Tell It to the Trees

by Anita Rau Badami

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.

  She said, “Stay in the car, I’ll be back in a second. Don’t get out, did you hear? I’ll be mad if you do. I won’t bring you with me again, ever.”

  I asked her, “Who are you meeting?”

  “A friend. I have something important to discuss with him.”

  “Why can’t I come in with you?”

  “You can’t. We’re talking big-people stuff.” She checked her face in the rear-view mirror, patted her hair.

  That made me feel cross and I started whining. “I’m thirsty, I want some water, I want to come inside too.

  I’m cold.”

  Which I guess made her cross. “Here’s some water. Now stay here and stop being such a baby,” she said. She thrust a bottle of water at me, slammed the door shut. She opened the door again and kissed me. “I’ll be back soon, promise.”

  I watched her ring the doorbell, and got a brief glimpse of a man with red hair at the open door. Then Mom disappeared inside and I was all alone.

  She was gone for hours. She said it wasn’t hours, only twenty minutes, but it was. I bet it was. I waited and waited for her to come out of the stranger’s house. I was really bored and then I was really angry. I wondered if I dared to leave the car and run away. Or maybe I’d just get out and scream for Mom and everyone would hear because the street was very quiet. That would show her! I imagined telling Papa about it, but she’d made me promise and I knew I never would. So I waited. And waited. Then I started getting scared. It was almost noon, I think, and we were far away from home and pretty soon Papa would be back with Akka and find us gone and get real mad at Mom. Maybe at me too for going with her. Or simply because I looked like her. Or something.

  I’m not sure why Papa always gets so angry with me. Back then, it wasn’t my fault that my Mom sometimes took me with her when she got an attack of the roamings. Roamings, that’s what she called them. I would watch her carefully, but they’d come sneaking into the house, wrap themselves around her feet and carry her off to the shops or to the next town, and even farther sometimes. She’d always get home just before Papa did so he wouldn’t know.

  When Mom felt the roamings getting closer, she’d pick up the phone and call Mrs. Cooper next door and ask her if she mi
nded coming over to keep an eye on me and Akka. But if she couldn’t then Mom called Aunty Chanchal for help. She didn’t like to do that because Aunty Chanchal is a snoopy old bag and wanted to know where Mom was going and when she’d be back and why and what and who and other stuff that Mom got cross about. There was also the danger that Aunty Chanchal would spill the beans to Papa. Her husband Uncle Gopal is Papa’s friend and Aunty Chanchal considers Papa part of her family.

  Mrs. Cooper, on the other hand, only wanted company and couldn’t be bothered less about what Mom did. All she cared about was a hot cup of tea and a nice long chat with Akka. They used to be really good friends until her daughter got pregnant and ran off with somebody and after that Papa didn’t encourage her to visit much and always got mad when he discovered Mom had got her to help. So Akka and I stopped telling him when Mom had the roamings and Mrs. Cooper came over. That way, Akka said, there was no room for a quarrel, or for Papa to holler and Mom to holler back and threaten to go away for good from this godforsaken hellhole of a place.

  Every six months, Papa took Akka to the hospital in Vancouver for a complete checkup. They left very early and got back in the afternoon. Mom called this her “independence day.” She’d be full of a suppressed excitement the night before and in the morning took forever to dress. She’d wait for Mrs. C. to show up, give me a kiss, promise me a treat if I was a good girl who knew to keep secrets, and then disappear for the whole day.

  But that morning, Mrs. Cooper couldn’t come to babysit and my mother had to take me along with her on her roaming. I sat on her bed and watched her transform herself from a Mom into a Princess. She emerged from the bathroom in a pale satin slip the colour of her skin, with a towel wrapped around her head. Dimly visible through the thin satin was the dark V of her crotch. She unrolled transparent nylon stockings, holding out her arms to draw them up her legs, and when she bent down to pull them on, her breasts swelled out of her brassiere like living things. I remember the faraway expression in her eyes as she delicately stroked the hose up her smooth brown legs, up and up and up, first one then the other. At last she straightened up. Her hands went under her slip to make some quick, secret adjustments, and she was done. She caught me watching and raised an eyebrow at me like the Hollywood divas in her magazines. She laughed. She had a lovely laugh, as nice as the tinkly wind chimes Akka had hung on the lilac tree in the front garden.

  “What are you peeking at, you naughty girl?”

  I giggled and she looked away. I know now she was already detaching herself a little more each day, preparing to leave me, although I didn’t realize that then.

  She gazed thoughtfully at her image in the mirror, stroked her fingers through her damp hair and dried it carefully around a big cylindrical brush until large loose curls bounced about her head. She trapped it down under a hair band and applied foundation to smooth out an already smooth skin. Then she picked up her powder compact, a beautiful silver thing with some fancy stones set into a design of roses, which appeared mysteriously one day and which she said she would give to me on my sixteenth birthday. There was a condition, though—I was not to tell Papa about its existence.

  “It’s a secret, between you and me,” she had said, kissing the top of my head as I played with the compact.

  “Where did you buy it from?” I asked, and she winked at me conspiratorially.

  “I didn’t buy it,” she said.

  “You stole it? You found it finderskeepers losers-weepers?” Mom had an amazing talent for finding things lying around—beautiful things, expensive-looking stuff—the compact, a bracelet, a purse made of silk and beads—so many pretty things, all secrets from Papa, all promised to me when I turned thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

  “I don’t steal things, silly,” Mom said. “I find them.” But I was not to breathe a word about her amazing luck either to Papa or to Akka. This was our secret—between us girls. I was not good at keeping secrets, I needed to tell someone, but when I went to Akka, she stuck an index finger in each of her ears, squeezed her eyes shut and said, “No, no, I don’t want to know anything. I am too full of my own secrets, I will burst if you give me any more to keep!”

  Akka didn’t want to be like the woman in a story she told me once, a kind woman who listened to everybody’s secrets and kept them safe inside her belly. That way people would feel light as air and good as gold because they didn’t have their secrets weighing on their souls. But the poor woman grew fatter and fatter and fatter from all the secrets inside her and one day she exploded like a great big balloon with too much air. All the secrets were released and flew around the world. And everybody knew everything and so the people to whom the secrets belonged got mad at the kind woman and cursed her so hard her spirit got no peace and is still wandering around the world trying to collect the scattered secrets.

  “But Papa will get mad if I tell him. What should I do?” I was frantic. It was like holding on to an urgent pee.

  “Go tell the trees,” Akka said. “They won’t tell a soul.”

  Sometimes Mom said she’d bought these things cheap at the second-hand store in the next town, or if it looked too expensive, like with a pair of old and intricate earrings, she said she’d inherited it from her great-grandmother. I knew she was lying.

  Mom liked people to think she was grander than she really was, that she came from an old and respected family, the kind that lived in big homes with polished wooden floors and crystal vases full of chubby pink roses. She dropped hints about ancestral property, heirlooms, an inheritance. But I never once met my grandparents or any cousins, aunts or uncles on my mother’s side. It was as if she had sprung out of the earth rootless, with no past, no memory, no history except what she made up. She turned up her nose at Papa, called him a great big bore, she joked about his work as an accountant in a small lumber mill which he always says is very important work. Her sneering drove him mad, he’d lift up his large hands, shout and throws things like a crazy man.

  “At least I earn an honest living,” he’d roar. “You just live off me, you bitch.”

  Papa likes an immaculate home. My mother was a messy bessy—she hated being a housewife, she grumbled when Papa complained about the piles of clothes that grew like they were alive in all the corners of our house: heaps of frilly panties on the dining table waiting to be put away, shirts needing to be ironed lurking about on top of the washing machine, dirty clothes stuffed into baskets, socks, underwear, her beautiful frocks … they came tumbling out from all over. Mom was always sniffing at them to check if they were clean or dirty, cursing under her breath if they needed to be washed. Nothing was ever in the right place—hair clips on the couch and on the coffee table, high-heeled shoes on the stairs and on the landing, bras, books, barrettes, lip gloss, socks, my clothes, Papa’s underwear, magazines, everything was everywhere and always in the wrong place. She was a wretched cook and even though she followed recipes faithfully, something always went wrong and the end results, though available in vast quantities, tasted horrible. She’d start boiling something, forget it on the stove because she was busy reading a book or getting dressed to go out, and end up with a burnt pot of food. It drove Papa crazy, but she never changed her ways.

  They’d scream at each other, getting angrier and angrier, until I was sure the house would shatter.

  “Why did they get married if they hate each other?” I’d ask Akka when I was a little older. In all the fairy stories she told me, the prince and the princess fell in love, got married and lived happily ever after.

  “No, no, your Papa loved your Mom more than anything in the world,” Akka would say. She was his religion, my grandmother explained. And he was like a wild-eyed and fanatical believer. It was his love for her that ate away at him, turned him into a maniac. And the more he loved her, the more he wanted to hold on to her, the more she wanted to get away. And that made him screaming mad. It was terrifying. I was glad I had Akka to go to when our house turned into a volcano.

  So that
morning when I was four, I waited in the car for my mother and wondered what she was doing inside the house. Two girls walked past, a car came up and stopped at the house across the street and a man and a woman got out. They held hands and went inside their house. I wished they were my parents. I wished my Mom would hurry up. Then just when I started to cry the door opened and there she was. She was shining like an angel, I thought. She got into the car and leaned forward to kiss me. “Here, this is for you.” She held out a small bag with some candy.

  I crossed my arms and refused to take the bag. I was angry with her, but also glad that she was back. That she hadn’t left me forever inside the car in a strange town.

  “Oh come on, come on, who’s my sweetie pie? Hanh? Hanh?” She tickled me and I giggled. I loved her again.

  Around her throat was a pretty new necklace.

  “Can I have that too?” I touched her warm brown skin.

  “When you are sixteen, baby.” She smiled. “But only if you don’t tell anyone about it. Especially Papa.”

  She smiled again and kissed my cheek. My anger floated away. Mom drove super fast down the roads, the wind tearing through the windows which she liked to keep open, turning my hair into a big nest of tangles. I felt we were on a roller-coaster ride.

  But it was no good. By the time we got home, Papa was already there. He was madder than a hornet. “Where were you two?” he shouted as soon as we stepped into the house.

  “Out,” Mom smiled at me. “We went for a picnic, didn’t we, baby?”

  I nodded. I didn’t look at my father in case he caught the lie hiding in my eyes. I felt bad for him. I understood exactly what he must feel like when he looked at Mom, this lovely restless butterfly who never entirely belonged to us. I think I knew, even then, that she would leave us as soon as she could convince herself that it was all right to go without me, her only child.

  “Where was this picnic? What did you eat?” Papa grabbed her by the arm and shook her. “Why do you lie to me? You are lying, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”