Tell It to the Trees

by Anita Rau Badami

  “And what is that feeling?” I had insisted.

  “Why, a deep respect for your husband, my dear, what else?”

  “What about love? What if I feel respect but no love?”

  “If you respect him, how can you not love him too?” Madhu Kaki had asked.

  “I respect the temple priest,” I said, “but I don’t love him. Should I?”

  “What a thing to say! Love Shripad Acharya indeed! Why, he is older than your grandfather might have been if he was alive! And if he had heard you talking this way, he would have died of shock! Chhee!” Madhu Kaki wagged her hand at me and said, “What an odd creature you are! I am sure you will get along very well with your mother-in-law. You two can sit in Canada and spend your time quizzing each other about silly things like love and all. I will thank you to leave me alone!”

  I asked her again, the morning of my wedding, beset with doubts. “I don’t think I love him, Madhu Kaki,” I whispered as my aunt hovered about me, turning me into a bride.

  “It will come, this love that you keep talking about,” Madhu Kaki assured me, fat chin set in certainty, her arms jiggling as she rubbed turmeric and sandal paste on my arms to make my skin golden and fragrant.

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “It will, girl, stop questioning me. Look at me and your uncle—I had not even set eyes on him before I married him, and then I felt only love for him afterwards.”

  “Why?” I persisted.

  “What kind of question is that?” Madhu Kaki had been genuinely puzzled. In her innocent, simple world marriage was a prerequisite for love and you fell in love with nobody but the person you married. There were no second chances, mistakes were to be tucked away inside a cupboard smelling of mothballs and sandalwood and regret, and commitments were to be honoured until death. “Your husband will take care of you like your father did, so naturally you have to love him for it.”

  Could you love somebody out of a sense of obligation? I wondered. Could you love a man simply because you were married to him? No, I know that now. For my aunt, though, the heart was like one of the third-grade pupils whom I tutored—easy to discipline, easy to control.

  After the wedding, we went to Mercara to spend a week before my new husband returned to Canada. On the last day of our stay, there was a small incident that unnerved me. He had gone back to our room to get a shawl for me since it was a little chilly, and as I waited in the lobby of the shabby old hotel a young man carrying some suitcases bumped into me. It was an accident. He stopped to apologize and I said, “It’s okay.” I might have smiled, I don’t remember. The next thing I knew, Vikram was there beside us, furious, his eyes violent. He grabbed my arm and dragged me away, asking repeatedly, “Who is he? Where did you meet him?”

  And I stammered, wondering whether he had lost his mind, whether I was stuck in a nightmare, “I don’t know who he is, I don’t know, I promise.”

  “What’s his name? Don’t lie, I know you are lying, you bitch, you’re planning to leave me I know!” Vikram was yelling now and people were looking at us and I was crying and thinking, I am married to a crazy person, what am I to do, what am I to do?

  We stayed in our room the rest of the evening, me weeping and Vikram pacing the room, and then suddenly, as if it had all indeed been a bad dream, he gathered me in his arms and stroked my hair and buried his face in my neck and whispered, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, I can’t bear to see you crying like this.”

  Six months later, pushing my luggage trolley into the arrival lounge at the small Merrit’s Point airport, I was reminded of this incident. Vikram was waiting for me, bearing a lovely, large bouquet of flowers. A young woman dashed past and flung herself into the arms of a man in a red checked shirt. They looked so happy that I couldn’t help smiling. Another man, middle-aged, walking alongside, caught my glance and smiled too—a brief, motiveless sharing of amusement. I felt Vikram’s eyes on me and turned away from the hugging couple and the middle-aged man. He was frowning now, holding the bouquet against the side of his leg like a tennis bat.

  “Were you waiting long?” I asked nervously.

  He turned away and began to walk very fast, leaving me to run behind him, pushing my laden trolley with difficulty.

  I caught at his sleeve and stopped him. “Is something wrong?”

  He paused to throw the bouquet into a garbage bin. “Why were you smiling at that man?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t smiling at anybody,” I protested.

  “Don’t play the innocent with me,” he said. We had reached a blue car. “I saw you. Did you meet him in the plane?” He wrenched open the trunk and loaded my bags.

  I couldn’t speak for a few moments and then I said, “I have never seen him before in my life. Why don’t you trust me?”

  “Why were you smiling at him, then? Do you make it a habit to smile at strange men?” he asked.

  He opened the car door, got in, turned the ignition key, and the car roared to life. I went to open the door on my side but he started to back out of the parking spot, so that I had to jump aside. I stood there like a fool, teeth chattering, eyes and nose watering from the cold, while he accelerated away down the lot.

  Was he mad? Suddenly I wondered: had his first wife really died in an accident, or was there something more sinister about it? I couldn’t believe that he was going to leave me here, all alone, in the freezing parking lot of a strange town in an unknown country. I didn’t even have a change of clothing, nothing warmer than the sweater and shawl that I was wearing, and in my handbag was ten dollars—all the money the Indian government allowed a traveller to take out of the country then. In rupees that was a lot of money, but I knew it was not enough for more than a meal or two here. But I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might find myself in a situation where I would need more money than that.

  I tried to staunch the flow of panic and drew a deep breath. I had Vikram’s address. I would ask somebody at the airport how I could get to his house. I hoped it would cost no more than ten dollars. Once there, I would meet his mother—a woman would be sympathetic to my plight, she would scold her son for making such baseless accusations, and then it would all be fine, it would, it had to be. I couldn’t fly back to India. I had no ticket. Besides, it would be a shameful thing to do. People would talk. It would hurt my father. I knew nobody else in this country I could turn to for help. For the first time in my life, I felt overwhelming fear, complete loneliness.

  There was a scream of tires and the car was back, once again barely missing me as I stood there. Did the man want to kill me? He leaned over and opened the door. “What are you standing there for? Waiting for your boyfriend? Get in!”

  As we started off I made an attempt at conversation. “Have you been well?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Who was that man, you still haven’t told me.”

  I felt tears rising. This was certainly not the kind of reception I had imagined. I looked down, fiddling with my bangles, hoping he would not notice that I was crying. “Nobody,” I said. “I don’t know anybody here. I just smiled because he smiled, that’s all. It meant nothing, may god strike me dead if I am lying.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes and then, in one of those abrupt changes of tone and mood that I have spent the last eight years trying to get used to, he looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time and asked in a kind voice, “So, was it a tiring journey? Would you like to stop somewhere and eat before we go home to my mother and daughter? Are you hungry?” He grinned like an excited boy, and baffled as I was by this sudden switch in his temper, I smiled back, glad that whatever had gone wrong had turned right mysteriously. I didn’t want to question the shift then, I was grateful that he was smiling at me. I even loved him for a brief moment for smiling at me and asking after my comfort. Like a pariah dog that will follow, with tail-wagging adoration, any friendly person who clicks a finger at it.

  For a while on that drive to my new home Vikram was chatt
y and charming. He pointed out mountain ranges as we drove farther north, closer and higher than anything I had ever seen. Only an occasional car passed us. I thought it was beautiful—that fresh air, the soaring mountains, the dark green of the trees. I forgot the strange cruelty that he had displayed only a short time before.

  “This is how it must be like driving through the Himalayas,” I said impulsively.

  Vikram frowned at me. “The Himalayas are much higher, and you can’t drive through them like this. Even my five-year-old daughter knows that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know much, I haven’t been anywhere.”

  That was the beginning of my slide into irrelevance, I think—that admission of ignorance, of stupidity. Sometimes I think back on that morning and use that conversation to lash myself, like one of those priests in stone-walled monasteries who whip themselves bloody so that they can drive the demons out of their souls. My demon—a demon that I had not known lived within me—was my willingness to stay and take it. I stayed for many muddled reasons: fear of this unknown world mostly, lack of money, and because I feared the shame of returning, of dishonouring my father if I left my marriage.

  “Marriage is not about getting together,” my Appa had said the day before my wedding. “It is about staying together.” He had stayed with my mother. Stayed through health and in sickness, and even after she was dead he had stayed true to her memory. I wanted to be as true a spouse as my beloved father had been. So I stayed even though the temptation to run was always there like a strong pulse just beneath my skin. For the last eight years I have tried to do all that he asked me to without a complaint, have looked after him, his child and his mother, tolerated his sudden rages which tear across our lives as frequently and viciously as winter storms. And they were my fault, he would say in the lull that always followed, his face wet with tears, his hands trembling as they roamed over me as if to make sure his words and his blows had not erased me from the face of the earth, crushed me into a dusty nothing.

  “Why do you … why do you make me say these things?” he would moan. “How many times have I said, don’t make me say these things? It hurts me, don’t you see?”

  In the early years, when I still had some sense of myself, I would feel indignant. He was hurt? What about me? But I was still so unsure how I was supposed to deal with him or our relationship. So I made silence my best defence against Vikram’s jealous rages, his debilitating meanness, and as the years passed, my own silence has crushed me further. How can it not be to some extent my fault, stupid annoying woman that I have become?

  Once, a long time ago, when I was a girl full of hope, some tourists had photographed me in my home town. That hope has leaked out of me now. I think of the photograph often and wish I had a copy so that I might look at it and remember who I was. I wish I could run back to that bright-eyed time, that moment when a different future seemed possible.

  Then my son was born, and for a while I thought—an old-fashioned idea—that he would make things better between us, that a child is a strong link between husband and wife, that Vikram would now have proof of my devotion, understand my willingness to stay, that this was my home now, that he would soften. When you are unhappy, you use any little thread, imagined or otherwise, to fabricate an entire quilt to comfort you.

  My son arrived before his time, out in the open, sliding into the snow, right in front of Mrs. Cooper’s front door.

  I named him Hemant for winter, the season in which he was born. It was to be his talisman against that season and all its attendant demons, a vaccine, like that administered for polio, injected into his body to trigger immunity against the illness called winter that afflicts this land every year.

  Despite my own feelings, though, my boy grew to love the wretched season. I wonder if his name allows him into its mysteries, turning it from talisman into a magic sesame of a word, opening doors that lead to untold treasures. Hem sees beauty where I see only misery, he is at home in this wintry world whereas I forever remain a stranger to it. He is always rash-marked and itching and whining through the brief, drenching heat of summer, sniffing, sneezing, wheezing, allergic to everything through spring and autumn, turning red and healthy and energetic only as the days draw close and dark and the sky turns bleak. For some reason, even though this was why I gave him this name, I feel profoundly betrayed by his fondness for the season.

  “The snow fell into your eyes,” I say accusingly, as if Hem somehow colluded with the weather and made it snow on the day of his birth. “It bewitched you, blinded you to this cold.”

  And when I am in a worse mood because of the numbing, long winter days that I could never have imagined in Madras, I insist that the snow bhooth flew into his soul on that day despite my best precautions.

  “Then why did you name me after it?” Hemant demanded once. “Because you hate me as much as you hate the cold?”

  “Hate you? Don’t be silly,” I said. “You are more to me than my own life. I named you and now you love winter—isn’t that the magic of a naming?”

  My own naming too had a magic attached to it, but it must have been twisted into bad luck by mischievous spirits. My mother bestowed it on me, and in the worst moments of my life I try to hear the soft whisper of her loving voice in my ear. Suman, she would say, my little blossom. Su-man—meaning flower, beloved only offspring. Yes, I was a beloved daughter. No one ever hit me, I was not slapped or pinched or punched; nobody ever raised their voice or flung foul names at me if I made a mistake; nobody accused me of being a fool. If I did something wrong, my Appa gently pointed out the problem to me, patted me on the head, told me not to do it again, and forgave me instantly.

  “Next time you will do it the right way,” he would say mildly, and I, always anxious to please, would make sure I did.

  Years later, when I think about those loving times, I find myself wishing perversely that I had been shouted at and beaten, because that way at least I would have learned how to dodge and run, I would have turned as tough as a slipper that has travelled on mean roads. I might even have learned to hit back.

  Part Two

  ANU AND SUMAN

  Anu’s Notebook

  June 1, 1979. I am here! And it is all I hoped for. Drove through the mountains for a few hours loving the fresh air blowing through my partially open window. A sign informed me that I was approaching Merrit’s Point, and within a few minutes the town centre appeared, heralded by a brief line of lamp-posts bedecked with flower baskets. I drove past a few small shops, a grocery store, a café, a church—and then it was finished—before I knew it I was on the highway again. I pressed down on the accelerator, pushing my rattling old car to greater feats of strength and daring, hurtled past darkly wooded patches loud with the chirr-chirring of cicadas and emerged into blinding sunlight. To the right of me the road hugged cliffs composed of scarred rock the colour of sunsets, to the left were fields of undulating green. In the distance the mountains—lavender and blue shading into gloomy purple and navy, smoke and carbon. Imperious, watchful. The jagged peaks still topped with snow.

  I arrived at a T-junction and turned off the highway into Fir Tree Lane, a bit of a misnomer, I discovered, since there was not a single tree on it. It was a bald and ragged little lane, pitted and stony. I winced as my poor car bumped and ground and rattled over it, wheezing in exhaustion all the way.

  A giant lake shimmered up suddenly, dark green with silver flecks where the sun caught on ripples. I passed a shuttered house, surrounded by weeds, a long stretch of broken-down fencing, and then I was at a gate with an incongruously ornate mailbox painted an iridescent green. My car rattled a few more times, sighed, shuddered and finally collapsed. I cursed aloud, climbed out and surveyed the emptiness stretching out all around me. A longish driveway curled away from the gate and ended at the Dharma house, which crouched low against the ground.

  The earth sprawled warm and inviting as a lover beneath the sun. Somewhere an insect made a piercing call, like
the high-pitched whine of telephone wires in my brother’s backyard in summer. A bee made straight for my face and I whacked furiously at the air, all my citygirl fears rising up—what if I was allergic to bee stings? I wished I had brought bug repellent with me. And antihistamines. And mosquito nets, and spears, and guns, and other things to protect me from this fearsome emptiness, this silence. Then I felt ridiculous. I had come here for the silence and the emptiness and now, within a few minutes, I was ready to run away.

  Closer to the house, the scenery changed. A wild-looking garden rose up from the ground, with patches of yellow, pink, purple spreading out haphazardly in all directions. There was a shaggy clump of mock-orange shrubs in full flower, soaking the air with their fragrance. A giant peony, collapsed under the weight of massive magenta flowers, looked like a supplicant in a flouncy skirt praying on her knees.

  A woman appeared from around the corner of the house and waved. She was wearing a sari—an incongruous sight in this landscape. I waved back, suddenly glad I was here, surrounded by all this untamed beauty, this quiet, about to meet a woman in a sari.

  Suman

  I remember when Anu arrived on a warm day in the beginning of summer. Winter was finally over, so my spirits had risen as a result. It was early in the afternoon. I was in the yard at the side of the house, hanging out the washing. I heard the low, uneven drone of a car as it approached the house and then a stutter and silence. A car door slammed. I realized it was probably our new tenant, Anu Krishnan—we had been expecting her earlier that day—though I wondered why she had stopped so far from the house.

  It was Vikram’s idea to rent out the back-house. His hours were being cut at work, the company was bleeding money and might even close. Someone, maybe Joe Hutch, suggested that renting out the small cottage behind our house would bring in some extra money. I couldn’t imagine who would want to leave a bustling life in the city to stay in Merrit’s Point, but to my surprise Vikram had at least seven inquiries. People always want to run away from what they have, I suppose. Anu Krishnan said she had been Vikram’s classmate at college, although he couldn’t remember her at all, and when a common friend told her about his advertisement in their alumni paper she decided to rent it for an entire year. She had paid us for six months in advance as an assurance that she would stay. I envied the woman her control over her life, her money, her future. It seemed she made the decisions, there was nobody she needed to consult. What would she make of me? I must be everything she wasn’t.