Tell It to the Trees (2 page)

And I come from a long line of dead people. I know everyone in this world does, but our family tree is knotty with folk who died in odd ways, almost all of them on my grandfather’s side of the family.

“We all die quietly in our own beds of old age or boredom,” Akka claims. “But Mr. J.K. Dharma’s people—ho, you won’t believe how some of them died. I tell you, enough to fill a book!” Then she counts off her favourite deaths on her fingers. “First there was your grandfather’s oldest cousin Ranjini the Raving Beauty, she who got
bitten by a rabid dog before her wedding, didn’t tell anyone, showed up at the marriage hall in all her finery, foaming at the mouth, had a seizure, fell into the sacred fire and terrified the groom so thoroughly that he ran out of there and never got married. And since he was an only son, his parents died without grandchildren, calling down curses on the head of Ranjini the Raving Beauty.

“Then there was that other cousin on your grandfather’s side again—the one who finished a satisfying and forbidden dinner of mutton biryani at the military hotel in the Muslim area of the town in which he lived, was crossing the road to finish things off with a betel leaf stuffed with sugar beads and betel nut shavings and a touch of opium, when he stepped right into an open manhole and drowned in filth. And your grandfather Mr. J.K. Dharma, small man with a big ego, froze into a pillar of ice right outside our front door when he was forty-seven years old. He forgot his keys, came home really late, really drunk one winter night, couldn’t wake me and turned into an ice sculpture. He deserved what he got, the drunken lout. He brought me nothing but tears.” He was too young to die, Akka adds quickly of her frozen husband. But I can tell she’s not sorry about it. He was a blot on the family name.

Last but not least is my own traitor mother Harini, who called herself Helen and hated living here with me and Papa and Akka, so she just took off without explanation one fine morning.

I don’t think Papa has forgiven my mother for leaving
him even after all these years. She was a bad wife and a wicked mother, he said after she was gone. She deserved her death.

“You
were a bad husband,” Akka shouted at him. “She didn’t deserve the misery you brought her and she certainly didn’t deserve her death.” She held me close to her and glared at Papa, who looked like he wanted to hit her the way he did my mother and sometimes me too when I am naughty.

My father controlled himself then, but he had torn up all of my mother’s photographs and burned them in the fireplace. He told me I was to forget her absolutely. I was never to talk about her. Ever. She was a traitor. She had abandoned us. She was a bad wife and a wicked mother. She was an Unmentionable. We’ve not forgiven her, Papa and me.

But it’s hard to forget. And she refused to leave me. She was everywhere in the house. I would wake up at night sometimes, sure she was sitting in a corner of my room—a loud and strong and beautiful ghost. I tried to hate her but I couldn’t. I wanted to reach out and hold her tight, I wanted to rub my face against her belly, and kiss her and feel her softness. And then I’d remember that she’d left me without a backward glance, and the rage would come rushing in. I’d push her away. Not needed here, she is not. Go away monster mother, leave us alone, I’d yell, we’ve found somebody else to love, a new mother who will always be here, for as long as ever.

“It was your father’s temper that chased your poor mother away,” Akka said once. “And if he doesn’t watch out, your stepmother might leave as well.” She paused for a bit and then added, “Poor thing. Poor thing. She must be cursing the gods for bringing her here to this Jehannum.”

I always became anxious when Akka talked like this about Suman running away. When Suman first came here, she tried so hard to fit into the space my real mother left behind, but failed every single time. That made Papa mad. And that made me worry—what if she too went away like Akka said she might. Would she take us with her? Or would she leave us behind with Papa? What if she left me and took only Hemant? After all, he is her son, I’m nothing more than her stepdaughter. Then I’d tell myself she would never do such a thing: she
loves
me. She is
mine
. Papa brought her for me all the way from India. I am grateful to her for giving me my brother and for keeping the house clean and for cooking yummy food. I try hard to make sure she has no reason to leave—I am good as gold, I help her with chores, and I hug her every morning and at night before bed. I try, I do try to make her feel loved. It is my job to tie her to me tight so that she will never ever leave.

So that’s it—our family—Akka, Papa, me, Hemant, and Suman—three generations of us, crammed together, typical Indian-style, in a small house built by my grandfather on five acres of land on the edge of a rotten little town called Merrit’s Point. It’s in the middle of nowhere and is full of gossips and bores and kids with snotty
names like Celia and Mason. If land in our town is cheap now, Akka says that when Grandfather bought it about forty-five years ago it cost less than a handful of dirt. He was dead before I was born and Akka says she has no idea why he moved all the way up here into this back of beyond. He didn’t even leave a record of his thoughts—I know because I looked everywhere—just a few words scratched with purple ink in an empty little notebook: “This is all mine. Silence at last.—J.K. Dharma.” What was he claiming? I asked Akka. But she couldn’t tell me.

“Who knows, and why should I care?” she said. She never wanted to speak of him anyway, the frozen husband who’d robbed her of her happiness. So I have to imagine it. I imagine him living in a crowded place in India—I haven’t been there yet, but I read in one of Papa’s books that there are millions and millions of people there. Maybe Grandfather was tired of all those people. Maybe it didn’t matter to him that he was in a place where hardly anybody else wanted to live unless they had to—like the people in town who came here to mine copper and then to work in the lumber mill. I think what mattered was that he owned this piece of the earth, paid for by him with his first savings, and when he opened a window he could hear the wind instead of a thousand chattering voices, he could see the starry sky instead of dust, and all around him his eyes landed only on quiet mountains and giant trees standing in silent clusters, bearing in their wooden hearts the secrets of all the creatures that live here.

“We are cursed,” Akka wailed. “We are cursed with the family we have, and the family we have lost, we are cursed because we have to live in this town. We are cursed because we are who we are.”

“If you hate it so much, why did
you
come here?” I demanded. Sometimes my grandmother confuses me with her contradictions. She loves my father, but she blames him for my mother leaving. She is fiercely protective about our family and hates “prying eyes,” as she calls them, but she says my grandfather was a demon and my Papa is one too. She shoots a fist up in the direction of the sky. “It’s their fault, those fancy-dress monkeys up there, those gods your silly father loves so much these days! They’re blind and deaf all of them.”

But even though Akka says these things about Papa and Grandfather, it is only in private, to me or to Suman. She’d never let our family down in public. Neither would I or Hem or Papa. Tight as a fist, we are, and as hard if you get in our way. Suman is the only weakness, the little finger, but Papa and I knew right away we’d have to hold her hard in our grasp. That way she wouldn’t have a chance to do anything silly.

That’s how we were until Anu Krishnan moved into our lives. Then everything changed.

Suman

I stood at the dining room window and stared out at the searchers in their thick winter jackets, moving around in the bleached landscape like small bright insects. I couldn’t stop crying even though I hadn’t known Anu that long. She’d become a good friend to me. But Vikram never liked her. I think he often wished he hadn’t rented her the back-house for a whole year. And now she is dead.

Through the doorway into the living room, I could see Varsha and Hem glued to the window too. I should have stopped them from watching that horrible scene out there. Varsha glanced my way, as if aware of my gaze, and our eyes met across the space.

“Why did she have to go out in this weather?” I cried. I was repeating myself, I knew. I was not really looking for an answer from anyone.

Varsha said patiently, again, that she and Hem were asleep. “Maybe she needed to smoke, Mama,” she added a second later.

I imagined Anu outside the door of the back-house, wrapped up against the cold, taking a ciggy break, as she called it. She confessed guiltily in the first week following her arrival that she smoked like a chimney. “I know, I know,” she’d said, catching my disapproving look. “I will probably die early from lung cancer.”

“No, no, I wasn’t thinking of that,” I replied quickly. “Just that Vikram doesn’t like anyone smoking inside the house. So …”

“Aha! So you don’t care if I burn up my lungs and die, eh?”

I had smiled uncertainly. It was years since somebody had teased me, laughed with me instead of at me.

Anu had held up a hand. “I give you my word of honour, I shall never smoke inside the house. You can assure your husband of that.” She kept her promise, even when the weather turned cold and the leaves began to fall, and then the snow. I should have warned her that the cold could not be trusted, that it was a dangerous thing.

My name is Suman Dharma. For thirty years, from the moment of my birth until I left for Merrit’s Point, I lived in one of four streets that form a quadrangle around a famous and very old temple in Triplicane in the city of Madras. People believe our neighbourhood has been around since the first century BC. Since then, it has seen crowds of foreigners from Portugal, Italy, France and England, but has somehow managed to retain its past. It
still has the feeling of a small town frozen in time, even though it has become, in reality, just a tiny corner of a large, bustling, modern city. Our home was on the third floor of a rickety old building and in order to get to it you had to enter through the living room of the ground-floor tenant Rama Shastri, a priest at the temple, slapping aside damp bedsheets and pyjamas, striped underwear, dhotis, saris, petticoats and diapers, dozens of them, that always hung like banners from the low roof, as if to celebrate the teeming life within that small space.

Our own home was kept scrupulously clean by my father’s sister Madhu Kaki, who was a tyrant with the broom and the mop. Even so, she could do nothing about the tired outer walls of our building which needed to be whitewashed, or the windows with streamers of old paint hanging away from their slowly rotting wooden frames, their iron bars pockmarked with rust. She would set me to scrub the paint away with a rough ball of wire, and leaning out of the window to reach a curl of paint I would gaze down at the many strands of gullies and streets and roads, messy as hair on an uncombed head, life of all kinds swarming like lice on them. From the lowest fly to the almighty human, no one creature was more superior than the other from the high vantage point of the windows in our building. Or, for that matter, from the perspective of thieves and goondas, politicians and religious nuts, who killed both flies and humans with the same casual brutality. We were all packed into those filthy streets, animals, insects, rogues, saints, demons, breathing
the gummy air, and neither minded the other. We humans had learned to walk those streets like gods, omniscient, with eyes and ears all over our heads, always aware of that steaming pile of cow or dog shit to be avoided, the rickshaw or the scooter, the car or the bullock-cart, the thieves and the beggars, the touts and the vendors. We saw and heard everything and negotiated our lives through it all without too much damage to our bodies or our souls. I can say with complete certainty that despite the dirt and the chaos and the lack of any finery, we had that one thing that most people spend a lifetime looking for and never finding: happiness. I was a happy girl and it is perhaps that deep and sturdy foundation of happiness that has sustained me this far.

Occasionally, small groups of tourists, lost in the maze of narrow streets and whirling crowds, wandered into our street and I would wonder what they saw when they looked at us and our homes. After I came to the West, I understood that air of panic and wonder that surrounded those tourists—the world they had left behind was a planet apart from the one in which I grew up. They would twirl around, their heads dizzy from an excess of everything, the pulsating, vibrating, chanting, shrieking chaos, from the confusion of stories constantly forming and dissolving before their dazzled, dust-rimmed eyes. They would go
click-click-click
with their beautiful cameras, ask passersby to lean against this wall or that as they clicked, searching always for that authentic moment, the absolute truth, the unimaginable multicoloured reality
which they could never catch no matter how hard they tried. They failed to understand that the truth was a shifting, shy thing, like sunlight changing from moment to moment, unknowable even if you spent your life in the heart of it. The secret, as my beloved father used to say, was to watch for it from the corner of your eyes, pretending that you weren’t really looking. That way, you might, if you were lucky, catch a glimpse of truth.

Once, near the temple tank, a group of tourists asked if they could take a picture of me and my aunt Madhu Kaki, and so my photograph went out of India before I did, into the wide and foreign world. Somewhere out there in Germany or England, Italy or America, I live in the pages of a stranger’s album of family photos—a girl of sixteen with hope in her eyes and the trustful certainty that nothing could go wrong.

Varsha

I can remember back to when I was four. Okay, not much, just bits and pieces. It was a sunny morning. Spring was in the air. I could smell it. Papa had taken Akka to the hospital in Vancouver and I was in the car with my Mom. I had no idea where we were going. For a pizza, I hoped, or hot chocolate or a movie—anything was possible with Mom. But we kept driving till we were right out of Merrit’s Point in another town. I don’t remember the name. We went up a narrow street and stopped in front of a small house. Its front garden was piled with snow and nobody had shovelled the driveway. Mom was tense with excitement. I could actually feel it.