Tell It to the Trees

by Anita Rau Badami

  So I see a large mean eye floating in the air above Papa’s head, shooting out wicked lightning bolts at him, turning him from a good child and making him an angry roaring demon man. What if the eye decides to look at me? Or Varsha? Maybe we will turn into a monster like our Papa. Then there will be nobody left to take care of Mama and me. Akka is way too old and pretty soon she’ll be dead, she keeps telling us so. “I shouldn’t be alive!” She wheezes and laughs in her voice that cracks, and she looks up at the ceiling as if god is sitting up there on the chocolate brown fan with the big fat light hanging from it. “Why is that fellow up there keeping me here? Hey you, do you hear, send me a ladder, it’s time for me to climb up or down, I don’t know and don’t care. All I want is that ladder. Too long too long I have been here. I am bored I am tired I am old. Hey you, listen to me!”

  But another time Akka said Papa was the way he was not because of a demon inside him but because of the genes that came to him from his father Mr. J.K. Dharma. Genes are something you get from ancestors, like our house and money, and cut glass decanters and the green sofa that has a leg missing and has to be propped up with a brick made of newspaper, and Mama’s jewellery which Varsha says is hers because she is a girl and girls get their mother’s stuff. I don’t think that’s fair since Mama is only her stepmother and she already has Real Mother’s jewels. But when I say so, Varsha gets mad at me. She says she will curse me with the evil eye if I ever ever ever again say that Mama is not hers. She will curse me and she will summon all the ghosts in the world to carry me away and torture me. “She is mine, you are mine, everybody in this house is mine, you miserable runt.” She screamed this at me. She scared me so much I decided to stay under my bed for a whole entire morning.

  “Your Papa was a good boy,” Akka said bitterly. I watched the little drops of water that leaked slowly out of the corners of her eyes. They caught in the pouchy skin underneath, and then spilled down her cheeks. Varsha wiped them away gently, licking her fingers like she was licking away our grandmother’s sadness. “But he got his father’s genes, he got his father’s demons. That’s why he gets so angry, my children. That’s why.”

  I don’t like thinking about demons torturing my Papa’s intestines, making him go crazy when he looks at us or at Mama. When he opens his mouth to yawn or laugh I wait for the demon to come out from inside of him in a puff of dark smoke. I’m sure I can see it moving around.

  “Can’t a doctor cure our Papa?” I asked.

  Akka said some illnesses have no cure except death. “When I see what he does to your mother, it hurts my heart.”

  And I hugged Akka back because my heart was hurting too.

  When we woke up, everything was okay again. Mama was in the kitchen. She was making scrambled eggs for us. Papa was sitting at the table all dressed and ready to go to work.

  “Did you sleep well, my pieces of the moon?” Mama asked when we came into the kitchen. She smiled at me. She had a bruise on her face just below her eye. It was like a purple-pink flower.

  Varsha said, “Yes Mama we did, thank you.”

  I looked at my sister because she’d forgotten about the night time. “Mama, you got hurt.” I pointed to her face. “Papa, look!”

  “Did I? Where?” She smiled at us all this time.

  “On your face,” I said. “It’s a funny colour.”

  “Really?” She shrugged. “I must have bumped into something last night.”

  “Too much of an imagination, just like your mother.” Papa slapped Mama’s bottom and pulled her close to him. She touched Papa’s hair but her eyes looked at Varsha and me. Her eyes were trying to say something to us without words but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  Then Papa left for work. When we were all dressed Mama walked Varsha and me to the bus stop at the end of the road, all of us wrapped tight, holding hands because the snow was blowing so hard. If we held hands we would be fine even if we couldn’t see anything and got lost. Varsha said if we did get lost it would be together as a family and a family that sticks together succeeds together.

  “Remember, don’t tell anyone at school anything, understand?” Mama’s voice was coming out of her muffler like it was all wrapped up in wool.

  Varsha was kicking at the snow as she walked. She picked up a fallen branch and hit the air hard with it. Flick-flickety-flick! It sounded like Papa’s belt just before it lands on my skin when I’ve done something bad andletdowntheDharmaname, and I thought, Don’t tell anyone what.

  Anu’s Notebook

  August 22. The children are just hanging around again today. They must be bored. No other kids to play with here—they don’t bring friends home. I think they’ve been snooping inside my hut; some of my things aren’t where I remember putting them. A few days ago, I returned from a trip to town to find my notebook open. I’m certain I’d closed it when I left the house. I must lock the door, which I don’t always remember to do—the emptiness of this place makes me feel I’m safe. Perhaps I’m being too suspicious, but they are an odd pair those two. I see them often roaming around the property. Their favourite spot seems to be a spectacularly tall old conifer some way off to the right of my house.

  Yesterday afternoon I wandered up to them, curious about what they were up to. They had their faces pressed against the trunk of the tree, arms wrapped around it as far as they could reach. I think they were singing, or maybe chanting something in low tones. The girl noticed me first. She leapt away from the tree and really glowered at me.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You can’t come here.”

  “Why not?” I tried to sound mild, not offended as I was. “Nobody told me I was forbidden to go anywhere on this property.”

  “Well, I’m telling you now, so make sure you don’t come here again,” she said peremptorily.

  “Why? Is there something special about this spot?” I was not appreciating her ordering me around.

  “Yes, it’s our place. This is our tree. You can’t come here. You can’t touch our tree.”

  “Our tree,” Hemant repeated.

  The little boy is, as usual, glued to his sister. If I spot one, I know the other is not too far away. He never says anything without his sister’s permission, and when he does, it’s to repeat a bit of whatever she has just said, like a weird echo. They don’t like me, they made that quite clear the first day when I arrived, when they crashed into the room, scowling and furious. Even my bribes of pastries and other goodies that I take over to the house haven’t made much of a dent in their hostility. They gobble it up, thank me because they’re supposed to, and disappear off somewhere. They seem to blame me because their mother hadn’t gone to meet them the day I arrived, the pampered brats!

  “We waited for you!” Varsha had said, glaring at her stepmother.

  “I am sorry, Vashi.” Suman tried to hug the girl, who evaded her arms and continued to sulk. “I am sorry, it won’t happen again.”

  “We waited and waited and Hem was getting really terrified something had happened to you.” Varsha sounded like a schoolteacher and Suman an errant child, and I wondered how on earth Suman allowed the little bully to push her around like that. Now I understand the family dynamic a little better, I realize Suman lets everyone push her around.

  “You’re old enough to bring your little brother home, aren’t you?” I said in the kind of voice I use with my brother’s kids. I shouldn’t have poked my nose in since I was a stranger just arrived, but I guess I thought I was being friendly and aunty-ish. The girl obviously didn’t.

  “Who are you?” she said, giving me a look that’s become familiar to me—a mixture of scorn and irritation.

  “She is our new tenant, Varsha,” Suman said. “Anu Krishnan. I told you she was arriving today, don’t you remember?”

  The boy had climbed onto his grandmother’s bed. “MY grandmother,” he said in a baby voice, kissing Akka’s face extravagantly.

  I smiled at him and said, “Lucky boy to have such a wonderful gr
andma!” or some such, I don’t remember. I do recall with embarrassment that the girl irritated me so much I was ready to smack her. I reminded myself, as I find myself doing practically every time I talk to her, that I am an adult and childish spite is not an adult option. The boy continued to stare suspiciously at me with those prominent eyes of his, as if he expected to catch me red-handed at something. But Akka seems genuinely attached to the boy and his awful sister. She stroked their heads and fussed over them and seemed not to notice they were ill-mannered brats. I was definitely not a part of the cuddly unit of three that afternoon—and when Suman started clucking about school and homework I decided it was time for me to leave.

  The girl is a malevolent little spider with her bony face and arching, well-marked eyebrows above giant eyes. She wouldn’t be bad-looking except when she smiles—she reveals a set of sharp, irregular teeth which resemble the coconut scraper my grandmother used to bring along with her from India when she came to visit us. I wonder why her parents haven’t bothered to get them fixed. Once her teeth are straightened out, she might end up looking like her gorgeous mother Helen. Suman told me she’s thirteen, but she appears much younger because she’s so small.

  The boy is not pretty at all, which is surprising since his father is still, I admit, very handsome and his mother amiable-looking if rather downtrodden. There’s a sense of nervous frailty about him. He scuttles along on a pair of Pinocchio legs. Suman said he’s sickly, nearly died when he was a baby, so the females in the family treat him as if he is a piece of antique china. Horribly spoilt, in other words. He appears quite healthy to me. Ugly as a troll, but healthy as one too. And will prove to be as long-lived since trolls live for thousands of years.

  Suman puzzles me. She’s clearly a thoughtful woman and—now she’s no longer so nervously shy—she’s kind with me (and generous too). But she behaves like a doormat around her family. These pretences we’ve had to concoct about my being in the house because of Akka, and the secretive food business!

  Vikram’s mother Akka is the best of the lot. She must have been quite something when she was young. I like her, she reminds me of my own grandmother with her shrewd eyes and her acerbic wit. She is well read, speaks several Indian languages in addition to the Queen’s English. I can’t imagine what she’s doing in a dump like this, or how she arrived here in the first place, but I suspect I’ll hear all about it soon enough. She’s chatty and fun to be with, and tells me all sorts of stories with great gusto when she’s feeling well, though she’s more or less confined to her bed. Apparently a stroke some years ago weakened her considerably, then a few months later a fall broke something in her back and now she’s always in a great deal of pain. Suman tells me that it’s sometimes so bad Akka can’t even lie down, and then she has to spend entire days sitting in an odd wooden structure that is a bizarre cross between an armchair and one of those old-fashioned raised wooden potties. I’ve seen her tethered to that chair, and I mean that literally, with bedsheets torn into long strips that wind around her body and the back of the wooden contraption, so she won’t topple out in her sleep. It seems barbaric to keep the old woman tied to a chair. Surely there’s something else that can be done, something properly medical? I asked Suman why they didn’t consult a doctor.

  She was vague and guarded. “We did. And then Vikram’s friend, Gopal, who knows about these things, said this is the best way.”

  The best way? To keep an old woman bound to her chair, sitting for days on end? I’m not sure what to do—I feel I have to speak to Suman and Vikram about it again. I of all people understand how terrifying it is for an immigrant family to release their elderly parent into care in a strange home with food and customs frighteningly foreign to her at that age. But she needs better care. It’s all wrong. This Gopal sounds like a quack to me, and I said as much.

  Suman gave me a blank look. “I don’t know, you must ask Vikram about it. He took Akka to the hospital and they said there wasn’t anything they could do for her at her age without causing other problems. Forty-sixty percent chance she might be healed—or become a vegetable, they said. So Vikram says this is the best decision. Vikram knows.”

  I hear these phrases at every turn—Vikram knows, Papa knows, Papa says, Vikram says. He seems to be god around these parts, my classmate Vikram. I’m beginning to think that everybody in the house is terrified of him. If I want to be spiteful and childish—as I confess I’m tempted to be when those brats are around—all I need to do to get them to behave is threaten to complain to their father. All the bluster leaves them and they turn into a pair of frightened little kids. Which makes me feel like shit.

  Hemant

  My baby brother would’ve been five years younger than me if he’d got born. He was very tiny. He died because he was a PREEMIE. Varsha told me. Mama was going to call him Vasanth which means Spring. I would have liked to be an older brother. My brother. Ours, Varsha said.

  After school one day Mama showed us X-ray photos of our brother. He was like a ghost floating in white stuff, sucking his thumb. The stuff is called an AMNIOTIC SAC and contains water. It protects the baby. I was the one who spotted the baby’s ear shaped like a shell and I asked if he could hear things from this side. Could he hear the yelling? Or the songs Mama sang to him? Could he hear me? Or Varsha? Could he hear the woman who Mama says sings in the moon when it’s round and full? “Yes, he can,” Mama said. “He can hear every single thing, so be careful what you say, Hem. Your little brother is listening to you and learning from you.” She was sure the baby was a boy. She said she could feel it in her heart.

  I believe mostly everything my mother tells me. I will be an astronaut. Varsha will own a circus. Butterflies are spirits of good people. Moths are the souls of the wicked. Papa will always love me and Varsha. The way he does when he’s in a good mood. When he drives us for ice creams and makes us giggle. When he says he’s sorry.

  But I don’t believe Mama when she said she fell down the stairs and broke her arm. Or bumped into the furniture in the dark, or that she gave herself a black eye when she was pulling out a STUBBORN root in the garden. Even though Varsha twists my arm hard and says I’m a naughty little liar and Papa and Mama are the happiest people in the world and we’re the happiest family in the world. If I have any lies to tell, Varsha says, I have to whisper them to Tree and nobody else or one of the six hundred and seventy-three ghosts who live between our house and the sky will come and drag me away by the ears into the black lake and I will be trapped like the fish that float under the ice in winter.

  Varsha said especially I was not to lie when we had to call 911, and the ambulance people came to take Mama away to the hospital because the baby was slipping out of her tummy too soon. She said if the ambulance people asked I was to tell them Mama fell down the stairs by accident. So I told them. When Mama came back home without my brother I went to Tree and told it everything. I told how Mama had fallen out of her room when Papa was being a wicked giant. I told how I wasn’t lying even though Varsha said I was. Tree listened quietly and then it said shhh, shhh, shhh and then it was okay for a while. So I was not so scared.

  After my baby brother died Mama wept for six days and seven nights. I counted. Then she went quiet. Then she began to search, search, search. I was at home sick. I saw her. Varsha told me she was looking for her passport, so she could leave us in Merrit’s Point and go away to India. That scared me. What would we do without our Mama? But Varsha said she couldn’t leave because she’d hidden the passport. She showed me where she hid it behind Grandpa’s photograph.

  “But if you tell her, she will go away without us. And I will be very angry and call a slimy ghost to eat your brains.”

  Mama was turning things upside down. She checked under my mattress. She looked inside all my drawers and inside my cupboard. When we had lunch she checked inside the rice tin and the sugar tin. So I asked, “What are you searching for Mama?” even though I knew but I pretended.

  She pressed a finger to her
lips. “I am looking for my happiness, Hemu. Can you help me find it?” But then she gave a huge sigh. “My passport, Hem, have you seen it anywhere?”

  So I said, “What’s a passport Mama?” even though I knew.

  “A magic book that will let us go all the way to India,” Mama said. Then she placed a finger against her mouth again. “But this is our secret, okay Hem? Don’t tell anybody. Not Papa. Or your sister. Promise?”

  “Yes Mama, I promise.”

  “On my head Hem, promise on my head.” Mama knelt down and put my hand on her head. “Now if you tell anyone, I will die. You don’t want that, do you bayboo?”

  I promised and I promised. Mama’s secret felt very heavy inside me. “But what if I have to tell somebody? What if the secret just wants to come out? Then what do I do? Sometimes my face hurts from not telling.”

  Mama looked around and around the room, like we were being followed by monsters. Then she smiled at me and hugged me hard. “Do as Akka told you—tell it to the trees. They know how to keep secrets.”

  So I told Tree how Mama was looking for her passport. I told it that she wanted to run far away to India. But Varsha saw me.

  “I hope you’ve told me what you’re telling Tree, Hem.” She crossed her arms and her eyebrows met across her forehead. I knew she was mad at me. She owns me because she saw me first in the whole wide world and I’m not to keep secrets from her. “You know what will happen if you haven’t, don’t you?”

  I nodded. She would call the demons from the other side of our gate and they would carry me away. So I told her Mama was looking for her passport and she wanted to go all the way back to India so she could be happy like she was when she was a girl.

  “Silly Mama,” Varsha said. “How can she think of doing such a shameful thing? It will bring our name down to dust, and what will happen to us if she leaves? Good thing you told me, Hem. Now we will have to watch Mama extra carefully, won’t we?”