Tell It to the Trees (5 page)

I wept hard for my lost friend, swore that such sorrow would never come to me. Before Lalli’s wedding, I had sat at her mehendi, a swirling vineyard of dark green henna
paste drying on my hands, turning red from the heat in my blood (the hotter your blood, the redder the colour left behind), and wished that my father too had the money and the jewels to bribe a man to marry me. I was eighteen—a ripe old age for a woman, practically a toothless crone, if the talk around me was to be believed. Until Lalli’s death I had convinced myself that marriage was the best thing that could ever happen to me. Not surprising, really, given that marriage, marriage, marriage was all those wretched gully-people thought about when they saw a girl. Not just in my gully, it seemed to me, but in every road and alley, every single home throughout the country. The economy of India runs on marriages. Weddings are big business. All you hear right through the year—except for a few months when Saturn presides over the planets and nothing auspicious is launched—is talk of marriages. Every activity has to do with that walk around the sacred fire. Saris are purchased, jewels ordered, and money flows around like so many intersecting rivers. Fortunes are built (by shopkeepers and marriage halls, priests and cooks) and lost (by the girl’s parents, mostly) during the wedding season. Gold prices all over the world are affected by this season—going up when we are getting married and our poor parents are spending their life savings on gold ornaments, and collapsing in the bad-luck months of July, September and December.

And in those fallow months when nobody is getting married, mothers and aunties and grannies and matchmakers exchange horoscopes and plot yet more weddings
for the coming year. Even the songs that Madhu Kaki sang to lull me to sleep when I was an infant were about how a prince would come and carry me away from my father’s home if I was a good girl and shut my eyes tight. When I was naughty and refused to eat something, my aunt would threaten me with spinsterhood—that curse more dreadful than death even. She would warn me that nobody on earth, not even a crow, would wish to make me his bride if I carried on fussing. And when I was older, women on our street would pull my nose and say, ayyo, this is growing too long, who will marry her? Raddled old grandmas who had nothing to do but dream of love and young bodies mating, and of men with tight muscles, would squeeze my small breasts and cackle, soon, soon, it will be time for a man to touch these, for a baby to pull at these. Or they would pinch my cheek and yank my chin and warn me that if I went out in the sun like an ignorant cat, my skin would grow too dark for matrimony.

By the time I was twenty and out of college, I had developed a ringing in my ears and a buzzing in my head from all this talk. It drove me mad.

I still wanted other things then—to study some more, to find a job like those women who sprawled confidently inside the glossy covers of magazines in Lalli’s father’s shop, to travel to strange places with names like New York, Trafalgar Square, Down Under, the Arctic and the Antarctic. I wanted and wanted and wanted everything that was out of reach. I was like a donkey, chasing a carrot
dangled before its greedy nose, like Tantalus, that man in a Greek story that our English teacher Miss Shanti told us. This man was punished by the gods, who, it seemed, were like the angry sages in our myths who forbade women to look directly at the new moon.

On that night of the new moon, though, I, along with all those women who stood around us on the terrace in distant Agra muttering prayers for the health of their husbands to Shiva the Lord of the dark and of all the ghastly hordes who roared through the mysterious place between waking and sleep, between night and dawn, real and unreal—I too sent up a prayer to the wild-haired, ash-clothed God to send me a husband who would carry me away from my small life in one of the back alleys of the world. Shiva the eternal bachelor had been pierced awake from cosmic slumber by an arrow from the God of Love and had fallen fiercely in love with Parvati. I too imagined myself a Parvati, or a Mumtaz Mahal, a Juliet or a Laila, the object of a hero’s undying love. I too wished to be borne away on horseback, in a train, or a plane, even in an ox-drawn cart if nothing else was available, by a man who would allow me to expand beyond my boundaries, beyond that stick-insect of an
I
, who would show me the world, who would love me into being more than what I was. It did not occur to me that I needed no one to take me to my ambitions, to fulfill my desires. I could do it on my own, like Chandra did, and the women in those magazines in Lalli’s father’s shop. All I needed was the will and a little bit of courage.

My excuse was the world in which I was raised. Even though my own childhood and youth was far less constrained than Lalli’s, I was part of a tight-knit, contained universe where everybody lived within an unwritten code of conduct the knowledge of which came to us with our mother’s milk, was dinned into our skulls at every opportunity by our elders, inhaled from the virtuous, dusty air we breathed. In this world secrets could never be kept. Homes were set so close that young boys jumped from one rooftop to the next without fear of falling in between. You could look into your neighbours’ windows, stretch a leg and an arm and climb in. When windows were shut, everyone knew it was because on the other side a couple was making love or they were quarrelling or somebody was dying and wanted a little bit of quiet darkness in which to slip away from the world they had inhabited for this while.

If it wasn’t the closeness of one house to another that kept us all within the unwritten code of conduct that nobody dared to break, then there was the fear of alienation from the community. Forgiveness was not part of our vocabulary and to be cast out of our close-knit community was akin to being disowned by your own mother, or, in my case, my father—an unbearable thing. It was like being exiled from the world, sent out alone into the unknowing silence of outer space. It filled me with fear.

There were, of course, the occasional transgressors, bold creatures like Chandra Raman who went around
with a swing of her round hips and her nose in the air seemingly unaware of her disgrace, or if she knew, careless of the whispers following her. Somebody had seen her on the beach with her cousin Shekhar, holding his hand no less, so close to him that you could not even pass a blade of grass between them. That was enough to destroy her reputation, although Shekhar, the cousin, had got away scot-free. Chandra became a pariah on our street, and even though she continued to live there, she might have been a ghost the way people looked right through her.

I was a girl of thirteen when Chandra was cast out, and even at that age, when my prudish moral compass was set by my elders and the people in my neighbourhood, even then I had smarted at the unfairness of it all. She had been like an older sister to me, had taken care of me innumerable times when my mother was ill and Madhu Kaki, who had moved in by then, was busy with housework. Chandra had held my small, shivering body when my mother had finally died, insisted on walking me to school every day for nearly a year until I got somewhat accustomed to the idea of death’s permanence, to the notion that my mother was not coming back, that I would never again hear her weak little voice calling me to her except in my memory or in dreams.

But to my everlasting shame, I had done nothing. I did not even wave back when Chandra fluttered her hand at me as she went past our house, her bangles shining in the morning sun, their jingle abnormally loud
in the dusty, watchful silence of the street. Instead I ducked inside and hid there until Chandra had turned into a bright blur of sari at the other end of the street.

This is my weakness, I know that now. I am a follower of rules. I do not have the courage to break them. I cannot bring myself to fight back against the things I know are wrong or to stand up for things that are right. I let Chandra go. I watch as Vikram beats the children and I do nothing. I am that scrawny little stick-insect of an
I
that fell into a mirror on a crescent-moon night many years ago on a terrace in Agra. I am still there, unable to climb out.

I moved away from the window and glanced at the children again. They were huddled together, whispering. Hem appeared to be crying.

I walked across to them and they shrank closer to each other. “Come away from that window, both of you,” I said.

They nodded and moved away. Varsha had her usual pleasant expression, polite but guarded. I have no reason to complain about her behaviour—she has always been the perfect child, young girl now, no longer the five-year-old I met when I first set foot in this house.

“You shouldn’t be watching such things,” I said. “I should have stopped you. Hem, come here, bayboo.” I held out my arms. Hem hesitated, glanced at his sister. I caught the edge of something odd in the look that he received from Varsha. What was it they were
hiding? Some childish secret, perhaps? I have to catch Hem alone—he will never tell me anything when his sister is around.

Varsha looked back at me with her fathomless black eyes and said quietly, “Hem is scared of dead people. He hasn’t seen any, that’s why. But I told him it’s okay, I’m here for him.”

Where does the girl get her self-assurance from? It’s not as if she has seen dozens of dead bodies herself! I held out my arms and insisted, “Come here, Hem.”

He didn’t come to me. He shrank against his sister. “I was asleep,” he whispered.

What was he talking about? I felt like pulling him away from Varsha and holding him against me. But before I could do anything, as if she had read my thoughts—and perhaps she had, the odd girl that she is—she pushed Hem towards me. “Go to Mama, Hem. She will make you feel better. And I could do with a hug as well, Mama. I am scared too. To think poor Anu was right here, so near our house …” And her eyes brimmed with tears.

I was surprised by the sudden display of vulnerability from a girl who hardly ever weeps, not even when Vikram whips her. Then they were wrapped around me, both of them, the girl as tall as I am, her freshly shampooed hair soft and sweet-smelling, and I was ashamed of my suspicions. She is still a child at thirteen, she has done everything since I came to this house to make me feel a part of her family.

“Mama,” she whispered, her breath tickling my ear. “Our Mama, we’ve nothing to be scared of as long as you’re here, right, Mama?”

I nodded silently and thought of a morning a few years ago when she was eight years old. Hemant was a toddler. Vikram had left for work after scolding me for something I had done or not done, I don’t recall. I couldn’t stop crying that day although I did make an attempt to control myself when I was in Akka’s room, making up her bed, folding her clothes.

“Why do you stay, Suman?” the old lady had asked me unexpectedly. She was in her chair, her legs stretched out on a stool, and I was massaging some warm oil into her wrinkled old feet. “Go, leave today. Run. Run.”

I stared up at her and the tears started up again. “How? I have no money, how can I leave? Where do I go?” I asked. “And my son, I can’t leave him.”

Akka leaned forward and touched my cheek and said, “Take your jewellery to a pawnbroker, sell it. And here, this is to get you to a city with pawnbrokers.” She dug around beneath the seat of her chair and fished out a handful of dollar bills which she thrust at me.

I looked down at the money—not more than a hundred dollars. And my meagre collection of jewellery would get me no more than two hundred. That was barely enough for a flight back to India, definitely not enough for me and my son to survive on. Akka had no idea how much anything cost, Vikram took care of all her financial needs like he did mine, doling out money to
me when I wanted something, insisting on a full accounting afterwards, driving me to town to do our weekly shop together.

“Well, what is the matter? What’s going on in that head of yours?” Akka asked.

“This is not enough for anything, I can’t leave,” I said.

She fumbled around her neck, removed a gold chain that she always wore and pressed it into my hand. “Then take this too, I don’t need it.”

Still not enough, I thought. I stood there mutely, terrified of leaving, terrified of what might happen if I stayed. And Akka pushed me with all the strength left in her withered arms and said, “Are you a sheep, are you a brainless ninny, what are you doing standing there like that? Go, I say, go!”

“Mama is going away?” Varsha had entered the room unnoticed and stood there, a tiny girl with large, frightened eyes. “Akka, you are sending Mama away? Why? I don’t want her to leave. She is mine. She is mine. She is
mine.”

The girl hurled herself at me and wrapped her arms around my legs. “I won’t let you go!” she screamed. “I won’t. I’ll tell Papa! I will, I will!”

It took an hour to convince her that I was not leaving and after that Akka never again brought up the subject, at least not when the girl was around.

A few days after that, my passport vanished. I assumed Varsha had told Vikram about my conversation with Akka and he had taken away my passport to prevent me
from leaving. I didn’t dare to ask him for it. Who knew how he would react?

Was Varsha aware of my renewed plan to leave? With Hem and without her? I would like to take her with me, but I can’t, she’s not mine to take anyway and she wouldn’t leave her father. He comes first in her affections along with Hem and Akka. Had she sensed it somehow, like an animal smells unheard, unseen things?

Now, with Anu gone, I wondered if I would have the courage to go after all. I held the two children close. My ear filled with the sound of Varsha’s quiet breathing and I felt guilty that I do not entirely like her.

She pulled away from me and stared into my eyes. “I love you, Mama,” she said. “Please don’t leave me.”

I was silent. She shook me and insisted, “Don’t leave me. Promise you won’t?”

“I promise,” I said, the lie tripping easily off my tongue. “I promise.”

Varsha

I was already in a bad mood thanks to Nick Hutch, who’d gone on and on about me and Hem being POCs.