The Girl in the Garden (12 page)

I picked up a pebble that was lying on the floor and pretended to examine it, hoping that she would not notice the tears that had sprung to my eyes.

Nalini Aunty, having successfully plunged in her sword, rose almost as quickly as she had sat down. “Well, what
am I doing here chatting with little girls? This is what my life has come to,” she chuckled to herself. “Let me see what those useless servants are getting up to in the kitchen.” She collected Balu from Krishna’s arms and plodded away.

Once she left, unable to control myself, I hurled the pebble into the rain. “Why does she have to be so mean all the time? I hate her.”

Krishna didn’t say anything; she just stared down at her toes. After a few moments of silence, embarrassment about my outburst crept in. Maybe Krishna thought I was being disrespectful of my elders. But then she turned to look at me and said in a conspiratorial whisper:

“Come with me, I want to show you something.” She took my hand in hers; it felt hot and moist, and she seemed unusually excited.

“Where are we going?”

“Ssshhh, just come.” Krishna pulled me down the hallway and into a bedroom I had never seen before—the door was always closed and I had never dared open it. The walls were painted an uncompromising yellow. The bed was neatly made with a dark green spread, and matching curtains that looked as if they were made from burlap covered the window.

“This is my mother’s room,” Krishna said.

“Won’t we get in trouble?”

Krishna shrugged. “She won’t be back for some time now—not until the rain stops, at least.” My mind immediately went to the walled garden, and for a second I allowed myself to indulge in a vision of the drenched flowers enclosed within, before I pushed the image away.

Krishna went over to the closet and opened it. A row of monochromatic shawls and kurthas hung in a tidy row on
one side, and a modest stack of saris sat piled on the shelf beside it. Crouching on the floor, Krishna stuck her arms into the closet and began feeling around.

“Ah, here it is,” she said, and with some effort pulled out a dusty cardboard box.

“What’s in there?” I was intrigued and impressed.

“Family photos—old albums. My mother hid them in here, but I found them one day,” Krishna lowered her gaze. “Sometimes I come in here when no one is looking and open her closet. I like the smell of her things.”

I kneeled down beside Krishna; she glanced up and smiled. “Anyway, you will never believe this.” She picked up the top album, placed it in her lap, and began flipping through. When she found what she had been looking for, she pushed it over to my lap and pointed to a formal black-and-white portrait of an attractive young woman who seemed familiar. Her petite frame was wrapped in a silk embroidered sari, and she wore a hopeful smile on her delicately rounded face.

“Who is that?”

“Guess,” said Krishna with a cheeky smile.

“I have no idea. She seems so familiar, but I can’t figure out who it is.”

“It’s Nalini Aunty.”

I turned to face my cousin and laughed. “I can’t believe it, look how pretty she is, she’s so… so… skinny.” But it was true—when you factored in a double chin and sour expression, the face was undoubtedly Nalini Aunty’s.

“I think this was taken just before she was married to Vijay Uncle. This is the picture her family sent to our family when the marriage was being arranged. She still looked like this when she first came to Ashoka, I remember. And she was even kind of nice back then, too.”

“So what happened?”

Krishna closed the album. “Living here has changed her.”

I leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, but it’s a feeling. There’s something not quite right about this place.” Tears filled her eyes, and she wiped them away with an efficient gesture that reminded me of Sadhana Aunty. “It’s a hard life here, Rakhee, and you don’t know, you’re only here for one summer. Then you get to leave. You’ll forget all about us.”

“No, I won’t. I may have to leave, but I’ll never forget. I can come back, too, and you can come visit us in Minnesota. Have you ever been on a plane before?” Krishna looked so sad that I wanted to cheer her up by changing the subject.

She sniffled and gave me a halfhearted smile. “Do you want to see some more?” She rummaged through the box and pulled out another album. Passing her palm across the cover, she cleaned off the layer of dust that had collected upon it.

“This is our grandparents’ wedding photo.” The picture was printed on a thick cardboardlike material that had faded over the years of heat and neglect, but I could still make out Muthashan’s high forehead, the aquiline nose, the deep-set eyes that I knew so well. Muthashi looked incredibly young—she couldn’t have been much older than Gitanjali—with a face still soft with baby fat and eyes full of acceptance.

“But why would Sadhana Aunty hide these photos? Why aren’t they kept out where everyone can see them? Why are there so few pictures hanging on the walls?”

“My mother doesn’t believe in remembering the past. Anytime I bring it up or ask questions, she gets angry. She
says we should just focus on what God has set before us in the present, and take care of what happens in the future.”

“Who’s this?” I pointed to a picture of a lanky young man with curly black hair. He was sitting cross-legged on what appeared to be the verandah of Ashoka, smoking a cigarette.

“My father,” Krishna said in a soft voice. “Sometimes I wonder if that is the reason why my mother never wants to look back… because she misses him. I don’t remember anything about him, but from his pictures I can tell that he was a nice man. My mother says he was always sick and that he just sat around reading all day, but I don’t believe her.”

She began flipping through the pages again. “You’ll like this one,” she said, stopping finally, and passing the album back to me. “See, our mothers are still young here.”

In the photo, a band of children stood in a haphazard cluster before a backdrop of trees. I examined the picture and determined that the children were in fact Sadhana Aunty, Veena Aunty, Amma, and Prem, and they were standing in front of the forest that grew behind Ashoka. The stone barrier had not yet been erected. My two aunts posed primly in their half-saris; Amma and Prem, who looked to be about my age, appeared decidedly more disheveled. Prem was smiling and poking Amma’s arm, and Amma, with a patch of mud on her skirt, was beaming from ear to ear. Judging from the picture they looked as if they had been the best of friends.

“Let’s keep going,” said Krishna, flipping the page. “Here’s a family portrait.”

Muthashan, Muthashi, Sadhana Aunty, Amma, and Vijay Uncle were all assembled on the sepia-colored front lawn of Ashoka. In the background everything appeared
unchanged—the Ashoka trees lining the stairs, the cowshed, the goat pen.

Muthashan sat in a chair beside Muthashi in the center of the lawn, and the children looked older than they had in the previous picture. Sadhana Aunty, who must have been about sixteen at the time, posed in a long skirt and blouse behind her father. Although she still wore the same serious expression, she seemed somehow lighter, softer than she did now. A roly-poly young Vijay Uncle, looking very much the same as his present incarnation, grinned complacently at Muthashi’s knee. Amma stood a bit away from the rest with her arms folded across her chest. Her chin was tilted toward the ground, but there was a flicker of defiance in the eyes that glanced up to meet the camera lens.

I scrutinized the picture for a long time, searching Amma’s young, unmarred face for any resemblance to my own. As I stared, a spot at the edge of the photograph caught my eye and I brought it closer to my face. The spot, I realized, was actually the unfocused profile of a young woman captured unwittingly by the photographer. I ran my finger lightly across her face, mesmerized.

I pointed out the woman to Krishna. “Who is that?” The woman’s features, though not quite beautiful, were arresting. But her eyes were what gripped me—huge, dark, and glowering. She seemed to be watching the scene with unfiltered hatred.

“I never noticed her before,” Krishna said, taking the album and squinting into the photograph. She examined it for some time before dropping the album with a start. “Rakhee, it’s Hema.”

“Who?”

“Hema, you know, crazy Hema, the servant woman.”

We looked at each other, unsure of what to make of our discovery. Meenu’s footsteps came thumping dramatically down the hallway.

“Where
is
everyone?” came her impatient call.

“Quickly, we must put this away,” said Krishna.

I nodded and helped her push the cardboard box back into the closet, understanding that as much as we loved Meenu, some things should be kept just between us.

That night after dinner we all gathered around the television to watch the latest installment of a popular Malayalam serial. Amma seemed distracted and kept fidgeting and glancing at her wristwatch throughout the first half of the show. Eventually she got up and slipped out of the room, unnoticed by anyone but me. I hesitated at first—maybe she was just going to the bathroom or to get some water—but curiosity got the better of me when Amma did not return after a few minutes, so I, too, slipped out of the room.

Amma was in the front yard. I hid in the velvety dark of the verandah. The trees surrounding the house stood out like inkblots against the sky’s deep blue, and the leaves were flocks of black bats lying in wait upon the branches. The low hoot of an owl sounded from somewhere above.

Amma looked unearthly in her pale, rustling sari. The night air felt lovely and warm upon my skin, but somehow I was afraid. She was walking across the lawn, wringing her hands, her steps light and deliberate, her eyes rapt. She moved with purpose, as if she had a specific destination in mind, although she was simply pacing, treading across the same white streak of moonlight over and over again.

Another figure emerged from the darkness of the front steps, another silent, unnoticed observer. I squinted through my glasses trying to identify the intruder.

It was Prem.

I knew then with utter certainty that it had been Prem who had been sending those letters to Amma. It was Prem who was taking Amma away from me and Aba.

“Chitra,” he said, and Amma froze. Then she went to him, stumbling over the edge of her sari, wrapping her arms around his neck, and leaning her head against his shoulder.

He tipped her chin back and began to talk to her, softly, intimately—I could not make out the words. His fingers caressed the rope of her braid. I crouched in my hiding spot, transfixed, as if I were watching two actors in a play.

They spoke for only a few minutes. Prem kissed Amma on the mouth—a long kiss. I had never seen anyone kiss like that, except in movies that I wasn’t supposed to see. Sometimes back at home, Aba kissed Amma in front of me, but it was always brief, and then Amma would turn scarlet, push him away, and say: “Vikram, not in front of Rakhee.”

After a while Amma broke away from Prem, and ran back toward the house. I remained huddled in the corner, cloaked in shadows.

N
alini Aunty was eagerly listening to Murthy, the mailman, perched atop his rusty bicycle, conversing enthusiastically in between sips from the metal tumbler of lime juice, which she had carried out to him. It had stopped raining and I was sitting alone on the damp top step.

“Really, Murthy?” Nalini Aunty’s eyes were so wide with curiosity they practically bulged from their sockets, “Is Thara Thomas’s husband really divorcing her? She was only one year senior to me in school—I still remember the wedding. Tut, tut, what a shame.”

Murthy was the best source of village gossip, abusing his job by opening and reading everyone else’s mail before making his weekly deliveries. His possession of coveted information allowed him to move freely from house to house, accepting tea and sweets, and sometimes whiskey, in exchange for the latest news. Nobody ever dared offend Murthy, and most people buttered him up in the hopes that he would keep their own precious skeletons locked up in their closets, safe and sound where they belonged.

He was short and rail thin, with a dark complexion
smooth and shiny as polished wood, an elaborate mustache, and a mischievous yellow grin.

“Yes, and this is only between us,” Murthy continued, leaning toward Nalini Aunty and whispering conspiratorially into her ear, “but they say she was in the habit of taking drinks, and that is why he is asking for the divorce.”