen. Suman told me she’s thirteen, but she appears much younger because she’s so small.

The boy is not pretty at all, which is surprising since his father is still, I admit, very handsome and his mother amiable-looking if rather downtrodden. There’s a sense of nervous frailty about him. He scuttles along on a pair of Pinocchio legs. Suman said he’s sickly, nearly died when he was a baby, so the females in the family treat him as if he is a piece of antique china. Horribly spoilt, in other
words. He appears quite healthy to me. Ugly as a troll, but healthy as one too. And will prove to be as long-lived since trolls live for thousands of years.

Suman puzzles me. She’s clearly a thoughtful woman and—now she’s no longer so nervously shy—she’s kind with me (and generous too). But she behaves like a doormat around her family. These pretences we’ve had to concoct about my being in the house because of Akka, and the secretive food business!

Vikram’s mother Akka is the best of the lot. She must have been quite something when she was young. I like her, she reminds me of my own grandmother with her shrewd eyes and her acerbic wit. She is well read, speaks several Indian languages in addition to the Queen’s English. I can’t imagine what she’s doing in a dump like this, or how she arrived here in the first place, but I suspect I’ll hear all about it soon enough. She’s chatty and fun to be with, and tells me all sorts of stories with great gusto when she’s feeling well, though she’s more or less confined to her bed. Apparently a stroke some years ago weakened her considerably, then a few months later a fall broke something in her back and now she’s always in a great deal of pain. Suman tells me that it’s sometimes so bad Akka can’t even lie down, and then she has to spend entire days sitting in an odd wooden structure that is a bizarre cross between an armchair and one of those old-fashioned raised wooden potties. I’ve seen her tethered to that chair, and I mean that literally, with bedsheets torn into long strips that wind around her body and the back
of the wooden contraption, so she won’t topple out in her sleep. It seems barbaric to keep the old woman tied to a chair. Surely there’s something else that can be done, something properly medical? I asked Suman why they didn’t consult a doctor.