Aunty Chanchal came to look after Akka and Papa drove me and Hem to school before going to the hospital. At the school gates Papa got out to open the back door of the car. He hugged both of us and said, “Be good, children, I love you.”
Hem didn’t say anything back, but I did. “Love you too, Papa.” Even though I knew. He got back in the car, looked out of the window at us and waved. We waved back, our hands high in the air. It’s what he likes. It’s what he expects. A fond farewell when he leaves and a fond greeting when he returns.
After the car had disappeared down the road, I smacked Hem’s head. “Why didn’t you say anything? He’ll be upset. Just hope he didn’t notice.”
“I hate Papa. He hurt Mama,” he said.
“He didn’t hurt her. She hurt herself, didn’t you hear? She tripped over her slippers and fell down the stairs.”
“No she didn’t,” he said. “He pushed her out of their room. We saw it.”
“No we didn’t.” I smacked his head again.
“Yes, we did,” Hem insisted.
“Okay. But he didn’t push her. She tripped on her slipper and fell on her own. And you are not to mention it to anyone. I’ll call the ghosts to punish you if you do.”
“What if it comes out of me by itself?”
“Hold on to it, it’s a secret. Hold on and tell it to Tree when we get back from school, okay?”
“Why does he beat Mama? Why does he beat us? Doesn’t he like us?”
“Of course he does, silly. He loves us, wants only what is good for us. That’s why he has to punish us when we’re naughty. For our own good.”
“Was Mama naughty?”
“Papa didn’t do anything to her,” I reminded my brother. “She fell, Hem. Fell. On her own.” He was a baby. He needed to be taught how to keep secrets. Family secrets. Our family, our secrets. Nobody else had to know.
We reached our stop and the bus ground to a halt in a cloud of dust. The doors folded open and Hemant and I got out. Mr. Wilcox the driver waved and took off down the road, farther and farther, until the low roar of the bus became one with that of the wind which always blows down from the mountains through Merrit’s Point.
There was no sign of Suman. Later she apologized humbly, but we were mad at her, Hem and I. It’s her job to come and get us. That’s what mothers are supposed to do—look after their kids, make sure they’re safe. Anything could happen to us between the bus and the house, anything. That’s what Papa says, although Akka thinks it’s ridiculous. She says I’m old enough to bring my brother home myself and that Papa is being a tyrant for making Suman do it when she has so many other things to attend to.
“Where’s Mama?” Hem asked, looking around as if she might be hiding in the fields on either side of the road.
“How should I know? Come on, let’s go,” I said. “Maybe Akka is ill or something.”
Hem squatted down on the ground. “I’m going to wait. She’s always here. She said she would always be here no matter what!”
“Come on, Hem, don’t be a giant squib!” But I was worried too. It was so unlike Suman not to be waiting for us—she’s there every day, sun or snow. What if she had had one of her fits of illness? What if she’d fallen and broken her arm again? Or if Akka had finally died, as she kept hoping? I started to walk homewards fast, dragging Hem behind me.
“Do you think she’s dead?” He sounded tearful.
“I don’t know,” I snapped. “Come on, hurry up and stop behaving like a baby.”
We passed old Mrs. Cooper’s house, the only other home on that long road. It’s shuttered and silent now. I always wish, when we pass the house, that Mrs. Cooper’s granddaughter, Gilly, was still around. She’s the only friend I’ve had. After moving to Calgary to live with her dad, she sent me a single letter. Then I heard nothing more from her. Mrs. Cooper moved away a few years ago as well, to live with one of her sons—Billy or Dave. They were both construction workers and Mrs. Cooper told us stories of how they spent the winters in the ski resorts nearby, busy renovating, maintaining or building the posh hotels and cottages that had grown up around the resorts. They came home every weekend to be with her, sometimes bringing beautiful girls with long legs who walked with a swing and a sway of their tiny hips. Once I tried to copy the walk to entertain Hem, swinging awkwardly around the house, one arm bent at the elbow and hand glued to my waist, my nose in the air, until Papa noticed and slapped me about the head for being silly. Good thing he didn’t figure out who I was mimicking—I’d have been beaten black and blue for sure. Papa used to remark that the girls looked cheap, like tramps, even though they had seemed perfectly nice to Hem and me. Even Suman had liked them, but then she likes everyone. Papa says that she has no discernment. Afterwards, as always, he was sorry for smacking me. But as he explained over ice cream treats the next day, it was only to teach me the difference between good and bad, dross and gold. Poor Papa, it’s not his fault that he has to be hard with me sometimes. I know he’s worried I’ll turn out like my real mother, the one who abandoned us to our fate.
So I always stare at the shuttered windows of the Cooper house when we walk past. They’re like dead eyes. When Mrs. Cooper was there, even after Gilly had left, she’d watch for us to go by, sometimes call us in for some fresh-baked cookies, and we would run up her driveway guiltily. And Suman would follow, saying, Only one cookie each, hurry up, and don’t tell Papa, don’t tell.
In winter, the old lady would keep the living room lights on warm and friendly as her smile, and reassuring, informing us that we were only about twenty minutes from home, not lost in the wilderness of snow that spread out in every direction, borders and edges blurred and lost.
“It’s a long time now. I don’t think she’s coming back, do you?” Hem said, thinking my exact same thoughts again, like he’s my twin.
“Don’t know. I miss her.”
“Me too. Her cookies were the best in the world.”
“Greedy little thing, all you can think about is food.” I yanked his arm. “Race you home. Last one there is a miserable, bandy-legged spider.”
I swung my bag over my shoulder and started running. We slowed down out of breath as we approached the gate. Noticed the car parked outside.
“I wonder who that is,” I said. The car looked crappy, worse than ours, which Papa calls his rusty steed. Sometimes my father can be really nice and really funny.
Hem started running again and barged through the front door. “Mama! Mama! Where are you?”
Sounds of laughter floated out of Akka’s room. I thought, would they be laughing if someone’s hurt? We dropped our bags and went into our grandmother’s room. There was Suman, sitting on the bed, cool as you please, and Akka, leaning against the pillows piled up in her chair, her white hair like silk threads spread out on the pale pink covers. And a tall woman we’d never seen before.
“Hello, hello, you must be the famous Hemant! And this lovely girl must be Varsha,” she said. She held out her hand. “I am Anu Krishnan.”
I didn’t know how to react to that. Nobody has ever called me lovely. I wasn’t sure what to say or do, so I frowned at the woman to let her know I wasn’t about to be taken in by praise. Later on, when I read her notebook, I knew she was a smiling liar.
But I have to admit, she looked kind of cute, and her clothes were really, really nice. Her hand was still out, but I decided not to shake it, just because. Later on, after I read those pages from her notebook, I was glad that I didn’t take her hand. She was no friend. She was a liar, Anu Krishnan. She never meant a word of anything she said to us. How was it she described me in her horrid book? Ugly little thing, teeth like her grandmother’s coconut scraper, beady eyes. And Hem was a troll, pretending to be sick all the time. And Suman needed help to get away from us all, and she, Anu Krishnan, outsider, was going to give it to her. Oh yes, she lied and cheated and planned to steal.
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).
Tell It to the Trees Page 5
