The Girl in the Garden

by Kamala Nair

  We went outside and stood before the wall. Sunlight danced on the gray stone.

  “I’ll go first and you follow,” I said, and scrambled up the wall. “It’s easy, see?” I called out after I had jumped down to the other side. “Now, your turn.”

  I waited for a few minutes, shouting words of encouragement as I listened to Tulasi moving around on the other side, struggling to make it up the wall. Finally I glimpsed her white, terrified face at the top.

  “Are you sure it will be okay?”

  “I’m sure.”

  She dropped down beside me, and together we stood under the shade of the banyan tree.

  An intense silence covered everything like a fresh blanket of snow. Gold filaments of sun flitted through the trees and lay on the forest floor like scattered beads. I glanced at Tulasi. Her knees were bent and her hands were outstretched, as if she were teetering at the very edge of a cliff.

  I smiled, relieved. “See? Nothing happened.”

  Tulasi didn’t speak. She was staring at the ground and breathing heavily, almost panting.

  “Are you all right?” I placed a tentative hand on her shoulder.

  “Let me go back, I have to go back,” she gasped. Flinging herself against the wall, she began fumbling at the stone.

  “But you just got here. You really want to go back already?” I was disappointed that our little adventure was ending so soon, especially now that I knew for sure Tulasi would be okay outside the garden wall.

  “I am in earnest, Rakhee.” She made a clumsy attempt to get her footing in between the stones, but slipped back down. She tried again, and again she slipped. She began to make an inhuman rasping sound.

  I watched her try to climb up the wall and continuously slip down.

  “Help,” she croaked. “Help me.”

  But I couldn’t get near her because her arms were flailing. “Hang on, be still for a second.” I tried to grab her foot and boost her up, but she was thrashing about so much that I couldn’t get hold of it. “You have to calm down and climb, Tulasi.”

  “I cannot breathe, I cannot—” She began to sob.

  In the distance I heard the rooster’s brassy crow.

  I, too, started to panic. “Come on, you can do this, just concentrate.” But it was no use. Tulasi continued to flap about like a fish on the deck of a ship.

  What if Sadhana Aunty arrived and found us like this?

  I couldn’t let that happen. I pushed her aside and hauled myself up the wall. Draping my body over it, so that my stomach was flush against the top, my feet digging into the garden side, and my head and arms on the outside, I stretched my hands down as far as I could.

  “Grab my hand,” I said to Tulasi.

  She reached up. “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can. You have to jump.”

  She bounded up into the air and her fingertips brushed against mine. “I can’t, Rakhee. It’s too high, it’s too high.”

  “You can do it. Come on, there’s no other way. Take a deep breath and jump.”

  She jumped again, and this time our fingers latched. I grabbed her wrist with my free hand and felt my chin scraping against stone and my body falling backward with the weight of both our bodies. The next thing I knew I was on my back in the grass. Tulasi was beside me. Her breathing had slowed down and she was gazing up at the sky without blinking, blood welling on the underside of her chin.

  “Teacher was right,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t leave this garden or I will die.”

  I sat up and looked at her. “That’s silly. She’s not right, you just panicked. We can try again tomorrow.”

  “No, I can never try that again. She was right.” Tulasi got to her feet and held her hand out to me, now calm.

  I took her hand and she pulled me to my feet.

  “Thank you for everything, Rakhee, truly,” she said, drawing Amma’s shawl around her shoulders. “Please come back tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  I climbed back over the wall and ran as fast as I could through the forest, the scrape on my chin burning.

  Ashoka was still swathed in the quiet of sleep, and I exhaled and paused on the verandah to catch my breath.

  A howl of pain broke the morning’s silence. At first I thought it was a cat fight. Then I heard a dull thud and another howl. It was coming from the abandoned shed that used to serve as a bathhouse, tucked into the trees a few yards away from the goat pen.

  The thudding and the howling lasted for a full minute. Finally the shed door swung open and Meenu, her face red and swollen, limped out, followed by a haggard-looking Sadhana Aunty, who was carrying a wooden paddle.

  I ducked so that they wouldn’t see me. They went back into the house through the front entrance, and I heard Meenu’s door close. A moment later Sadhana Aunty reappeared on the lawn, without the paddle, but this time carrying a notebook and a basket. She walked around the side of the house and disappeared, and I knew that she was going to see Tulasi.

  From that morning forward, Meenu was different. For the rest of the summer she was haughty, sullen, and solitary. She no longer played or hung around with me and Krishna. Like Gitanjali, she rolled her eyes at our games and shooed us away when we approached her with the cricket bat. She had grown up.

  Chapter 17

  Not long after the incident with Meenu, Muthashi got sick again. Her fever spiked and she was confined to her bed, except this time nobody gathered us around the table and told us not to worry.

  I heard Dev and Sadhana Aunty speaking outside Muthashi’s bedroom.

  “H-h-h-her heart is weak. P-p-p-preparations should be made.” Dev’s sleek stutter echoing in the corridor made my blood run cold. Nothing, it seemed, had been said about our encounter. He hadn’t been around for a few days, but the moment Muthashi got sick, he arrived like clockwork, and nobody, not even Amma, said a word.

  I looked inside Muthashi’s bedroom when they left and saw not my neat, clean grandmother, but a mess of dingy white sheets and disheveled gray hair. There was that funny smell again, but this time it was more pungent. I covered my nose and ran to the verandah.

  Krishna was sitting on the swing bouncing a small ball on the ground.

  “I just saw your mother going down to use the telephone,” she said in a flat voice.

  “Really?” My heart thumped. “Who was she calling?”

  “She had the big telephone book with her. I know what that means. She’s informing people.”

  “Of what?” I asked, and as soon as the words left my lips I knew the answer.

  A few tears rolled down Krishna’s cheeks and dissolved in the lap of her dress. I had never seen anyone look so sad.

  Later that evening, Sadhana Aunty went into Muthashi’s room carrying a bottle of medicine and a spoon. A minute later she emerged with a fresh brown stain spreading across the front of her sari.

  “She won’t take her medicine,” she said to Vijay Uncle, who was hovering outside the room. “She spat it out and swore at me. Our mother, Vijay. Our mother, who would rather let a mosquito feast on her blood than slap it. She is not herself.”

  “Let me try,” said Vijay Uncle, taking the bottle and the spoon from his sister. But he, too, came out defeated, medicine dribbling from his chin onto his white shirt like dirty raindrops.

  At the dinner table, Sadhana Aunty turned to Amma. “Did you speak to Veena? I assume she’ll want to be here.”

  “Yes, she’s trying to book a flight as we speak,” said Amma.

  “What?” I tugged on her sari. “Veena Aunty is coming here?” The thought of seeing someone I loved from Plainfield was too thrilling to contain my happiness.

  “Muthashi is her aunt. We all grew up like sisters, you know. She wants to pay her respects.” Amma’s voice trembled, broke, and gave way to tears. She pushed away her banana leaf and buried her face in her arms.

  “Chitra.” Sadhana Aunty placed a hand on her shoulder but her face looked a
nnoyed.

  Vijay Uncle got up from the table and disappeared into the sitting room. My cousins all kept their eyes glued to the table, as if the knotty wood were the most fascinating thing they had ever seen.

  I waited with morbid curiosity for Death to arrive. What would it look like? Dev had hinted at its arrival, but a few days passed and nothing happened, except a constant current of dread buzzed under my skin—that awful feeling of waiting for an unwanted but inevitable visitor.

  I continued sneaking out of the house at dawn to visit Tulasi, and we never mentioned what had happened when she had climbed over the wall with me. Part of me wanted to try it again, and another part of me was afraid that maybe Tulasi was right. I did not want any harm to come to her, but at the same time, as the end of summer grew perilously near, I couldn’t help fantasizing about setting her free and bringing her back to Plainfield.

  She kept asking me what life was like in the outside world, and the more I told, the more I felt I should stop, for Tulasi was changing. She was no longer the happy, accepting girl I had met only a few weeks before. Caring for the garden was gradually becoming less of a priority for her. Instead she spent much of her time holed up inside the cottage, hovering over the Shakespeare book, devouring each play, one after the other, over and over again, as if the words on the page were now sustaining her life. The garden was still fragrant and exquisite as ever, but I noticed small changes, changes that pierced my heart with guilt. The grass was not so pliant beneath my feet. Petals from the Ashoka flowers pooled at the foot of the tree, waiting, like patient children, to be swept away. Weeds wound their way into the flower beds, and the magnificent roses began to droop.

  Why couldn’t I stop spinning my long, elaborate tales of life on the outside? The reason, I admit, was selfish. I told myself Tulasi needed to know these things, that I was telling her the truth, but really no one had ever listened to me like this before, had hooked themselves upon my every word as if their life depended on it. I felt bold, brash, and, for the first time, necessary.

  Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night and imagined I heard Puck’s mournful call echoing through the forest and into my bedroom, a message for me alone, of sorrow or of warning. I shielded my ears with my hands and tried to put Tulasi out of my mind.

  Death finally arrived around four o’clock one morning, accompanied by a chorus of wails. I ran out into the hallway, where my three cousins had already gathered in front of Muthashi’s room.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Krishna, but she did not answer. Her mouth was agape. Sadhana Aunty, Amma, and Vijay Uncle were all huddled around Muthashi’s bed. Amma and Vijay Uncle were clinging to each other and weeping. Nalini Aunty was standing with her back against the wall and her head bowed. Sadhana Aunty was not crying, but there was a haunted look in her eyes when she came to the door and told us:

  “Muthashi is no more.”

  It was a funny way to put it: Muthashi is no more. Death had gathered up what was left of her in his black satchel and wandered off into the night. Muthashi had been snatched from the face of the earth. She was no more.

  There was a loud collective cry, and my cousins were all embracing. I stood apart. Sadhana Aunty put her arms around her daughters.

  “There is nothing that can be done now. Her soul is at peace. Go back to bed and get some rest.”

  I did as she said, leaving my cousins to their grief. It was something I could not share.

  I climbed back into my narrow bed and blinked into the ceiling, wondering if tears would come. The room was so dark I might have been lying on the lawn, staring up at a starless sky. I wasn’t sure if what I was feeling was sadness.

  I didn’t get a chance to go to the garden in the morning because I fell asleep again, and by the time I woke up, the house was teeming with people. Murmurs and sobs emanated from the hallway outside my door. I sat up and listened, too afraid to go out. Eventually Amma swept in, her eyes puffy, with something green draped across her arm.

  “Rakhee, have your bath, then put this on.” Her voice was hoarse. She laid the material out on the bed. It was a long tunic with baggy pants and a shawl.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  “It’s Krishna’s, but it should fit you all right, though you’re taller.”

  Amma leaned against the door frame for a moment, sighed, and walked out, closing the door behind her.

  I lingered in the bathroom, prolonging the process as much as possible. When I had bathed and dressed and could avoid it no longer I went out into the hallway, which was clogged with swarms of strangers. As I moved through the crowd, I felt all eyes upon me. Valsala, Veena Aunty’s sister, was standing in one of the clusters, holding her baby, Parvathi, in her arms. Parvathi, who had grown considerably since I had last seen her that day at the hospital when she was a newborn, looked into my eyes as I passed and blinked, or at least I imagined she did.

  The family was in the sitting room. Prem and his parents were there, too. In the center was a long white box that looked like a refrigerator except it had a clear glass lid and the words “Mobile Mortuary” printed across the side. Muthashi lay inside the box on a bed of chilly white satin. I had never seen a dead person before and instinctively turned away.

  A hand came down upon my shoulder, soft as a falling petal. “It’s okay to have a look.”

  Prem guided me forward toward the box. When I was only an inch away he removed his hand and left me alone.

  I gazed down through the glass lid at Muthashi’s face, which was illuminated by a fluorescent tube light. The withered moths of her eyelids were closed and her hands, fragile and wrinkled as crepe paper, were folded across her chest. At first glance she might have been sleeping, but the more I stared the more I sensed the difference death had wrought in her. There was a gray, iridescent sheen to her skin that hadn’t been there in life, as if spiders had spent the night spinning webs back and forth across her face. She lay in that box, frozen and still as a slab of wood, and I knew that the Muthashi of my dreams, the one who sang the ant song to me, the one who pressed her face to mine and swallowed my scent, had disappeared entirely. Muthashi was no more.

  “Come, Rakhee, you should eat something.” Another hand came down on my shoulder; this time it was Amma’s, and she steered me out of the room.

  The rest of that day went by in a blur. Villagers trooped in and out of the house in a constant stream, some silent and subdued, others tearing at their hair and weeping, but all bearing food. I remember eating an uncomfortable amount because I didn’t know what else to do, and by night my stomach was round and tight as a drum. It seemed the whole village came to pay their respects to Muthashi and our family that day. One woman pressed Sadhana Aunty to her ample breast and sobbed into her ear: “She was our mother, too. She was all of our mothers.”

  On the morning of the funeral Veena Aunty pulled up to the dirt road in front of Ashoka in a shiny black car, just as Amma and I had arrived only a couple of months before. I was waiting for her on the top step. It was the second day now that I had neglected to visit the garden. I knew Tulasi would be worried, but there hadn’t been a single moment to slip away. Someone was always awake, up and bustling around, doing this, doing that. I was stuck.

  The car door slammed. Veena Aunty was wearing a navy blue sari and had a maroon bindi on her forehead, but she was still the same Veena Aunty from Plainfield with her close-cropped black hair, her round face, her easy, gap-toothed smile.

  I ran down the steps and hurled myself into her arms.

  “Hey there!” she said, stroking the top of my hair.

  “How’s Aba?” I asked.

  “He misses you like crazy. We all miss you like crazy.”

  I held her hand as she instructed the driver to take her suitcases to Valsala Aunty’s house, which was another mile down the road. Together we walked up the steps to Ashoka, where Amma and Sadhana Aunty were waiting to greet her on the verandah.

  Veena Aunty hugged Sadhana
Aunty, then went over to Amma, placed both hands on her cheeks, looked into her eyes, and gave her a concerned smile. After a while Amma pulled away and Veena Aunty said:

  “I want to see her.”

  Muthashi’s body was still in the sitting room, but the mobile mortuary had disappeared. Now she was on a bed of banana leaves, laid out on the floor, with no barrier between us. She had on a white sari, but this one was slightly more formal than what she usually wore; the material seemed thicker and starchier, with a thin gold border. Someone had streaked her chalky brow with a red paste, and a constellation of bronze lamps flickered with smoky orange flames just above her head.

  Veena Aunty knelt at Muthashi’s side, folded her hands together, and pressed them to her forehead. She began whispering a prayer. I closed my eyes, waiting for her to finish, and when I opened them, Hema was standing in the doorway. Both Amma and Veena Aunty turned to Sadhana Aunty, who was watching Hema. Hema began to move forward into the room, her unblinking eyes never leaving Muthashi’s face. Why did Sadhana Aunty not intervene? Hema sank to her knees beside Veena Aunty and continued to stare. Amma and Veena Aunty exchanged glances. Sadhana Aunty took a step forward, but still did not speak. Hema’s face contorted into an expression of wild rage and she raised her hand as if she was about to strike Muthashi. Only then did Sadhana Aunty leap forward, grasp Hema by the arms, and pull her to her feet.

  “Get out of here,” she spat. “Who gave you the right to enter this house?”

  The rage in Hema’s face crumpled into despair.

  Sadhana Aunty’s back straightened and she looked down at the feeble, shivering woman, who was clutching at the stained white cloth of her widow’s sari and gathering it closer around her shoulders. “Leave now,” she said.

  Hema turned and shuffled out of the room.

  Amma and Veena Aunty both had their mouths open.

  “She is obviously unwell,” Sadhana Aunty addressed us in a crisp tone. “Let us not mention this to anyone.”