Tell It to the Trees (20 page)

“Oh really?” It looks like the entire family has closed ranks and is insisting on the same fib.

“You don’t believe me?” she said challengingly, more like her usual self. “What do you think happened to me then?”

I thought it might be an opening. “You tell me. I wouldn’t know what goes on inside your house. Would you like to tell me?”

“Inside our house? I got hurt at school.”

“We love our Papa,” little Hem piped up, without any prompting from Big Sister, and apropos nothing.

She gave him a quick nudge and laughed. “He’s such a silly-billy. Of course we love Papa and Mama and Akka—they are our family. Just like you love your family, I suppose. Mama said you have a brother and two nephews around my age. Do you love them?”

“I guess, most of the time, when they’re behaving themselves,” I said, blowing smoke into the cold air. Where are we going with this conversation? I wondered.

“You shouldn’t smoke, it’s bad for your health,” Varsha said. “You can get lung cancer.”

“Yeah, I know, Miss Smarty-pants.” I grinned at her.

She grinned back, her whole face lightening. I think she could be nice if she tried. “Then why are you doing it?”

“Because I enjoy it, that’s why,” I said. “Don’t you ever do anything because it makes you feel good?”

“Not if it’s bad. My Papa would be upset.” Her voice was prim again, her frown back.

I tried again. “Hey, Hemant, did you like the T-shirt I gave you for your birthday? You never said anything. Did it fit?”

“Yes, he loved it,” Varsha said.

“Doesn’t your brother have a voice? Hmm?”

Varsha nudged Hem. “Tell her how much you loved it, Hem.”

“I loved it,” the boy repeated obediently. “Thank you very much, Aunty Anu.” But then he surprised me. “What
are you writing about? Mama said you were looking for stories. Have you found any?”

“Maybe, I’m not sure,” I said cautiously. Have they been reading my notebook in my absence? I must remember to carry it with me when I leave the cottage. “I’m just making notes at the moment. Nothing definite.”

“Are you writing about us?” he piped up. No prompting from his sister. Perhaps the little man is developing a mind of his own.

“Do you want me to write about you?” I asked, smiling at him.

Before he could respond, his sister had decided our little meeting was done. She was probably exhausted from being nice to me. She took his arm and started back to the house, which looked warm and inviting with golden light filling the windows.

“See you then, Anu,” she said. “Make sure you don’t drop your cigarette butt on the ground. It will look horrid in the spring when the snow melts.”

“Hey! What happened to Anu Aunty?” I called after them, but they didn’t look back, either of them, and I was left alone in the gathering dusk.

I am still mulling over this unexpected visit and sudden short burst of pleasantry. What did they really want to find out?

January 30
. Met Chanchal again, minus Gopal. He was apparently busy building a bird feeder back at the house. “Very kind man,” Chanchal explained. “It breaks
his heart that poor birdies have no food in winter. So.”

This time I dragged her to Bradford’s café for a chat. I needed to talk to her about the Dharmas. She’s known them far longer than me; she would have a better sense of what, if anything, is going on there.

“So, I hear you’re coming over to dinner next week?” I started.

“Yes, it is a long time. Vikram is very busy. I will be happy to see them all.”

I decided to get to the point. “Chanchal, I want to ask you. You know them well. Is there something wrong in that house?”

Chanchal’s expressive face looked uncomfortable. “Wrong? What do you mean?”

“I mean, does Vikram beat his kids?”

Chanchal shrugged. “I don’t know all this. Sometimes children can be bad. A spanking won’t hurt them. Your mother-father never got angry with you?”

“And how about Suman? Does he hit her too?”

She stared at me. Her face became shuttered. “These matters are between husband and wife.”

“But sometimes it is your job as a friend to intervene.”

She was silent.

“Have you heard anything about this? You’ve been in this town a long time. You’ve known this family for years. Gopal is an old friend of Vikram’s.”

Chanchal shook her head. “Nobody is saying anything to me. I don’t know. Now I must leave. No time for tea. Gopal will be worried if I don’t come home on
time.” She gathered up her bags and hesitated. “What if it is true? Can you do anything? Nobody has complained, no? How to do anything if nobody complains?
What
to do?”

Hemant

Varsha and me read Anu’s notebook a little bit when she was in town. She wrote mean things about us. She called me REPULSIVE which means yukky as a dead frog. Varsha said. I am
not
a dead frog. I am a
person
.

She also wrote that Papa is a bad man who beats us. She wrote that Akka killed our grandpa. “She is lying,” I said to Varsha. “Akka is
good.”
I didn’t know what I should say about Papa, I get mixed up when I think about him so I kept quiet. “Our Akka would never do such a thing, would she Varsha? Would she?”

But Varsha shook her head and said our grandfather was a drunkard. He had hurt our Akka and disgraced our family, and he deserved to die. She said if Akka did kill him she was a real smarty-pants the way she got rid of him. She said it was murder without any EVIDENCE and she will be a lawyer one day so she knows all about crime and stuff. Anu wrote that our grandfather became a pillar of ice. Which is what Akka tells us, but she laughs when she tells us.

“How do you become a pillar of ice?” I asked Varsha.

“It’s a figure of speech, stupid.” She slapped the side of my head, not gently like she does when she loves me but hard so it stung.

I know my sister is annoyed with me because I’m beginning to like Anu. She bought me a brand new T-shirt for my birthday. She brings cakes from the bakery in town and she doesn’t mind sitting with Akka when Mama fetches us from the bus stop. I think she’s nice. She asked my sister when her birthday was, but Varsha said it was none of her business. The T-shirt was a cheap way to buy my affections, she said. Her Snow Book was much harder to make. Plus she’d SUFFERED a beating from Papa for my sake. She would do anything for my sake. Would I?

“Yes, yes!” I said, hugging my sister. I felt bad about hurting her feelings. Also I didn’t like Anu anymore because she called me REPULSIVE.

“Then you must cut up the T-shirt Anu gave you and throw it away.”

I didn’t want to. I liked it.

“You said you would do anything for my sake. Do you want to break my heart?”

I wanted wanted
wanted
to keep my T-shirt.

“If you break my heart I will be dead,” Varsha said. “Then my ghost will come and cry in your room every night. What will you do then, Hem? What will you do?”

So I threw my birthday present in the garbage like my sister said because I didn’t want her to die of a broken heart and come back as a ghost to haunt me. I was not to
smile or be friends with Anu either, Varsha said. She was a crook and she was going to steal our Mama from under our noses and then where would we be?

“How do you know she is going to?” I asked Varsha.

“She wrote it in her book, silly. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, but she told Mama she was writing a
story
, not real things. Maybe it was only a story. Mama would never leave us. She loves us more than the whole wide world.”

“It was real. It’s called an autobiographical story.”

I still didn’t believe her, but I kept quiet because I didn’t want her to get mad at me.

Anu’s Notebook

February 1
. Today I decided to corner Suman in her own territory—the kitchen of the main house. Through the bare trees and rattling branches, the main house is more visible now and it looks very pretty, hunkered down in the whiteness, small icicles dripping down from the rim of the roof. Snow is heaped up all around except for a narrow path that Vikram has cleared from my door to the house, around the house, and on to the gate. Yet even as I walked, it began to snow again and the path became less and less distinct. Vikram is fastidious about clearing that pathway most of the time, but it’s hard for him to keep up. I watch him sometimes with the snow blower, in his blue jacket, ploughing through the snow, pausing now and again to swipe a mittened paw across his nose, and wonder how he looks so harmless.

The wind groaned in the trees. A branch cracked and fell just ahead of me. My heart jumped—I appreciate nature in all its naked glory, but lately, especially after that last snowstorm, it’s starting to get to me. If I fell, how
long before I am found lying in the snow? I am beginning to understand why Suman carries all kinds of emergency supplies in her bag on that walk to the bus stop to pick up her kids. I now understand her winter paranoia. The solitude, the isolation, the silence—it’s all nerve-racking, especially at night alone in my cottage, which is more or less roof-deep in the white stuff. Far overhead the sun struggles to make its presence felt, casting a pallid yellow light over the landscape. Yesterday morning when I forced myself to head off for my daily walk, to keep my energy levels up, to avoid being swallowed up by this beast called winter, I could barely make out where anything was—the field turning into the road into the lake into the shrubs and distant mountains, all outlines erased by the descending whiteness.

The weather report is calling for another major storm tonight and the sky and the earth have merged into a steely sameness. The thought of living through this for the next six months depresses me. What was I thinking of when I signed my wretched lease for an entire year? The silence which seemed so idyllic in summer is now a nightmare. And the frigging cold—I don’t remember cold being
this
cold!

I tapped on the kitchen window and Suman looked up, startled, from her cooking. She smiled when she saw it was me and opened the door. “What are you doing here, Anu? I would have come later on. I have made such tasty rasam today. Perfect for this cold weather, you know.”

“Does he hit you too, Suman?” I asked her, straight
off the bat. I didn’t want to give her time to consider her response. “The way he beats your children? And don’t tell me he doesn’t—I’ve seen those bruises and they don’t come from falling down the stairs or tripping on shoes. Why are you lying? Why are you protecting him?”

She backed away, her face sinking into familiar lines of anxiety. “I wasn’t lying,” she said at last, wearily. “He doesn’t beat me, not really.”

“Oh? Then what does he do? How come everybody in this house, including you, is so clumsy? Falling all the time? Give me a break, Suman. I’m not a fool.”

“Shh, stop talking so loudly. She will hear.”

“Who? Akka? Well, she should be ashamed of herself, letting her son do this to you. I would have thought she knew better!”

“No, no, Varsha. She is at home with flu. She is sleeping upstairs. Please go away now.” Suman pushed me towards the door.

“No, I won’t. And if you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going up there to wake up that girl and drag it out of her. You mustn’t be afraid. You can get help. I can help you. Please.”

Suman gave me a bitter look. “You don’t know anything,” she said in a low voice, turning away from me. “You don’t know how it is to be alone, to be without any money or anywhere to go for help. Yes, I lied about what he does to me, but it was only a partial lie. He doesn’t raise his hand to me the way he does with the children. Not anymore. Not after I lost my baby.”

“You lost your baby? I’m sorry, Suman. What happened?”

She shook her head.

“Was it his fault? It was, wasn’t it?”

Silence again.

“Okay, you said he doesn’t hit you anymore. But he does hurt you, I know. What does he do? Tell me.”

“Pushes me sometimes, or squeezes my arm so hard I can feel his fingers on them for an entire week. He isn’t a bad man, really. He doesn’t mean to hurt us. You must understand.”

I don’t understand at all. I am angry at the excuses.

“He punishes me in other ways,” Suman continued. “No money in the bank account that I am allowed to use, so I have to pay at the grocery store with handfuls of pennies and nickels and dimes. Calling me stupid, criticizing everything I do, even my food. My food—anyone can see how good I am in the kitchen, but you’ve never had to ask anyone for money like a beggar every day, have you? Even to buy sanitary napkins? Or a chocolate candy? No, you haven’t. So how would you understand? Vikram is good at that sort of subtle humiliation. His violence is more hurtful because nobody can see it. You can’t put ointment or a cold pack on or eat a Tylenol to take away those marks and that pain. His attacks, they go for the root of your being, kill your self-respect, your idea of who you are, take away your sense of balance. That’s why we are always falling, we have no sense of balance in this
house. Vikram calls me a fool and I’ve
become
one. I hate how easily I’ve given in. I thought, for a while, that if I loved him enough he would stop. But it doesn’t work that way. It could only be the kind of love a prisoner feels for her guard.” She stopped, drew a harsh breath and turned to look at me. “There,” she said quite calmly, no tears. “There, I’ve told you. Can you still help me? Hanh? Can you?”

I nodded. “Yes, I can. I will, I promise you. Have you never told anyone all this? Surely somebody would have done something. I can’t believe everybody in this town is indifferent. Don’t you have any friends?”

“No, I don’t. I was ashamed to tell anyone. And anyway, what could I have done without money or a passport? He has hidden my passport so I can’t leave. Even now, you say you can help me, but where do I get a passport from?”

“We will deal with the passport thing later. It’s probably expired anyway. You can say you lost it. But that can come later. To begin with, let’s get you out of here. After that, you get in touch with my lawyer. Here, I brought you her address and phone number. Keep it until you decide. If you agree, I’ll phone her for you and fix an appointment, okay? And I can lend you money to tide you over until you find your feet. Yes?”