by Kamala Nair
The Girl in the Garden
Kamala Nair
NEW YORK BOSTON
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Table of Contents
Copyright Page
For my parents, Sreekumaran and Lathika Nair
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to:
My wonderful editor, Karen Kosztolnyik, and everyone at Grand Central Publishing, for believing in this book and bringing it out into the world.
Marly Rusoff, my brilliant agent, for her warmth, faith, encouragement, and perseverance. Thank you also to Michael (Mihai) Radulescu and Julie Mosow.
My professors and fellow students at Trinity College Dublin, for their invaluable comments during the early stages of writing, especially Brendan Kennelly, Patrick Finnegan, and Roisin Boyd.
Elena Morin and Maya Frank-Levine, my New York writing group, for always wanting to know what would happen next.
All of my friends for their support and enthusiasm. With special thanks to the following for reading drafts and offering insightful feedback: Shil Goswami, Ariana Hellerman, Alexis Lawrence, Sarika Mehta, Alison Schary, Elana Shneyer, and Nora Singley.
My dear friend Danielle Town for never failing to cheer me on.
Seemi Syed—faithful friend and beautiful writer—for poring over draft after draft with a patience and intelligence that awe me.
Kavitha Nair Bindra, my incredible sister, for all her love and wisdom.
And finally, my parents, Sreekumaran and Lathika Nair… for everything.
The Varma Family Tree
Unbreakable, O Lord,
Is the love
That binds me to You:
Like a diamond,
It breaks the hammer that strikes it.
My heart goes into You
As the polish goes into the gold.
As the lotus lives in its water,
I live in You.
Like the bird
That gazes all night
At the passing moon,
I have lost myself dwelling in You.
O my Beloved—
Return.
—Mirabai
Translated by Jane Hirshfield
Chapter 1
By the time you read this I will be flying over the Atlantic on my way to India. You will have woken up alone and found the diamond ring I left on the bedside table and beneath it, this stack of papers that you now hold.
But for the moment, you are sleeping peacefully. Even when I lean down, touch my face to yours, and inhale your scent, you do not stir.
Watching you sleep, my heart aches. I have done a terrible thing.
I would like to say it began with the letter I received two days ago, but it goes back much further than that. It goes back to the summer I turned eleven, when Amma took me to India and everything changed. Anyone who knows the full truth about my past, and there are not many who do, might say I have emerged unscathed from the events of that summer—in a few weeks I will graduate with a master’s from Yale School of Architecture and begin a promising career at a design firm in New York City; I have a good relationship with most of my family; a wonderful man has just proposed marriage to me—but I haven’t overcome any demons, really. I may have wrestled and bound them beneath my bed, but they have clawed their way free, as I should have known they eventually would, and I cannot marry you until I’ve banished them.
This is why I am leaving behind the diamond ring you gave me, which I never should have accepted in the first place, not when there are still these secrets between us. Until I have gone back to the place where it all started, and told you everything, I cannot wear your ring or call myself your wife.
You know the basic facts, but I have never filled in the details. I haven’t even told you about Plainfield. You still think I grew up in Minneapolis, and when you ask why I never take you home I tell you Minnesota has nothing to do with who I am now. I left when I was eighteen, built a new life for myself, and have never looked back. For a long time I convinced myself this was the case. Aba has kept quiet as well, even though my father has met you on numerous occasions. He doesn’t think it’s his place to say anything, but I know he disapproves of my reticence. I remind him of her.
Once while searching through my desk drawer for a pen, you found the old family portrait I keep. Amma is wearing a blue silk sari and her hair is loose and long. You told me my mother was beautiful and that I look like her. I took the photo from your hands and tucked it back into the drawer under a pile of papers. No I don’t, I said, and went back to my sketching, even though I felt a swell of pride and longing at your words.
It is no secret that I have been writing back and forth to India for years, though whenever you asked whom I was corresponding with, I lied and said it was a lonely relative I felt sorry for, nobody significant. When I called on the phone I made sure you were not around to hear the conversation. If I had told you the truth, then the whole story would have had to come out.
But once you asked about my mother. Do you ever write to her or call her? When I answered no, that was not a lie.
This letter that I received the other day was from a person in India whom I have not seen or heard from since that long-ago summer. But I immediately recognized the handwriting on the old-fashioned aerogram stamped Par Avion, and I had to sit down on the bench in the lobby. The doorman asked if I wanted a glass of water.
I drank the water, went upstairs, and locked myself in my little art studio with its paint-splattered walls. I sat on the floor and read the letter. I read it over and over again.
That night I dreamed I was in a garden surrounded by shriveled, coal-black flowers. The only hint of color was in the branches of a giant tree studded with red blossoms. An Ashoka tree. My mother was sitting underneath it dressed in the white cotton of a widow.
Amma, I called out, and she stood up and began moving toward me. Her face seemed not to have aged—she could not have been much older than I am now—but her body had shrunk to skin and bone. As she came closer, I stretched out my arms, but she glided past me as if I were invisible. I turned to find her leaning over the edge of an old stone well sheathed in moss. It took me a moment to realize what was about to happen, but when I opened my mouth to scream No! it was already too late. She had dived off the edge and, in a fluttering arc of white, disappeared into the well. I ran over and looked down into the hole, hoping to catch another glimpse, but she was gone, swallowed up by the dark water.
I woke up and booked a flight to India right then and there. I met you for dinner later that night, but I of course kept my trip and my dream a secret, like so many other things.
It has been this way between us since the beginning. Not long after we met in drawing class our first year, you told me about your parents’ divorce and of your conflicted relationship with your father, who left when you were a child, and how you had vowed never to be like him. I listened and nodded, and my heart pulsed with the first stirrings of love, even though I hardly knew you then. Still, I could not share my own story. As much as I wanted to tell you everything, I was paralyzed. Keeping secrets had become second nature, an inheritance passed down from mother to daughter like an heirloom. But one night, the night of our big fight, you refused to let the subject of Amma drop. You kept asking questions.
What was she like?
Where does she live?
Why don’t you speak?
Is she even alive?
I got that panicked feeling that used to plague me as a young girl during piano recitals, sitting on the hard bench with my foot trembling on the pedal and my fingers forgetting their hours of practice. I gave a few vague, stumbling answers about how she had gone back to India when I was young and she was no longer in my life an
d that was that, but you were not satisfied.
Look, obviously this is something that still bothers you a lot. Why won’t you talk to me? Maybe I can help.
You placed a hand on my shoulder and something inside me closed up.
There’s nothing to talk about, I said, and changed the subject. We made stilted conversation over dinner, then I excused myself and left early.
After that night I avoided you for a week, turning off my phone and ignoring the doorbell. I skipped all my classes and stayed alone in my apartment. The first two days I lay in bed, unable to move. The third day I got up and showered, then went into my studio with a pot of coffee and began to paint. I think I might have gone temporarily crazy in those days, painting in a frenzy. I don’t even remember if I slept or if I ate. All I remember is painting and the feeling of relief it gave me, like taking a drug, and also the feeling of not wanting to lose you. Finally I stopped. I packed up all the paintings, threw on my coat, and ran outside into the winter night. I ran all the way to your house, clutching the portfolio.
You looked shocked when you opened the door and found me standing there, out of breath and contrite. I can only imagine how wild I must have appeared, and you had every right to hate me after the way I behaved, but in spite of everything you let me in. You let me in.
I went over to the kitchen table, set down the portfolio, and began pulling out my paintings, one by one.
This is Amma’s magenta parka that I still keep in my closet.
This is the daffodil cake she baked for my third birthday.
This is the canopy bed she convinced Aba to buy for me when I was seven.
This is her orange pill bottle.
This is the oil lamp she lit in the hall closet when she was praying.
This is a rose from her prizewinning garden.
This is her hair covered in snowflakes.
This is the scar on her right shoulder from a snakebite.
You looked at each painting and listened. When I got to the final one I hesitated. It was of a magnificent white bird against a bright green background.
And what about this one? you asked.
I looked up at you.
I’ll tell you about this one another time, I promise.
For then, it was enough. But I knew it would not be forever.
So I began to write it all down, partly for myself, and partly for you.
For months I wrote feverishly, late at night while you slept, and though I felt immense relief when the story was complete, I still locked it up in a drawer.
I am finally ready to share it.
I hope that when you are finished reading, you will understand why I have left like this with no warning, no explanation, no good-bye; only this story, the ring, and an address in India where you can find me.
Most of all, I hope I am not too late.
Chapter 2
For the first ten years of my life I lived with my parents in a big, airy house on a hill in Plainfield, Minnesota. Our neighborhood was known as Pill Hill because all the doctors resided there in fancy brick houses built on neat green lawns, high above the rest of the town and surrounded by rippling cornfields. Aba was a cardiologist at the Plainfield Clinic, where he conducted experiments on laboratory mice. Amma had a part-time job in a department store at the Chippewa Mall, but she spent most of her time at home, gardening, cooking, and caring for me.
I would be giving the wrong impression if I said our domestic life was idyllic, but it was at the very least comfortable. I took my parents’ relationship for granted, content in the belief that if I loved them and they loved me, they must love each other.
School was another story. I was shy about my dark skin, unruly hair, and thick glasses, which separated me from most of the other kids at Plainfield Elementary with their blue eyes, hardy frames, and Lutheran church, whose vaulted ceiling soared above their golden heads every Sunday morning.
But at home I felt safe. As long as nothing disturbed our routine—Aba worked in his study or tended to his mice at the lab, Amma cooked or crouched over bulbs in her garden, coaxing them to sprout, and I read, sketched, or played with my dog Merlin—I was secure.
Looking back, I see that things were far from okay; the disturbances in our household were obvious, even before those months leading up to India. But like most children, I believed the world revolved around me, and I was oblivious to the signs that indicated otherwise.
One icy winter afternoon when I was in fifth grade, Amma received a letter.
That day my heart felt particularly heavy. Lindsay Longren was having a birthday party and she had invited every girl in our class but me. Lindsay had made a big show of handing out invitations on the ride home, calling out names, one by one, and making each lucky recipient stand up and walk down the aisle to collect her pristine pink envelope. This enraged our bus driver and added an even more dramatic flavor to the ceremony. When Lindsay had reached the bottom of the pile she looked at me with her pale blue eyes and said, “Oh, Rakhee, I think I have an invitation here for you,” and a surge of hope filled my chest. A few seconds later, she handed out the last envelope. “Never mind, I guess not,” she said with a light shrug, and my face felt as if it had burst into flames. I took my tattered copy of Arabian Nights out of my backpack and buried my nose in it for the rest of the ride, anything to hide the tears that had begun to sting my eyes.
When I finally got off the bus, I rubbed my mittens across my damp cheeks before picking up the mail from the box at the top of our driveway as I always did. A letter on top of the stack immediately caught my attention. It looked different from what we usually received—bills, catalogues, flyers, magazines, an occasional greeting card. It was a simple blue envelope with the words Par Avion stamped across it in red ink and Amma’s name and address written in fine black cursive—Chitra Varma, 7 Pill Hill, Plainfield, Minnesota. I knew that Amma’s last name before she got married had been Varma, but no one ever called her that. I found it odd that it didn’t read “Chitra Singh,” which was her full name now, like Aba’s, Vikram Singh, and like mine, Rakhee Singh. Just seeing Amma’s name written like that, Chitra Varma, the name she held before either Aba or I came into her life, unsettled me. The flowery cursive handwriting was so unlike my fifth-grade teacher’s blocky print, or Aba’s illegible doctor’s scrawl.
Carrying the mail inside, I set it down on the table in our front hallway, and pulled off my wet snow boots. My dog Merlin bounded up, his backside wriggling, and almost knocked me off my feet in his excitement. The sharp, delicious scent of spicy vadas sizzling in oil wafted from the kitchen. Amma was singing along to a tape of romantic film songs in her native Malayalam language, the music punctuated by the sound of spluttering oil and the steady beat of her knife hitting the wooden cutting board.
I grabbed the stack of mail and walked into the kitchen, dropping it on the table. She had three different pans going and was chopping magenta onions. Even with tears sliding down her cheeks, she looked lovely.
I used to think Amma was the most beautiful woman in Plainfield, maybe even the world. She was young then, only thirty-one, with pitch-black hair that fell below her waist, skin the color of milky tea, and wide, dreamy eyes, deep and dark as a clear midnight sky. Even though she usually dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, just as the other mothers at my school did, when she walked among them she was like an exquisite rose surrounded by drooping daisies.
Her good looks made me proud and also gave me hope. At night I peered into the mirror and prayed with all my might that I wouldn’t always have to wear my big glasses, that my teeth would straighten out, and that my skinny, plain-featured, knobby-kneed self would one day erupt into a beauty as glorious as Amma’s. I would think about this for a while until a wave of embarrassment swept over me, and I would look away, blushing.
“How was school, molay?” Amma asked. Molay is an affectionate term for “daughter” in Malayalam, and Amma often called me that.
I sat down on a stool at the
kitchen counter, in front of a cheese sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk. “Fine.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
Amma glanced up. “You can’t have done nothing all day. Don’t be silly, Rakhee.”
“A letter came for you Amma. It’s addressed to Chitra Varma,” I said, trying to distract her.
It worked. She stopped chopping and moved to the sink where she began washing her hands. Amma’s hands were very small and shapely but covered in scratches from the many hours she spent gardening in the spring and summer. They always gave off a fresh, lemony scent. She wiped them dry with a dish towel, dabbed at her eyes, and went over to the pile of mail.
Amma picked up the letter and stared at it. A red flush began to burn across her face. She dropped it, gripped the sides of the table, and closed her eyes for a long time. Finally, she opened them and took up the letter again.
“Amma, what is it?”
“It’s nothing, just a letter from back home, from India, that is all,” she said, but her voice had changed. It was subdued and slightly haughty, as if I were a stranger who had made a nosy inquiry.
India. India. My curiosity was aroused, but Amma did not say another word; instead, she tucked the letter into her apron pocket and went back to cooking and humming.
After a quiet dinner, we sat together in the family room waiting for Aba to come home from the lab. Amma had left a covered plate of food for him in the microwave. I was doing my homework and Amma was reading a novel. At one point I glanced up to find her crying. It wasn’t the chopping-onions kind of crying. Her chest heaved, her hands shook, and tears coursed down her cheeks.
I hadn’t seen Amma cry in years, and the vision made my heart freeze. It made me remember a time when I was little and I would wake up to hear shrieks and shattering glass coming from my parents’ bedroom, or would walk into the bathroom to find Amma doubled over the toilet sobbing and retching. One day Veena Aunty, Amma’s cousin who lived down the street, came to look after me, and Aba took Amma away in the car. He returned alone.