“I’m fine, thanks,” I replied. “I spent the morning beside your lake. It’s lovely.”
“It’s not our lake,” the girl said.
“There are dead bodies in it,” the boy added.
What an imagination! “How do you know? Have you seen any?” I asked.
The child gave me a serious look. “Varsha said.”
Even in the short time I’ve been here—and I don’t see the kids that often—I’ve discovered it is Hemant’s favourite response to most questions. Varsha said. The two of them are stuck to each other like halves of a clamshell.
The lane, the lake, the trees and the mountains, the abandoned house, the main road—that pretty much defines our immediate surroundings. I am not complaining. This is what I wanted: isolation, time to think and write, silence. The silence, especially, is astonishing. I can hear my own breath even in the middle of the morning. Tonight I stood outside and stared up at the vastness of the night sky with stars spilling in grand chaos in every direction, so close I feel I can reach out and pluck them like jewelled fruit. I imagine Vikram’s father, Mr. J.K. Dharma, who built this house, standing here much as I did, squinting up at the sky, his head cocked as he listened for sounds and hearing only the wind in the brooding darkness of the trees and the bullfrogs striking up their deep contrapuntal croaking. Perhaps the silence filled him with contentment. In India he must have grown up in a house packed with children and relatives, in a city crowded with sounds, and longed to get away from it all. I could make up anything about this unknown, unknowable man and it could be true. In a landscape such as this one, wiped clean at regular intervals by the snow, histories are surely re-created a hundred times over, memories minted anew, and nobody minds or cares.
June 15. I have set up a schedule of sorts for my day, starting with a walk in the morning, sometimes catching up with Suman and the children on their way to the bus stop at the T-junction where the highway meets Fir Tree Lane. Then I settle down at my desk to write for three or four hours, regardless of whether the creative juices are flowing or not, break for lunch, sit down again at the desk, then take a break for tea with the Dharma women. If Akka is feeling well and Suman isn’t too busy. Without the discipline, I might not get any writing done at all! A nap, some more work or not, and then it’s time for bed.
Now my car is back from the service station, I sometimes drive into Merrit’s Point for a coffee and groceries. The small town has a tentative, ephemeral quality to it, as if it knows in its bones that the mountains clambering over each other to peer down at it from all sides will someday slide down and obliterate it, or that winter one year in the near future will never leave and we will be conquered by snow at last.
A long time ago it was a thriving community, I’m told, famous for its copper mines. The tiny local library has some good photographs of the founder, Alfie Merrit. The pleasant young librarian, Laura, told me that according to legend, Alfie thought he was on the trail of gold. He hacked through wild roses and brambles that climbed in thorny tangles along the edges of pine forests, crossed jewelled lakes and nameless mountains, followed by a few other fools all dreaming of great wealth. There was no gold, but they found copper, which dried up within ten years, moved to lumber, which they chopped down faster than it would grow, and ever since, still waiting for the earth to regenerate itself and reveal more treasures, the town has slipped ever deeper into obscurity. Each year, Laura complained, more and more people, the younger lot especially, pack their bags and move to busier towns and cities and never return except for the funerals of the ones they’ve left behind. I said I’d noticed that the single main street that runs through the town is crowded with grey-haired grannies and grandfathers scooting around in wheelchairs, or pushing themselves painfully along with their walkers. And outside of town, abandoned houses dot the empty landscape like dead flies, shuttered windows gazing sightlessly at passersby.
The town is, to be honest, a grey place now, although Mrs. Jellinek, one of its inhabitants, feels otherwise. She seems to be—or thinks she is—the la-di-dah, high-mucky-muck of Merrit’s Point. Last Friday, I bumped into her almost as soon as I pulled up in the parking lot of the post office. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and looked like a stringy chicken in clothes, I thought meanly, and immediately felt ashamed since she was prancing along quite happily.
“My nephew is coming to visit this afternoon,” Mrs. Jellinek said, wrapping bony fingers around my wrist firmly. “He’s a big shot in Vancouver, you know. Engaged to Violet Williams—do you know the Williamses?”
I shook my head, mystified. Why on earth would she expect me to know the Williamses! “Also big shots?” I hazarded, since it was obvious that Mrs. J. associates only with that variety.
She opened her eyes wide. “Oh yes, my dear, Very Important People. Very Old Family. Rooted. My nephew is blessed, you know.”
“I am sure,” I said.
“He is coming here to invest in property.” I could see Mrs. J. was climbing onto a favourite hobby horse and was about to start rocking away for all she was worth. “Mark my words, this town has gold written all over it. You better get yourself a piece of the pie, dear.” She leaned closer and whispered, “I have some land you might want to consider.”
She is not the only colourful character in town; there are a few more. The coffee shop, for example, is run by a vast man named Bradford. He has grey-blond hair receding from his forehead in a C-shaped curve and creeping down the back of his neck like a hairy question mark. He dresses like Elvis Presley and occasionally entertains his customers by singing for them. Rather well, too. He told me quite seriously that he is a reincarnation of Elvis and was offended when I laughed. He is a chatty fellow, full of interesting little tidbits about people and events in the little town, and since his café is the only one that serves half-decent coffee, I always go in when I am there. He has three employees: two girls around seventeen or so and a younger boy, Nick, who helps out on weekends.
Bradford and his three young employees are usually dressed in canary yellow T-shirts and yellow caps with “Badfoods” embroidered across them. He told me the person who did the embroidery got the spelling wrong and gave him a full refund. But Bradford didn’t see any reason why he should throw away an otherwise good product and hadn’t bothered with a new set of caps and shirts. “I don’t give a dog fart about the spelling,” he said when I smilingly noted the error. “People don’t come here to look at my clothes, ma’am, they come for my coffee.”
Unlike Mrs. Jellinek, Bradford doesn’t think much of Merrit’s Point. He’s told me at least four times so far that he is planning to close down shop.
The last time he said that, Cindy, the waitress with the red hair, remarked, “Yeah, right, Bradford! Keep saying it and we might even start believing you!” Then she turned to me and shook her head. “It’s all hot air. He ain’t going nowhere, take my word for it.”
Bradford, like Mrs. J., is clearly an establishment here. Like most of the other inhabitants in this town, they are not leaving—except in their caskets to the local graveyard, from where they will no doubt emerge as ghouls to bother the living.
“So why don’t you sell up and leave if it’s so hard for you?” I needled him.
“Who the hell is going to buy me out? Nobody wants to come to this town, do they?”
“Well, Mrs. Jellinek says land values are going through the roof. There will be resorts and condos coming up pretty soon, she says.”
“Bollocks! That old nutter knows bugger all. She’s trying to unload her land to some idiot, that’s all.” He gave me a sharp look. “She tried to sell you a piece of it, didn’t she? Eh? What did I say?” He grinned. “Old bitch!”
And I couldn’t help grinning back.
Suman
It was Vikram’s father, Mr. J.K. Dharma, who had come to Merrit’s Point first, and his son and grandchildren had no choice after that. In the early days of my life in Merrit’s Point, I would stand at the kitchen window washing the dishes, loo
king out at that wall of dark green beyond the vegetable patch, and wonder what kind of strange man my father-in-law had been to choose this place on earth over all others. When I lay awake in bed after Vikram had raided my unresisting body, I’d make an arrow of my misery and fling it in the direction of Mr. J.K. Dharma. I cursed him for his lunacy in selecting this town to settle in, rather than one of the larger cities such as Vancouver or Toronto, where I was certain I might have found help. I would look up at the large framed photograph of the man hanging on the living room wall, garlanded with plastic flowers strung in a chain, and wonder if he was aware that his choice had ruined my life.
Years before my arrival, Mr. J.K. Dharma had travelled from India to Canada for the same reasons most people of his time did—to get away from sameness, to make money, perhaps also dreaming of an end to irrelevance in a country that had so many people that the loss of thousands every year did not matter much. Apart from this house and a few photographs, my father-in-law left no information about his origins. Across the front page of a diary that smells of mould, he drew his name in careful, cursive ink: Mr. J.K. Dharma. What was his first name? Jaishankar? Jagannath? Jaidev? I have never found out. When I asked Akka, the old lady shrugged and quoted a verse in Sanskrit about names having nothing to do with who one really is. And why the insistence on Mr.? The formality of it, as if without that honorific before his neatly parcelled name my husband’s father would be undone. On the diary page that followed he had written two brief sentences in the same careful hand: “This is all mine. Silence at last.—J.K. Dharma.” It is otherwise empty.
When I first came to this house as a new bride, I, too, was awed and delighted by the amount of space that surrounded me after the noise and bustling crowds of Madras. I helped my mother-in-law in the backyard, where we grew bell peppers and eggplants, tomatoes and beans, zucchini, potatoes, pumpkins, covering everything with chicken wire to prevent marauding creatures from getting our carefully tended produce. It was peaceful out there in the sun, the warm soil loose in my hands, the hum of insects informing me of a busy world that had nothing to do with the fraught one in which I lived. And there was the pleasure the children derived from discovering the first tomato forming on its hairy stalk, pulling out tender carrots even before they were completely ready, the sight of a hummingbird palpitating over bright red bean flowers. Hemant was a toddler then, and Varsha gentler, more innocent.
I remember how Hemant, only three, planted a penny in the soil because his sister had told him to.
“Water it every day,” she said seriously. “In two months it will grow into a money-plant ten feet long and you’ll be the richest man in Merrit’s Point and then you can buy each of us a lovely present.”
So he waited for his penny to grow, watering it diligently every day, squatting over the patch waiting for something to pop up, telling me in his high, sweet child’s voice about the things he would buy for me and his sister with his harvest of pennies. And it was Varsha who woke early one morning and stuck a long wild creeper that she’d yanked out from the edge of the forest into Hemant’s little patch of earth, and scattered pennies around it for her brother to discover.
After Akka damaged her back, I tried to take care of the garden for a while. But it became too much for me to guard against the marauding squirrels and birds, the deer and the raccoons. Now the forest that we held at bay with spade and loppers has crept back to reclaim what it had lost, a green silence in summer and in winter a dormant world under its cover of snow. I used to sing to myself to defeat the silence, I chattered endlessly to Akka, my only companion during the day, and to Varsha after she returned from school. But such is the power of this place that it drove my own voice out of me.
I knew very quickly that I should not stay here. For a while I plotted to escape and, until Hemant was born, I was convinced that I could. Every week I waited until Vikram had left for work after giving me elaborate instructions on all the things that needed to be done around the house that day—
One shirt button to be replaced
Two trousers to be ironed
An entire house to be properly dusted
Laundry
Windows to be cleaned, the third window in the upstairs spare bedroom on which my husband had spotted some smudges
—and I would dream of running away.
I had no idea how I would accomplish this since I had no money. Then my passport disappeared. Perhaps Vikram hid it—but I didn’t dare ask him. It would only have given him reason to shout at me for my carelessness or stupidity or any of the number of flaws I’ve developed since I became his wife. I don’t possess a driver’s licence—he doesn’t think I need to drive. So here I am stuck in a world full of borders and boundaries, unable to travel because I can’t show proof of my identity to the people who guard the entryways and exits. It is not enough to say, I am Suman, daughter of a beloved man, wife of a hated one. I still need a piece of paper with my photograph, stamped by the government of a country. Without that I am nobody other than the wife of a man who is my guardian, my custodian, my prison.
I spent hours wishing myself away from Merrit’s Point. I wished I had the courage to run until I reached the highway beyond Merrit’s Point that would take me to Vancouver, which shimmered in my imagination like a mirage. I thought of running away all the time, and then one day I gave up that thought too. I can remember the moment when I stopped trying.
Varsha brought home a Russian doll which she had won in an essay competition at school.
“Look, Mama!” she said. She pulled one doll away to reveal another and another and another until she got to the last one, when a tiny black beetle emerged and scuttled across the table, released from captivity after god only knows how long. I screamed and knocked the pile of dolls away. That beetle was me, caught inside the house, inside the town, within the circling mountains.
There is no escape for me from this place.
My father and Madhu Kaki never found out about my unhappiness. I didn’t tell them, it was pointless. There was nothing they could have done for me. They didn’t have the means to help. Besides, I couldn’t contact them without Vikram finding out. I could not telephone long-distance without him knowing when the bills arrived, and when I wrote letters he mailed them for me after reading them first, naturally. “Leave the envelope open, Suman,” he would say. “I would like to add a line or two to your dear father.”
So I created a lovely tracery of lies for my beloved Appa, warbled on pleasantly about how happy I was, how big my house was, how lucky I was.
Then he died, followed soon after by Madhu Kaki, and there was nowhere for me to run to.
Anu’s Notebook
June 20. My cottage is quite far beyond the main house, and the tangle of trees and bushes prevents me from seeing it except at night when the lighted windows wink golden. The family has a routine: Vikram leaves for work first, followed by the children, who are always accompanied by Suman to the bus stop. I don’t see why she has to go with them—that girl Varsha is old enough to walk alone with her brother. Other than members of the family, I have seen nobody coming to the house, not even the mailman. It is so quiet and isolated here that I have little trouble convincing myself that we are the only people alive in this town!
Sometimes, wandering around the backyard, looking for a sprig of parsley or coriander which Suman has given me permission to pick, I catch sight of her through the kitchen window busy with morning chores. I imagine her measuring out ingredients, chopping and cutting vegetables, washing the dishes, all with that endearing look of intense concentration that has become familiar to me. When I say something, she listens with all her might as if I’m god delivering the ultimate truth about life.
She looks very young, even though I know she is thirty-nine years old—another bit of information she handed to me along with the fact that she was already thirty when she got married, that the girl, Varsha, is not her own child, that Hemant was born outside in the snow—a fact that fills
her with deep embarrassment even though I tell her the boy now has a good story to tell for the rest of his life—and that Vikram was married before. I heard about the first wife from Carole Mattson. She manages to keep tabs on everybody in our university year—who has got married, who divorced, who had children, moved to Timbuctoo, died, that kind of thing. It was Carole who spotted the ad in the alumni paper for a small cottage for rent up north. When she phoned me in New York, she said she’d also heard Vikram Dharma might be having money problems, that the small lumber mill he worked for as an accountant was laying people off. “Do you remember him?” she asked me. “Kind of standoffish guy, quiet. Didn’t mix much with most of us? Always got great grades. Don’t know what Helen saw in him.”
I did remember him. Vaguely. A good-looking man. But he obviously couldn’t place me, because when I called him and mentioned we were in the same class, he clearly drew a blank. It was such a long time ago, he said, hard to keep track of everybody.
Carole said he’d married Helen Gupta from our Political Science class, whom I did remember—drop-dead gorgeous, busy having a good time, always scrambling to get her assignments done last minute. She, by contrast, was charming and lots of fun.
“She married him and went off to live in a small town up north? Why on earth?” I asked, baffled.
“God knows, but I heard rumours she was already seeing someone else—was going to leave Vikram—but she was in a car crash before that happened. Killed instantly. Sad.”
“Did he know she was leaving?” I was curious. I wanted to know more about the man if I was going to be his tenant.
“I don’t know. He was devastated by her death, I heard. But not so torn up obviously, since he found himself another wife within the year. You can fill me in on all the details when you take time off from your writing spree—or are you planning to go into hibernation for the next six months?”
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