Tell It to the Trees (4 page)

“I’m stepping out for a bit,” she said. She leaned down and kissed me on my forehead. “Be good.”

“Is Mrs. Cooper coming to look after Akka and me?” I asked. I noticed she had no lipstick on. It made me anxious. She never went out without lipstick. She hadn’t washed her hair and made it fluffy and pretty either—it was bunched up in a ponytail.

Mom hesitated, and then said, “Yes, she will be here in about half an hour. You look after your grandmother till then. Can you do that? Are you Mom’s big girl?”

I nodded. Akka just looked at Mom but didn’t say a word. I wonder if she knew Mom would never return.

When Papa got home that evening he found a note from her on the dressing table in their room: “I can’t stay. I am sorry.” It was written on a piece of paper decorated
with a border of purple and pink flowers. I had made six of those decorated notepapers for her birthday. For weeks I held on to the idea that she had used it deliberately—a secret message to me to say she would come back for me. I like to think that. I like to think that if she had not died taking a corner too fast, if that truck had not been speeding down from the opposite side, if and if and if, my mother would have returned for me.

Later that night there was a knock on the door. It was the police. When they’d left, Papa said, “Better she is dead than shamefully alive. Better for us.” Then he began to weep, big gulping sobs, like a baby. I had never seen my father cry.

But the next day he said, “Enough, I want her out of here.” He got some garbage bags and filled them with Mom’s things, even the earrings she had promised to give me, the jewelled compact, the silver rings I liked so much, the necklace she’d got from the strange man’s house the day before she ran away from us. He spent a whole day ripping her out of all our photographs. And when I said I would like to keep the ones of her and me when I was a baby, when she loved me, he smacked me hard.

He started to pray every morning and in the evening too. Akka says it’s to help him hold on to himself. I imagine my father without his gods, falling apart, arms and legs and head and feet breaking free and whirling around our house, hitting everything in a fury. I’m glad the silver gods in the small room next to Akka’s can keep him tied together.

Three months after Mom’s death, Papa’s gods ordered him to find a new mother for me and so he did. He went to find a wife in India, somebody like Akka, who will never leave him. It was the first time Papa had gone to India.

“He’s a fool if he thinks anybody will stay with him in this hellish place,” Akka muttered.

Aunty Chanchal moved in with us to help because Akka was too old to look after me on her own. Papa stayed in India for a month and returned home full of secret triumph. Six months after that, Suman arrived.

“A present for you,” Papa said, pulling her into the house, a short woman with long curly hair and worried brown eyes.

That night, before going to sleep, I asked him, “What if she too goes away like Mom did?”

My father gave me a serious look. “It’s your job to make sure she doesn’t, Varsha. And that’s the last time we mention Helen, do you understand? From now on, Suman is your Mom.”

I call her Mama. My Mom is too close, too real still for me to transfer the name I used for her to a stranger from India. Suman doesn’t mind. She is just anxious to be my mother. She is glad, I think, she doesn’t have to fight with me for a space in our house like those fairy-tale stepmothers. She works hard to love me, she combs my hair like a proper mother even though I am perfectly capable of doing it myself now at thirteen, she fixes me breakfast and makes sandwiches for my lunch box, she folds my clothes and neatens my room. This has been very nice,
especially since I don’t remember Mom ever doing anything like it and I love it. Then she gave birth to Hemant, a son for Papa, and I thought we would be happy as the sun in summer.

But
.

Papa can’t forget. Mom was beautiful, Suman is not. Mom yelled back at my father. Suman wasn’t quiet at first, but now she doesn’t talk very much. Papa began to find fault with everything she did or didn’t do. He shouted at her, he called her a fool, and he told her she can’t wear anything other than saris. Akka said he is ridiculous, forcing the poor woman to wear saris in winter. Papa told Akka to keep her nose out of his business. She told him that if he didn’t watch out, he’d lose another wife. That Suman is a good woman and he should consider himself lucky to have her. Papa told Akka to shut up.

Suman’s stopped smiling and cries a lot. She doesn’t sing when she does the housework the way she used to. She’s stopped telling me funny stories that her father told her when she was a little girl. She’s become silent as the walls and talks only in whispers when she has to, which makes Papa even madder and she cries some more. She still cooks all morning and cleans the rest of the time. She dusts, wipes, mops every single day, sometimes twice a day. I never see her without dusters and rags, brooms and buckets. You can eat off the floor of our house, perform surgery on it. The hum of the vacuum cleaner is our daily music. Papa will never love her. She does everything Papa expects her to, but he refuses to show when
he’s pleased. He never comments on the things she’s done, always looks for the things she hasn’t. He makes surprise checks sometimes—he runs a finger across the tops of bookshelves, behind the spice jars in the kitchen cupboards, on top of picture frames, places that most people might forget to clean. If he finds a bit of dust, he swipes it up with a finger and holds it out without comment and Suman shrivels up like a slug. And then she gathers herself together and she starts all over again. She cooks up a feast of his favourite things, irons all his shirts, cleans the house until it sparkles like a jewel, dresses in her best clothes. Nothing works.

She’s become a bit mean. I think she’s maybe stopped loving me. Now she complains to Papa about me. Maybe she hopes Papa will be mad at me and forget about her. So she goes whisper, whisper, whisper. She’s like a brown mouse scurrying around carrying tales.
She refuses to eat her breakfast, it is not good for her to go to school hungry like that, I don’t know what to do with her, I try so hard, she lost her gloves again, what to do, she is so careless this child, I am finding it difficult to manage
. Sometimes it works. Papa’s eyes fall on me instead. Nothing makes him feel more godlike than to discover our wrongness. Nothing makes him more heartbroken than to beat my naughtiness out of me, and more happy than to forgive me afterwards. He is doing it for my good, after all, he has no desire to see me turn into my mother.

“VARSHA, COME HERE!”

“VARSHA, WHERE ARE YOU?”

“WHERE IS THAT WRETCHED GIRL?”

Then the belt whistles through the air to scorch my back or legs, hidden places nobody can see. Never my face, he is careful about that, Papa, always concerned about other people’s opinion, always worried about our family name. What would people think if they saw belt marks across my face? It would never do, not at all. The Dharmas are spotless, ab-SO-lutely perfect.

Afterwards Suman always feels so bad. She cries and kisses me, combs my hair. She says, “I am sorry, I am sorry. How could I tell him? I don’t know why I told him. Oh poor child.” And I hold on to her hard, glad she is there, that she still likes me after all, grateful for the softness of her touch as she examines my bruises and soothes them with a towel wrung out in ice water. “It’s okay, Mama,” I say, stroking her face. “I deserved it, I was a naughty girl. It’s okay.”

Akka is on my stepmother’s side. She can’t bear to see her unhappy. I hear her telling Suman that she should leave. “Run, girl, run as far as you can,” she says.

Once she offered Suman her gold necklace to go away. I adore my Akka, but I was mad at her for doing that. “Why did you tell her to go?” I asked. “She is mine.”

“I can’t see her suffer, pearl of my eye,” Akka said. “It is not right.”

I was real scared afterwards. I didn’t want to lose my new mother too. So one day I took her passport from her dressing table drawer. I taped it behind the photograph of my dead grandfather. Suman will never dream of looking there. You can’t go anywhere without ID. She doesn’t
have a driver’s licence, so the passport is her passport out of this place and now she doesn’t have it. I catch her sometimes, looking, looking,
looking
for that passport, and when Papa asks her, irritated as all heck by her fidgety looking, what on earth she is searching for, Suman shakes her head and mumbles that she is not. Not searching, only tidying up. After a while she gives up, and I breathe a sigh of relief. She isn’t going anywhere. I am glad. I will try to love her as if she is my real mother, I promise Papa’s gods and Jesus Christ and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and all the good guys up there who might be listening. Suman
is
my real mother. I will love her to death and make sure she never ever leaves us. Never. Ever.

Suman

Until my marriage, I had travelled out of Madras only occasionally: with Madhu Kaki to Tirupati a few times so that she could pray for the welfare of our family to her favourite deity, and once when I was seventeen on a school trip to see the Taj Mahal. The only reason I was allowed to go was because I would be staying with my friend Lalli at her grandparents’ home in Agra.

Lalli’s father was a merchant whose family had descended to Madras from northern India years ago and had settled there. He owned several small corner shops that sold magazines and sundry items like biscuits, batteries, cigarettes. Although Lalli spoke my language fluently and could easily pass for a South Indian girl with her long oiled braids, her flashing dark eyes, her clothes, her accent and gestures, the inside of her home was a foreign place for me. There were several families living together in that large home with its barred windows and narrow corridors opening into numerous small bedrooms—Lalli’s parents and her three brothers, two uncles and
their wives and children, and several other indigent relatives who cooked and cleaned and worked for the family in return for a roof over their heads. The women were soft-spoken, unlike my own noisy Madhu Kaki, and drifted around with their sari pallus draped over their heads, shadowing their faces so that I could never figure out who was who except by their whispering voices, like wind rustling through leaves. Their continuous state of quiet busyness became frantic in the evening when the men returned home and had to be pampered with tea and juice and snacks and inquiries after their day or their health.

Most of the time the women wore simple starched cotton saris, but once a year they would all explode into a passion of colour, dress up like brides, even the oldest of them all, an aunt who was in her sixties, to celebrate a festival called Karva Chauth when prayers were sent up to the god Shiva for the welfare of their husbands. I had heard about this festival from my friend, who always brought us trays of sweets made for the occasion, but had never really seen anyone performing it until my trip to Agra where Lalli’s grandparents lived in a quarter of a crusty old building in one of the many dark gullies that criss-cross that city like veins in an ancient body. On the second night of our stay, all the women in the building began to prepare for Karva Chauth.

“Come on, let’s go and join them,” Lalli whispered mischievously, pulling me up the narrow stairs to the terrace on top of the building.

“Are we allowed to?” I whispered back. “Isn’t this for married women only?”

“Yes, but who is going to know?” Lalli had pulled her sari pallu over her head. She grinned at me. “Come on, what are you scared of?” She pressed a small round mirror into my palm. “Don’t look up at the moon when it appears, look at it in the mirror.”

“What will happen if I look at the sky instead?” I asked, mystified by this exotic ritual. We had our own rituals, but familiarity had made them ordinary.

“You will have a hundred years of bad luck,” Lalli said dramatically, and giggled again. “If you believe such nonsense!”

It was the first hour of the night and all around, on the terraces and balconies of Hindu homes which grew like mushrooms out of the dank filth of gullies, were other women waiting, like Lalli and me, to glimpse the sharp crescent of the new moon as it fell from the sky into their mirrors. It was forbidden for them to stare up at that silver C of light—I have no idea who forbade them, or why. No doubt some ancient seer, one of those bad-tempered, long-bearded old fogeys whose potent curses turned their wives into stone, their daughters into heaps of ashes or trees or birds for small transgressions—no doubt it was they who decided that a woman was not to look straight at the silly moon. It would be a wicked thing to do. No, worse, it would bring harm down on the hapless heads of their husbands, those idle gods who sat inside their homes, stuffing their bellies with food, and
yelling out orders while their poor wives fasted for their well-being after slaving over the kitchen stove to turn out meals fit for maharajas.

And so we stood there, with mirrors in our hands, to witness the birth of the new moon. Not too far away, despite the darkness, I could see the dome of the Taj Mahal thrusting up at the sky like a pale breast. I gazed at my face dimly reflected in the mirror.
I
. Such a sliver of a word to hold the meaning and the matter of all that I was and would be. I believed that I was tougher than that frail stick of a word, I could leap over its scrawny boundaries, I could become more than I was.

Not too long after our trip to Agra, Lalli was packed off with a dowry of five lakh rupees and two dozen gold bangles and a Godrej refrigerator and a motorbike for her husband, only to end up hanging from the rafters of her new home, the mehendi from her wedding still wet on her palms. Her in-laws wailed and beat their breasts and said that a mentally ill girl had been passed on to them without their knowledge, but the rumours that swept around the gullies were that her mother-in-law wanted more gold bangles and her father-in-law wanted an air conditioner, and her new husband wanted a car instead of a scooter. When Lalli’s father refused to oblige, her in-laws strung her up like a criminal hung for murder. She had murdered their desires.