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.
When Vikram flattered me, compared me to a flower, I should have been wary because there was nothing floral about me. If I resembled anything botanical at all, it would be a banana leaf—plain, sturdy, useful. But I was as unaccustomed to male flattery as a person who has never touched alcohol. How easily I lost my head. Now, with bitter hindsight, I believe that when he looked at me he saw a woman who could be moulded, who would not rise up and complain, who would be submissive to his needs and the needs of his household, who would not fight back, as Helen had done.
Within a week of his arrival he asked Appa for my hand in marriage. Ganesh Maamu’s wife came bearing the auspicious platter of fruit, the betel leaf and the coconut. She was smiling even though everyone knew that she was put out by Vikram’s insistence that he wanted to marry me—she had talked a lot before he arrived about an alliance between him and her daughter. Ganesh Maamu too had tried to throw a spanner in the works by informing my father that Vikram’s first wife had left him before she died and that he had a young daughter from that marriage. There was also an invalid mother who needed to be looked after. My father was doubtful about the match when he heard about the child.
“I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life taking care of me and your aunt, although I would be happy to see your beloved young face every day until I die,” he said, stroking my head the way he used to do when I was a little girl in need of comfort or advice. “But I am not sure I want you to travel thousands of miles with a stranger to look after his child and mother. The decision is yours, but don’t do anything at the cost of your happiness, Sumana.”
Then Ganesh Maamu came up with the notion that it would not do for Vikram to get married without his mother’s consent. But when my father contacted Akka, all she had to say during their short telephone conversation was, “It is up to the young woman, whether she wants to marry my son or not. I have nothing to say except that I will welcome anyone he brings home with warmth. That is all I can offer—a warm welcome.”
“Must be a very modern type of woman,” Madhu Kaki commented when this information reached us—approximately five and a quarter minutes after it had hit the Triplicane air—in a tone that implied that she must also, therefore, be crazy. How could any mother allow her son the freedom to choose his own wife? Marriage was a serious business, involving a lifelong commitment on the part of two families rather than of just two individuals. It was well known that mothers could see what their sons could not. Sons were prone to blindness when it came to women, even ordinary ones such as me.
“But then, she was always a strange girl. I remember her from when we were young together,” Madhu Kaki said, musing about Vikram’s mother who had grown up on this same street a long time ago. “Beautiful creature, no wonder her son looks like a film star. Insisted on going to college. Unheard of for a girl in those days. Her parents were freedom fighters. They had strange ideas about bringing up their daughter. There were young men from the best families lining up to marry her, but guess who she selected—a fellow from an unknown family. I don’t even know where they met—in college perhaps. She married him and a few years later we heard they’d gone away to Canada. Not a word from her since, all these years. And now suddenly her son is here about to become your husband. How strange is life!”
On my wedding day, my father gave me a few small pieces of jewellery that had belonged to my mother. “This is your mother’s blessing, your insurance against bad times, my beloved child,” he said, pressing the soft velvet pouches into my hands. “Which I hope you will never have to use.”
On that beautiful autumn morning, when the notes of the nadaswaram swelled out joyously over the wedding guests, when the mridangam players slapped their hands hard against the leather stretched tight over their drums in a rising crescendo to signal the auspicious moment when Vikram tied the thaali around my neck, I would never have believed that I might one day contemplate selling my inheritance to strangers in pawnshops halfway across t
he world.
Varsha
Another memory. Stronger this time. I was almost seven years old. It was a cold, clouded morning in December. Snow floated down like flowers from a low grey sky. Papa was at work, Akka was dozing in her room. And I can see me: I am on the floor of the book-room working on some drawings. This room is special. It’s too small to call it anything as grand as a library, but it’s where our father reads to us some evenings after dinner, his voice, which I think of as being a sort of golden brown colour, and warm as toasted marshmallows on a cold evening, comforting as milk and cookies, carrying us into the worlds hiding inside those books. Our family photographs live on the walls: my grandfather with a black mouse of a moustache perched over his chubby lips, standing straight as an electric pole behind Akka who is seated and is resplendent in wedding finery, her beringed hands holding down her knees as if she’s afraid they might kick up and down and run away with her; Papa, grinning and missing two teeth, about Hem’s age in one picture, solemn in another with a graduate’s robes and a degree roll in his hand, ready to go out into the world and light it up with his brilliance; Suman, wearing giant dark glasses that hide most of her face, her mouth painted pink and fixed in a tight smile, with Papa a handsome prince, arm draped around her shoulders like a python, his fingers, a bunch of bananas, hanging over her right breast; and finally one of all four of us, smiling as if our lives depended on it. Behind this you can see the space where my real mother’s photograph used to hang before Papa ripped it off the wall and threw it away. Sometimes when the new picture of Papa, Suman, me and Akka goes slightly crooked, I know it’s my jealous Mom fidgeting behind it, wishing she’d never left.
This is the room where the Punishments happen, where Papa’s belt cuts through the air and lands on my calves, or where I wait with bated breath while he checks my report card. Is he going to smile, or will he frown? Pat on the head or punishment? A sweet or a slap?
That morning Suman was perched on a stepladder in our book-room, dusting the books, her enormous stomach pressed outwards, her hair a mess of curls around her face. She’s expecting a baby, but I know she’s not happy about it. I heard her crying in Akka’s room the day she found out.
A cow mooed somewhere above me. A cow? Inside our house? Am I imagining things? Is it my real mom being a clown, trying to get my attention? She was always one for attention, my mother, always wanting people to look at her, to admire her, to tell her how beautiful she was. But she wouldn’t moo, it isn’t elegant. I looked up at Suman. She was gazing absently at the opposite wall and seemed not to have heard a thing.
“Mmooaw!” she said suddenly. “MMOWAAW!”
She was holding on to the bookshelf with one hand and touching her belly with the other. An expression of alarm clouded her face, she looked at me without really seeing me. “The baby,” she whimpered. “I think it is coming.”
I stared at her, not sure what I was supposed to do. She was clinging to the bookshelf. I pulled at a long strand of hair. It felt good, the slight tingle of pain in my scalp reminding me I am still here, I am not dead or disappeared.
“Go, get the phone, Varsha,” Suman said, climbing slowly off the ladder and walking wide-legged towards a chair in the middle of the room. “It’s the baby. It’s coming like an earthquake. We need to call for the ambulance.”
“Hello, Soo-man, and how are we today? Baby doing okay, then?” Greta the telephone operator bawled. She always shouts like you’re a million miles away and she doesn’t actually have a telephone in her hand. She is also the postmistress, and her daughter Leanne Walker who is in my class has a cleft lip and is waiting for an operation to make her beautiful.
“Greta, I need the ambulance immediately,” Suman said. “The baby is coming.”
“Oh dear!” Greta boomed. “Can you hang on a bit longer, darling? The ambulance and the fire engine are both out there in the mountains, accident on the highway.”
Suman mooed again, shaking her head, handing me the phone, say no, can’t wait, want it now, coming, the baby is coming.
“Well then, well then, all I can do is give them a call and let them know. Is there someone else at home with you? Where’s the big guy, gone to work, eh?” It’s a small town, everybody knows everybody else, nothing surprising about that.
Yes, Papa is at work, yes, I’m at home with her, and Akka, but nobody else. I’m too young and my grandmother is too old. How about a friend, then, anyone close by who can help? Surely there’s somebody who can help, small towns are full of helpful folks. Just hold on.
Call, call Mrs. Cooper, Varsha, hurry, hurry, hurry, Suman howled, and from her room where she was stuck in her chair my old grandmother warbled high like a bird with a sore throat—What is it? Is there something wrong?
Mrs. Cooper showed up after twenty minutes even though she lived only about five minutes away by car, because it took her time to climb into her boots and her jacket and her toque and her gloves, she said, and it took her time to find the car keys and the house keys, and because nobody had cleared the snow from the road leading to our house she’d had to drive super slowly. Ours are the only two homes on that road and every winter, by this time, there is so much snow that it takes four times longer to get anywhere. Akka always said if it wasn’t for Mrs. Cooper’s two sons who used to come down twice a month to check up on her, or Nick’s dad Joe Hutch, who does it once in a while because he’s Papa’s school friend, that road would be thigh-deep in snow in winter, and no one would ever find us till thaw time came and if it wasn’t for them, bless-them-with-a-hundred-dutiful-sons-and-one-loving-daughter-each, we’d be trapped inside our house, buried in snow, frozen and compressed over the winter into flattened versions of ourselves, we would freeze and become snow crystals on our own windows.
Mrs. Cooper limped in, helped Suman into the back seat of her tiny car, panting from the effort, and cried, “Hold on there, honey. We’ll get you to the hospital in no time.”
I refused to stay behind with Akka—what if my new mother snuck away with the new baby while I waited at home? What if? So I too got loaded into the car and Akka was left behind with the phone in her right hand, and her glasses looped around her neck so she could see what she was dialing, just in case she needed to phone somebody all of a sudden, in case she was dying, and she said she was okay and we’d better leave, looks like Suman is about to have her baby NOW. I fixed my grandmother’s image inside my head, so she would look exactly the same as she did at that moment, black eyes snapping with life, even if she were to die before we returned. Who knows what a dead person looks like anyway? I’ve still never seen one. Not even Mom. Do they look like puddles of grey water, for isn’t it true that the human body is made up mostly of water? Will Akka look like a brown leaf blown down by the wind? Or will she be just a sad thing like the cat that Nick Hutch killed by accident with his daisy gun—eyes shut and mouth open?
“Buckle up, everyone!” shouted Mrs. Cooper. She climbed into the driver’s seat, her smoker’s lungs whining protest with each breath she took, and drove as fast as she could, which was not very fast because of the snow, but soon Suman was screaming and begging her to stop, stop, please stop, the baby is coming. I will make a mess of your car seat. Please stop. We’d travelled only as far as Mrs. Cooper’s house, so there was nothing to do but turn into the gate and stop. Mrs. Cooper trundled around to Suman’s side of the car to help her out, but she slipped out of her seat, half in and half out of the car door, her sari ruched up around her waist, her soft brown skin turning blue with cold. I was out too, wide-eyed and shocked, watching my brother blooming like a hairy flower in the gasping darkness of the place between Suman’s legs, a swamp of blood spreading about her on the white snow, and the smell, the stink of new life, and then my newborn brother screaming from his first encounter with the frozen world. Mrs. Cooper rushed in and out of her house, dragging a rug from her living room, blankets, boiling water, scissors, cloth rags, and I stood and watched unnoticed, chewing a strand of my hai
r, shivering from cold and fear. Mine, I thought. My brother.
When Suman and the baby returned from the hospital, I helped her bathe him, held out the towels to dry him, brought lotions to make him moist and soft and sweet as fresh butter, held his chubby feet in the air while she changed his diapers, tickled his belly and combed his hair with the soft brush that had once been mine. She put a dot of black kohl on his thigh, like a giant mole on his pallid skin, to keep away the evil eye, and a dot of it on my head, deep inside my hair where it could not be seen by the kids at school.
The months after Hemant’s birth were good ones. Suman lost that panicked look in her eyes that terrified me so much, and she stopped crying in Akka’s room. For a while Papa smiled and cooed at the baby and made special things for Suman to eat, and bought us expensive presents to show how much he loved us. For a while it was okay and for a while we were the happiest family in the world. But I felt like we were all holding our breaths as hard as we could and pretty soon we’d just have to let go. Pretty soon Suman or I would say or do something that would make Papa mad, and everything would be back to the way it always was.
Suman
In the beginning, I liked Vikram, was curious about him, and flattered that he wanted to marry me. But that was all. What I imagined as “love” did not enter the equation. When he first touched me on our wedding night, I felt only nervousness and a bit of nausea at the thought of lying naked with a stranger. And afterwards, when he held me close, murmuring in my ear words that I was too embarrassed to hear, my legs sticky with our fluids, all I thought about was how soon I could rush to the bathroom and wash it all off. There were none of those feelings of ecstasy that the poets and novelists write about. Were those men writing about how they felt when they made love to a woman? Were men more susceptible to ecstasy? I had no idea. Madhu Kaki had been my sole source of information, and not a very reliable one. I had asked her about how I should feel on the first night of my marriage and she had said quite confidently that I should feel as any bride should.
Tell It to the Trees Page 6
