The Girl in the Garden

by Kamala Nair

  His words had become increasingly slurred and now his eyelids were beginning to flicker.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t nod off just yet.

  His head fell to one side and his lids shut, so I nudged his arm and he woke with a start.

  “Huh? What?”

  “How did you suffer?”

  “Oh, yes, how I’ve suffered.” Tears glistened in Vijay Uncle’s eyes. “I hate him. I still hate him, can you believe it?” His head drooped, and for a second I thought he had fallen asleep again, but then he spoke. “Molay, the moon has grown dim. Creatures of the night as we are, I think it’s time for us both to sleep.”

  “But Uncle, I’m not tired!”

  “A young girl like you needs her beauty sleep, now off you go, off you go.” He tried to stand and almost fell over. I quickly stood and tried to steady him but almost fell myself under the weight of his hand on my shoulder.

  “There we go,” he said, leaning against the wall, out of breath from the effort of getting up. “I’ll stay here for a while, molay. But you? Off to bed.” He waved me away with one hand, and realizing I wouldn’t be able to get any more answers out of him, I obeyed.

  Chapter 12

  We set out for the ancestral house right after breakfast, hoping to get there and back before the afternoon sun grew too severe.

  For much of the night I had stared up at the ceiling, turning over Vijay Uncle’s words in my mind, wanting to know more. I wasn’t sure why the house and Muthashan’s three old sisters—my great-aunts—compelled me, but they seemed important. And Amma had never spoken of them—I had a feeling she wouldn’t want me going there, and that only added fuel to my desire.

  “But of all places, why there?” Krishna had asked, crinkling her nose at my suggestion.

  “I’m curious, and besides, it’s not as if we have anything better to do.”

  “That’s true. But the old ladies—they frighten me.”

  “Maybe we won’t even have to run into them,” I lied. “I just want to see the outside of the house. I’ve never seen anything so old. Come on, it’ll be an adventure.”

  “Well, all right, I suppose we can go,” said Krishna, still looking rather reluctant.

  “There’s no way I’m stepping foot near that smelly old place,” Meenu said, butting into our conversation.

  We didn’t try to convince her, but surely enough she came running after us, just as I had expected, as we made our way down the front steps.

  “You two can’t go by yourselves. You need someone older and wiser to take you. But you owe me a favor for doing this,” she said, falling into step beside us.

  We walked about half a mile down the main road, in the opposite direction of the village square. Along the way we saw a ginger-colored dog with a curly tail and a mangy coat lying on its side in the middle of the road. When it saw us it bounded up, its pale, saliva-coated tongue lolling.

  It reminded me of Merlin, and I started toward it with my hand outstretched. Meenu jerked me back by the crook of my arm.

  “Are you mad? You can’t go around touching stray dogs. It’s probably rabid, the disgusting beast. Shoo! Shoo!” she said to the dog. It whined and backed away, its ears drooping in disappointment.

  We edged around it and continued to walk. After a few minutes had passed, Meenu stopped at the side of the road. “Ah, here we are.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, perplexed.

  “Don’t you see the staircase? We have to climb this hill to get up to the house.” Krishna pointed to a pile of stones wedged haphazardly into the side of a thickly forested hill.

  As we climbed, a feeling of gloom settled over me. The unwieldy branches that formed a tangled archway over the path and the crooked steps covered in a carpet of moss told me that we were the first visitors the house had seen in a long time.

  When we had reached the top of the hill we walked down another winding path, flanked on either side by shallow pools of tepid rainwater, and stopped only when we reached a clearing.

  The house was dark and crumbling, with ragged eaves drooping down from the roof. It was made up of three different sections forming a U shape around a central courtyard. The lawn was overgrown with scraggly bushes and patches of weedy grass.

  “I still don’t understand why you wanted to come here,” grumbled Meenu, leaning against the side of a ramshackle well to catch her breath.

  “Yeah, it’s even creepier than I remembered,” said Krishna.

  We heard a loud tapping sound.

  “Who’s out there?” said a gravelly old voice.

  We froze.

  The tapping grew louder.

  “I didn’t hear anything, Aunty,” said a younger, softer voice.

  “Well, I most certainly did hear something. Go out and see who it is. And don’t call me Aunty. I am not your aunty,” snapped the older voice.

  “Yes, Aunty,” said the younger voice.

  “Quick, let’s go,” said Meenu, grabbing us both by the hand, but by then it was too late.

  A young woman had come running outside and caught sight of us. She had squinty features, a low forehead, frizzy hair, and a wiry frame covered in a billowing floral housedress. Her frightened expression immediately softened into a jovial one.

  “Ah, Aunty, it’s only some children,” she laughed, calling inside to the old voice within.

  “Children? What children?” said the voice.

  “Aren’t you the girls from Ashoka? Gitanjali, right? And Meenu?” she said, looking first at Meenu, then at Krishna.

  “No, I’m Meenu and this is Krishna,” said Meenu, drawing her brows together. “And this is our cousin Rakhee.”

  “Ah Rakhee, she is the one from America, no?” The young woman’s eyes widened and she winked at me.

  The voice from inside called out: “What? What are they saying? Who are they? Come inside and tell me at once, you impertinent girl!”

  “Oh, she’s angry, you’d all better come inside. She’ll really give me a scolding if I send you away without at least inviting you in for something to drink. You are, after all, her brother’s granddaughters.”

  “I think we’d better get home, actually,” said Krishna, with a look of pure dread on her face.

  “Oh no no, you mustn’t leave. They’ll kill me,” said the woman, “Please, just come in, just for a little while.”

  The tapping started again, this time even angrier and more insistent.

  We looked at one another. There was nothing else to be done, so we followed the young woman inside.

  The room we entered was dark, so dark that for the second it took for my eyes to adjust I couldn’t see a thing. A musty odor enveloped us, and slowly the room came into focus. It was relatively small and the windows were covered in rough brown fabric, thin enough to let in wan patches of diluted sunlight but thick enough to give the room a murky look. The ceiling was low and its broad rafters sparkled with cobwebs. Above the rafters was a cavernous space that rose up to a point at the rain-rotted roof. Three tattered sofas were arranged around a heavy stone table, and upon the sofas lay three very old, wizened women.

  The woman lying on the sofa closest to the door was clutching a steel walking stick, and I realized that the gravelly voice belonged to her, and that the stick beating against the stone table had been the source of the tapping sound. She was the tiniest person I had ever seen, with shriveled skin and hair pulled back into a knot so sparse it reminded me of the small clumps of hair I sometimes left behind in the shower drain after a particularly vigorous shampooing, except hers was a dingy white. She didn’t seem to have an ounce of fat on her body, only bones, jutting out sharply from her skin at odd angles, like gnarled tree branches.

  “This is your Savitri Ammoomma,” said the young woman. Ammoomma, I had learned, was another Malayalam word for “grandmother,” like Muthashi.

  The next woman, Sarojini Ammoomma, was also thin, with a curved spine and hunched shoulders. A marblesize
d brown mole grew on her cheek, and bristly hairs swept across her chin. Her mouth was creased and sunken in, like a cave.

  The last woman, Sharada Ammoomma, was significantly fatter than her sisters and had two pillowlike breasts so enormous they drooped down to her navel. Wispy gray hair danced around her head. She wore wire-rimmed spectacles and had a bulbous nose.

  “So these are our little intruders,” said Savitri Ammoomma, the old woman with the stick. “Come closer so I may see you.”

  None of us moved. The young woman gave us each a slight shove so that we were lined up in front of the sofa. Krishna was so close to me I could feel the hairs on her arms tickling my skin.

  “Bend over,” Savitri Ammoomma instructed, and this time we obeyed. She ran her knotty fingers with their ridged, yellowing nails across Meenu’s face and pushed her aside. She did the same thing to Krishna. When it was my turn, her fingers lingered on my face. They probed and examined every feature, they traced the frames of my glasses, they ran down along the side of my neck, and I couldn’t help but shudder.

  Savitri Ammoomma let out a dry chortle. “They’re frightened of me, these children, frightened of their own dear great-aunt.” She pointed a finger at me. “Sit, sit, won’t you keep an old woman company?”

  I perched beside her on the edge of the sofa.

  “Won’t someone sit beside me too?” said Sarojini Ammooomma, stretching out her trembling arms.

  “And me too,” Sharada Ammoomma called. Meenu and Krishna went and sat beside them, both with miserable expressions on their faces.

  “Shanti, fetch some lime juice.” Savitri Ammoomma ordered away the young woman with a weak wave of her wrist. “And how is your grandmother keeping?” she asked, turning to look at me with her cloudy yellow eyes.

  “Um, she’s fine, I guess,” I mumbled.

  “Eh? What in God’s name are you saying? I cannot understand a word coming out of this girl’s mouth. Didn’t your mother teach you to speak Malayalam?”

  I glanced at Krishna, then at Meenu, hoping one of them would step in, but the old women were already chatting away to them.

  “No matter,” said Savitri Ammoomma. “I can talk enough for the both of us. It has been a long time since we’ve had anyone to talk to but ourselves. Ourselves and that silly servant girl in there.” She pointed her stick at the kitchen. “To think that we Varma women have sunk so low as to be cared for by that low-caste creature. When you see your Sadhana Aunty, tell her we are not happy with the girl she has sent to us. Not happy at all.” She paused, shook her head from side to side like a little elephant, and puckered her withered lips in distaste. Then she turned to me again. “And how about your mother?”

  I hesitated. “She’s fine.”

  “Chitra. She was always such a beautiful girl. It’s really too bad about that one. She could have made any match she wanted here. I suppose that is what happens when you let children run wild with no supervision. But your poor grandmother, I cannot think of blaming her, what could she have done? Such a sweet, simple girl she was back when she first married my brother. Sweet, yes, but cursed. Do you know that after Vijay she could never bear another child? She lost them, one after the other, one after the other. I suppose she didn’t even have time to pay any attention to the children she did have, she was too busy losing babies.”

  I looked around the room to see if my cousins were hearing what I was hearing, but they were each involved in their own private conversations with Sarojini Ammoomma and Sharada Ammoomma. I was on my own.

  “And your grandfather, my brother, he only cared about his oldest child, Sadhana,” continued Savitri Ammoomma. “Oh yes, didn’t care a whit about the other two, Chitra and Vijay. It was always ‘Sadhana this, Sadhana that.’ She was his pride and joy. ‘She has the fire of intelligence in her eyes,’ he used to say, ‘not like the others. Her only fault is that she is a girl. But still, she will go far, she will marry well and run the hospital after I die. I can die in peace knowing it rests in her hands.’ Chitra and Vijay were always running after him, trying to get his attention, but he would just brush them off, like insects.”

  Shanti came in with a tray of lime juice, and I took mine and gulped it down with relief. My throat had gone dry as the well in the yard outside.

  “But all the blame cannot go on the parents, I suppose,” continued Savitri Ammoomma after I had drained the contents of the glass. “There has to have been something wrong with Chitra from the start, some wildness in her blood that none of us could have ever predicted. I suppose it’s all well and good that she escaped and a man would still have her after everything.” She wagged her finger at me. “She has her mother to thank for that.

  “The older one, Sadhana, now she wasn’t nearly as lucky. Sadhana is just like her father, my brother—destroyed by pride. I used to have the Varma pride just as much as he did, we all did, but see where it has gotten us. What do we have to be proud of now? But Sadhana, as much as I dislike her, I do pity the girl. She never even had a chance at a good life. She disobeyed her father just once, and see what happened? She married that lazy cad she met at school and he abandoned her, just as we all knew he would. That is what happens when you send young girls to school, instead of marrying them off right away as God intended.

  “I told my brother that, I warned him, but he wouldn’t listen. Marry off the two girls, and educate the boy, I told him. But he wouldn’t hear of it. As I said, he didn’t care about the other two children. ‘They don’t have Sadhana’s brains or her sense of family pride,’ he said. ‘No, Sadhana is the one who needs the education, and she will run the hospital after I die.’

  “And then Sadhana defied him and married that low-caste villain, probably because he was the first man to ever cast a glance in her direction.

  “Luckily he left her. Yes, it was a blessing, if you ask me. That man was worthless, just sitting around, smoking those cigarettes and reading nonsense, never lifting a finger to help out in the hospital. Clearly he was only interested in her wealth, and once he realized he would never see any of it, that it was all going to somebody else”—at this, Savitri Ammoomma paused and gave me a pointed stare so penetrating I had to look away—“he was gone. He left no trace. No matter, though, he was nothing but a burden, and Sadhana and the girls are surely better off without him.

  “Little did she know she would spend the rest of her life trying to atone for that moment of weakness. Her marriage was her one act of rebellion and it broke her father’s heart. She knew she had made a mistake right from the beginning when she returned to Ashoka with her new husband, her head lowered in shame, and fell to her father’s feet, weeping. And he just looked down at her, then shook her away and went back inside. He didn’t speak to her again. Not until he was on his deathbed did he forgive her. And his forgiveness did not come without a price.” She gave a dramatic sigh.

  “Alas, Sadhana has become what I call a hard woman—so proud, even prouder than her father, if that is possible. What I say is, if she would simply relinquish her pride, then maybe some of this family’s troubles would end. But no, that will never happen, she will protect the Varma name until the day she dies, and by then, who knows what will have become of—”

  Savitri Ammoomma stopped again, as if catching herself, then grasped my wrist with surprising strength and leaned forward. Her eyes grew clear as she stared right at me with a look that was at the same time knowing and searching. “We’re all old and set in our ways, my child,” she said. “It’s too late for any of us. But you youngsters, you still have hope. Go and explore. Don’t be afraid to search for the truth. There is nothing to fear.”

  I squirmed but she would not loosen her grip. “You know what I am saying, do you not? Just open your eyes and see what is before you.” Her eyes grew cloudy again and she fell back upon the sofa cushion, releasing my wrist.

  Shanti appeared at Savitri Ammoomma’s side and placed her hand on her forehead. “Aunty? Aunty? Are you ill?” Then she looked at me, “She
must be tired, she is not used to visitors. Perhaps we should let her rest now.”

  I was more than happy to let her rest, and so were my cousins.

  “Come back and visit us again soon,” Sharada Ammoomma said, as we stood in the doorway. Savitri Ammoomma had her eyes closed and seemed to be asleep; Sarojini Ammoomma was crying soundlessly.

  “She hates saying good-bye,” Shanti whispered to us in a confidential tone. “You’d better go quickly. It will be easier.”

  We went outside onto the lawn. The sun had disappeared behind a horde of clouds. “We’d better hurry,” Meenu said.

  Krishna eyed me with curiosity. “What was Savitri Ammoomma saying to you?”

  “Oh, nothing. I could barely understand her,” I said.

  None of us uttered another word as we strode away from the house, but my mind was screaming.

  Krishna had told me her father was dead, but really he had abandoned them. Did Krishna know and just change the story out of shame, or had her mother actually told her that her father was dead?

  Thunder lashed the sky and we quickened our pace to a run. The rain began to fall hard and heavy upon our heads, running down our shoulders.

  What had Savitri Ammoomma meant when she told me to open my eyes?

  “Hurry!” Meenu yelled.

  As we ran, every now and then the darkness of the storm was broken by a streak of lightning that lit up the dripping trees and the red road that stretched out before us like a tongue. The thunder was deafening—I had only ever watched and listened to storms from behind the safety of a glass window. But I was part of the storm now, rain-whipped and shaking.

  Savitri Ammoomma definitely seemed a bit crazy, and yet I could not forget the way she had looked at me, the way her eyes had seemed to see inside me, as if she was riffling through my thoughts, my secrets, like papers in a drawer.