Tell It to the Trees (7 page)

In the meanwhile, my dear little brother was doing his bit to make Suman feel miserable. He threw a hissy fit and believe me, nobody does that better than him.

“Why weren’t you there?” he shouted, near tears, glaring at Suman, ignoring the stranger. “I thought you were dead.”

“Don’t be silly, Hemu.” Suman looked embarrassed. Akka was startled. Anu Krishnan was smiling as if my brother was a comedy show. “Why would I be dead?”

“THEN WHY WEREN’T YOU THERE?” Hem hollered. Once my brother gets going, he can be spectacular.

“I said I was sorry, Hemu.” Suman walked over to him and knelt beside him, looking worried, the way she usually looks.

“Stop shouting, Hemant,” Akka said sternly. “What is there to be scared of? Your sister was with you.”

“Mama said there are strangers on the roads, she said they do bad things to kids. She said she’d always wait for us. I WAS SCARED!”

“I said I am sorry! It will never happen again, I promise.” Suman reached out again to hold Hemant, but he pushed her away and stalked out of the room with me in tow.

Behind us, Suman said, “I am so sorry, I don’t know what has got into my son. He is normally a good little boy, isn’t he, Akka?”

“Yes, he is,” Akka agreed. “But I think he is getting a bit spoiled by you, Suman. They can walk home by themselves, at least in summer. Varsha is thirteen, old enough to take care of them both. And why have you filled their heads with nonsense about bad people and kidnappers and rubbish like that? There is nobody around for miles here.”

We waited, crouched on the landing at the head of the stairs, Hem and I. Heard chairs scraping backwards in Akka’s room. The woman’s voice. “I think I’ve held you all up for long enough. If you give me the keys, and point me in the right direction, perhaps I could find my own way?”

So that’s who she was—our tenant for the back-house, which Papa had decided to rent out.

Suman’s voice floated up: “I’ll walk you there. Show you where all the things are …”

Then Akka’s. “And when are you coming back to see me, Anu?”

I was startled. Akka sounded
friendly
. What was wrong with her? She is usually so sensible. Suman, yes, you can count on her to be daft about everybody, but our grandmother said she always took her time to get to know people.

The tenant laughed. “Whenever you want me to, Akka. Your wish is my command!”

Suman looked up and spotted us hovering on the landing. “Varsha, Hemu, do you want to come with me to show Anu the back-house?”

I held Hem’s wrist hard. We were not going anywhere. We were not going to speak to Suman. She had to be punished for neglecting us, her children, in order to spend time with a stranger. I stared down at Anu, standing behind Suman, tall and threatening, as if she already owned
my
stepmother and
my
house, and
my
Akka. The woman stared back.

“We shall hate her forever,” I whispered to Hem.

“For ever and ever,” Hem repeated solemnly.

Suman

I came to Merrit’s Point nine years ago at the end of March, a time when the ground is knee-deep in snow, and your breath hangs like a ghost before your face. I had flown from Madras to Vancouver. From there a single-engined plane that shook and rattled as it thrust through enormous cloud banks brought me to Merrit’s Point, once plunging into an air pocket with such sickening violence that I was sure that we were about to crash. I was one of five passengers on the shuddering twin-engine plane, and the only woman. The four men who sat scrunched up in their seats, knees wedged against the seat in front, their large heads nearly touching the roof of the plane, were like giants. What did they eat to make them so big? Vikram, my husband, was tall, but his head was long and slender, not like these men with their football-shaped skulls. I wondered what they thought of me—a bright exclamation mark in my yellow and black printed silk sari. I was also wearing all my jewellery because people back home, those with relatives abroad, had warned me that it
was better to carry my valuables on my person because suitcases were often stolen by luggage handlers. From their talk it seemed as if the world beyond our dusty street was full of thieves, smugglers, rapists, hoodlums and other criminals.

Mountains circled the quiet little airport at Merrit’s Point, looming over it. There were only a few passengers waiting for luggage. I dragged my two suitcases off the carousel and loaded them on a cart. Both had blue plastic rope wrapped thrice around them, giving them the happy look of birthday presents. It was Madhu Kaki’s idea. My aunt was certain that bags travelling on planes to foreign countries regularly came apart at the seams.

“Remember my sister-in-law’s nephew’s son Gopi, who arrived in the U.S.A. and received his belongings in bits and pieces?” she had said a week before my departure. She was bent over one of her six steel trunks that her father had given her as part of her wedding dowry, searching for a rope of the right thickness and colour. There was nothing that she couldn’t fish out of one of those trunks of hers: measuring tapes, geometry sets that had belonged to her sons, packets of seeds whose names she had forgotten and that she had collected from the garden of her late father-in-law’s house, stacks of saris which she was saving to sell to the raddhi-wallah, waiting for the gold prices to peak before she did so, because the saris, she claimed, had pure gold borders and she was determined to get the best price possible for them. There were tins of powder that had belonged to her long-dead
mother and that she could not bear to throw away, photographs, ancient flowers from her bridal braid, six pairs of scissors, silver bowls and plates, ripped-up cotton saris and bedsheets, and dozens of other odds and ends for which she always managed to find a use.

She poked me on the head with her knuckles. “Well, do you remember the boy?”

“I can’t say I do,” I had replied, preoccupied with the thought that I had got married in too much of a hurry. I had wished that Chandra Raman was around to tell me how to deal with my fears, how to toss my head as defiantly as she had tossed hers and run away from my new Canadian husband.

Madhu Kaki rapped me again with her knuckles. “He was the one who would have come first in the All India Medical entrance exams, that brilliant he was, but forgot to write his student number on his exam paper in his hurry to hand it in and poor fellow had to enrol in a polytechnic instead. Ended up as a chef in a hotel chain, the top chef, I am told. Now do you remember who I am referring to?”

The nephew had eventually gone abroad, but since he had no aunt like mine to find him bright blue rope to tie his suitcases, they had exploded en route, leaving a trail of clothes and other belongings at various airports. Finally, only six of ten pairs of VIP P-front navy blue underpants, which the young man’s mother had packed into the case, six (out of sixteen) vests (with sleeves because the young man sweated a lot and the arms of his shirts suffered as a
result), one of several tins of mango-lime-ginger pickles especially made for him by his grandmother, and a single shoe had arrived at the end of his journey from the east to the west of the world. His other shoe, a winter jacket bought at great expense from a smuggler who operated out of a radio repair shop on Second Beach Road, and numerous books which he might have needed were all lost when the bulging suitcase gave way.

Madhu Kaki narrated these details with such certainty that I believed her. Besides, she and other members of our extended network of friends and relatives in Triplicane told and retold the story of the boy’s baggage so many times that even if it was not entirely accurate, the endless reiteration gave it the shine of truth.

I had known Vikram for less than a month before our marriage and wasn’t sure whether it had all been a dream—the good-looking man who had been brought home by my Appa one fine morning and who had asked for my hand in marriage in a week. Such romance was unheard of in our mundane lives, such passion was the stuff of cinemas. Now I know that neither romance nor passion had played a role in Vikram’s decision. He chose me because I am good-natured, easygoing, the perfect substitute for a wild dead wife, a patient nursemaid for his aged mother, a caring mother for his child. He gauged me correctly. I am the staying type, the sort who can be made to fit a mould, the sort who will always do what is expected of her. But I did not realize, until I came here, how afraid and docile I could become, how easy to push around.

Our neighbourhood could not stop talking about our marriage for the entire six months that I remained in Madras after my wedding. The gossips and the matchmakers, whose noses had been put out of joint by this alliance which they had not arranged, went around telling everybody how cunning my father was. “Pretends not to know anything about anything,” they whispered about my unworldly Appa, who had never harboured a single devious thought in his entire life. “Who would have believed? He must have planned it all in advance. Caught a fine cockerel for his little chickadee! And a foreign-returned one at that!”

Vikram was a distant relative of our front-door neighbour Ganesh Maamu. He was visiting India for the first time in his life and had somehow missed the party of relatives that had gone to the airport to receive him. Appa—on his usual Saturday morning rounds of the temple, the vegetable vendor, his friends at the Dramatic Society of Triplicane, the lending library—had found Vikram wandering around the crowded market near the temple, sticking out like a palm tree in a mango grove, stopping occasionally to check a map of Madras that he held. Vikram’s taxi hadn’t managed to locate Ganesh Maamu’s house and had dropped him off at the temple instead.

In his khaki trousers and T-shirt, he had that gloss of Abroad on him, down to his clean, baby-pink sandal-clad feet that looked like they had been hidden from the sun for years, and his way of looking you straight in the eye
which some of the elders in our area mistook for a lack of respect. Appa knew who he was, of course. Everyone in our locality, on all the four streets forming a square around the temple, had been made aware of his visit, his exact and convoluted relationship to Ganesh Maamu, why he had never visited India before (these things happen what-to-do), what his father had done for a living (something to do with wood but dead for many years), what Vikram did (something brilliant, no doubt).

Faces lined windows at the hour when the Foreign Boy, as he had come to be known, was to be borne home from the airport by Ganesh Maamu and his relatives, mothers busy in their kitchens had posted their young children at their front doors and shouted every now and again, “Have they come?” and the street urchins were all on alert to spread the word as soon as they descended from the two cars that Ganesh Maamu had borrowed from somewhere. The arrival of a long-lost relative, and an eligible man at that, was a matter of great ceremony, and so everybody in Ganesh Maamu’s house had gone to the airport.

Besides, it was an opportunity to gawk at the planes as they took off and landed. We were all avid planespotters on our street. We all yearned to go away somewhere far from home, yet few had dared to leave the familiar sanctuary of our streets. So plane watching was a substitute for travel. We were fascinated by those winged creatures that roared overhead late at night and early in the morning. “Plane! Plane! Come and see, quickly!” the
lucky spotter would yell, and everyone would rush out onto their verandas and balconies hoping to catch sight of that magical creation that could take you across the world. And sometimes, soon after the monsoons when the weather was cool, families got together and went on picnics to a spot near the airport. Mothers and aunts and older sisters would unpack tins and paper packets full of puris and curd-rice and lemon-rice, and we would all lie on our backs or lean back on our elbows, tilt our heads backwards until we developed cricks in our necks, and watch the mid-morning planes taking off, vapour trails streaming out across the light blue sky like the tails of exotic birds. These were the small pleasures of our lives. So the arrival of the nephew many times removed, who was coming from halfway across the world in one of those silver machines, was a moment that belonged to us all courtesy of his family here on our street.

It was surely Fate, evil thing, that led my Appa to Vikram as he stood there poring over his map, trying to figure out which of the maze of lanes he should plunge into. And Fate that had brought the man to our home. I wish now that Fate had left us all alone.

I don’t remember what I was doing when he arrived, carefully stepping around the rangoli that the cleaning woman had drawn in the dust outside, stooping to avoid the fresh mango-leaf torana decorating the door lintel. He had stood there blinking as his eyes adjusted from the sharp sunshine outside to the cool darkness of our front room.

I remember that he kept those eyes on me right through the visit, following my movements as I served lemon juice and freshly made chakkuli, his face intense and serious. I was aware of his gaze even after Ganesh Maamu and his fifteen family members came rushing in to retrieve him, somewhat put out that we had claimed him first.

In the days that followed, Vikram came frequently to our house. On one of those occasions he smiled, a rare occurrence, and told me that I looked like a blossom in my pale orange cotton sari. Nobody had ever likened me to a blossom even though that is what my name means. Madhu Kaki never failed to remind me that I was nothing like the beauty my mother was. (My aunt was fond of attributing rare talents and amazing beauty to the dead.) I don’t blame her, she was merely doing her job, which was to keep me a modest young woman with no great ideas about myself or my appearance and no correspondingly high expectations of anything so that I would never be disappointed by what life or the future had to throw at me. One of the matchmakers had remarked that I was not bad to look at but she didn’t know how to describe me. There was nothing she could praise to high heavens—not my colour, or my eyes, or any other aspect of me. I could neither sing nor dance and I was a middling student with a degree in Home Economics. Nor did my father belong to a famous or wealthy family which might have whitewashed all my deficiencies and added the necessary gloss required for an advantageous marriage. By the time Vikram came along
I was nearly thirty, at peace with my ordinariness, and quite resigned to remaining at home with my aging father and aunt. I made a small income from coaching schoolchildren in math, reading and writing, but my needs were small and it was enough. I was happy.