The Girl in the Garden (21 page)

So I lay there, replaying Tulasi’s story over and over again in my head. She genuinely believed the tulasi plant was her mother and that she would die if she ever left the garden. She was so certain, and that otherworldly garden and Tulasi herself were so removed from anything I had ever experienced that I almost believed her, too.

There was a knock on the door.

“Rakhee, my mother is asking for you. She says to come out for breakfast.” Even though it was only Krishna, I sighed with annoyance.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, climbing back out of bed and slipping on my sandals.

I wondered if Amma would even be at breakfast. All that crying the night before might have given her a headache; perhaps she would spend another day in bed with the curtains closed.

I hoped the crying was a sign that she had been lying to Prem when she said yes. She had said yes but really she had meant no. And even if she had meant yes, Aba would never let Amma take me away to live with Prem in some house with a garden and a pond and windows that faced west.

Everyone, including a swollen-eyed Amma, was gathered around the table. Sadhana Aunty, standing at the head with the tips of her long fingers balancing on the surface, looked dark and somber. Two slanting bones protruded, bladelike, above the hollows of her cheeks. Purple bags sagged beneath her eyes. Dev was standing just behind her with a serious expression on his face.

“Muthashi is ill,” Sadhana Aunty announced in a crisp voice.

Vijay Uncle’s mouth fell open and Amma let out a quiet sob.

“It’s nothing serious. Dev has examined her.”

“Yes,” said Dev, stepping forward so that he was now standing beside my aunt. “It’s nothing but a f-f-f-fever, but at her age it’s better to be ca-ca-careful.”

“Dev would like Muthashi to keep to her bed for the next few days until the fever subsides,” Sadhana Aunty said. Dev shot her a look, irritated that she had stepped in and interrupted his speech. “I’d like you all to make an effort to be quieter when you’re in the house. I don’t want you disturbing Muthashi with too much noise.” I knew that this was directed at me, Krishna, and Meenu. “Also, Muthashi gets very lonely when she can’t be around people, so all of us must take turns sitting with her and keeping her company.” At this, I turned my attention to a cobweb shivering at the corner of the ceiling. “That means all of you. It’s very important that we keep her spirits up.” Sadhana Aunty’s eyes zeroed in on me.

“But how am I supposed to keep her company?” I asked. “She can’t understand anything I say.”

“Rakhee,” Amma said, “you don’t have to say anything. She’ll just be happy to be beside you and to know you’re there.”

“Okay, that is all.” Sadhana Aunty backed away from the table. “You may eat now.” She wiped her hands on her sari and left the room.

“Maybe we should just all go in together,” I suggested to Meenu and Krishna as we ate.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Meenu said. “Then we have to sit in there for three times as long. Just do it yourself—what’s the big deal?”

It wasn’t a big deal to my cousins who had grown up with our grandmother, who could speak to our grandmother, who knew her before she became this helpless, childlike creature. Although my memories of Muthashi before that trip were hazy, I had always thought about her. Whenever the teachers at school asked us what we were doing over the holidays, we would go around in a circle and the other kids would say “I’m going to Grandma’s house.” Grandma’s house became a vague, happy place synonymous in my mind with warmth and love—cookies in the oven, gifts under a tree, bony hugs that you shrugged away from but really looked forward to—images I had gleaned from movies or from overhearing postholiday conversations between the kids at school, images that I knew weren’t necessarily real, but that I dreamed about anyway.

Muthashi’s room smelled funny. It was hard to breathe with the dense curtains drawn over the windows, blocking out any light or air. I coughed as I stumbled over to the chair that Sadhana Aunty had placed next to the bed. My grandmother was lying asleep on her side with one arm stretched out under her ear and one arm resting on her delicate hip. From the meager light streaming in through the doorway, I could see that her gray hair, usually tied back, lay in scraggly disarray on the pillow. Her breathing was short and disjointed.

I settled down into the hard chair and thought about what Muthashan’s crazy old sister had told me, about how Muthashi had been a teenage bride. Muthashan had married her, then left her behind in that old, rotting house
to live with his mother and three sisters. Later, after Vijay Uncle, she had tried to have more children but lost them all. Her life had been filled with sadness, nothing but sadness. Krishna had said that there was something not quite right about this place, and I believed her.

I remembered the picture Krishna had shown me of Muthashi when she was young. Her face had not been beautiful, but even then there had been a kindness, a dignity to her round, placid features. The kindness was there still, but the dignity had gone, and I thought what a horrible thing it must be to grow old.

After a while Muthashi’s eyelids opened. Instinctively I backed my chair away a few inches. Her eyes, blank as marbles, fell on me and slowly warmed with recognition. She reached out her hand. It trembled as it hung in the space between me and the bed. Reluctantly I took it and was surprised by the silkiness of her palm against mine. She closed her eyes again and smiled, and I felt a sudden rush of feeling that I hoped was love.

O
ver the next week I juggled my visits to Tulasi with rehearsals for the play. My eleventh birthday was approaching, and my cousins and I had decided to put on a performance for the adults right after my birthday dinner, which Amma had taken upon herself to plan with surprising energy and determination.

In the early mornings I would sneak out of the house, quiet as a thief, and sprint through the forest to the garden, where Tulasi would be waiting, her excitement so palpable I could feel it radiating through the wall.

“It’s me,” I would say, and she would immediately begin moving about on the other side, so that I knew she had been waiting anxiously for my arrival.

Tulasi and I would sit together, drinking tea and talking until my hour was up and I would have to return to Ashoka. Usually during these visits she asked questions and I answered. She wanted to know all about things like school and other children. When I told her about them, a million more questions would follow. “Bus? But what is a bus?” She would reach out and grasp my arm in her hot hands and lean forward, her deformed mouth gaping, and I would do my best to explain. But it never felt
enough. I could see the dissatisfaction growing in her face.

Once when we were out in the garden, she stopped talking midsentence.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Sssshhh,” she whispered.

A bottle-green dragonfly was sunning itself upon a heart-shaped anthurium. In one deft movement, Tulasi leaped forward and captured the creature in her cupped hands.

“What are you doing?”

“Come and have a look,” she said.

We went back into the cottage, where she placed the dragonfly into a glass jar and capped it. I watched it crawl up the side of the jar as Tulasi went over to the wardrobe and shuffled things around. She returned with a spool of silver thread and a pair of scissors. Picking up the jar, she motioned for me to follow her back outside and I recalled the mysterious dragonfly that had led me to the garden for the first time. Tulasi picked up a miniature rose, which had fallen to the grass, and poured the dragonfly from the jar back into her hand. Handling it with skilled delicacy, she tied one end of a piece of silver thread around its tail and the other around the stem of the rose.

Her face glowing, she released the dragonfly, and together we watched as it drifted over the garden wall with the rose trailing behind it like a comet.

“That won’t hurt him, will it?”

“No, of course not, silly,” said Tulasi. “It’s very light and it will fall off soon. It’s just a little fun I like to have.”

I got into the habit of bringing her things—small presents—each time I visited. A bag of Skittles Amma had bought me at the airport, a tattered
Betty and Veronica
comic book, a Walkman with a Madonna cassette inside it, and headphones.

“Have you ever heard music before?” I asked.

“Teacher has taught me a few traditional songs.”

I made her put on the headphones, adjusted the volume on the Walkman, and hit the play button. At first her limbs jolted and she stumbled backward as the music poured into her ears, but then she stood still and a warm light spread across her face. She smiled and began to sway back and forth with her eyes closed. After a few minutes the smile faded, and she pulled off the headphones and pushed the whole thing back toward me.

“Take it away,” she said.

On the day before my birthday, none of the junk I could find in my suitcase satisfied me. I wanted to bring her something special, something that would really make her happy. I thought of the bookcase in the sitting room, dusty and unappealing, covered by an enormous yellowing doily, and decided that was where I would find the something really special for Tulasi.

I went into the sitting room, knelt before the twoshelved bookcase, and lifted up the doily, which gave off a musty odor. The books had an austere look about them, with dark spines and bronze lettering. I scanned the titles, most of which were unfamiliar to me, until I found the perfect book,
Shakespeare’s Tragedies: A Complete Volume
. The book was thick and would be difficult to carry through the forest, but I knew it would be perfect, so I slid it off the shelf and tucked it underneath my arm, thinking of Tulasi’s face lighting up when she saw that I had brought her an entire book of plays by her favorite writer.

As I arranged the doily back over the shelf, another book caught my eye. Unlike the thick hardbacks, this
one was slender and frayed. I pulled it out.
The Poems of Mirabai
. Amma had been reading it that day when I had lain sick beside her. I opened the book to the first page; an inscription had been written on it in a familiar hand: “To my dear Chitra. Yours forever, Prem.”

I felt that old tightening inside my chest at the sight of these words and automatically stuck the book into the pages of the Shakespeare before I rearranged the doily, left the room, and began to walk down the hallway clutching my stolen booty. Amma’s door was open a crack, and I paused. I know I should have kept walking, that I should have run to hide the books, but I couldn’t help myself, I had grown so accustomed to spying and eavesdropping that it was now second nature.

She was standing in front of the mirror wearing nothing but a threadbare brassiere held up by two thin straps and a beige underskirt, the kind she wore under a sari. Her scar, usually pale pink, seemed redder and angrier than usual. Her stomach was soft, brown, and flat. The long bones just below her throat were jutting out farther than I remembered, angled upward like a pair of eyebrows. Below them, her plump breasts rose and fell with the same steady, voluptuous rhythm of ocean waves on a calm day.

Her hair was loose and tucked behind her ears, and she was staring at her face while her fingertips were massaging her temples. They ran along the side of her face, down her neck, to her chest. They grazed the curving mound of one breast, then the other. There was a wild look in her eyes that I had never seen before.

The darkness of her nipples burned through the transparent white silk of her brassiere and her lips parted, letting a moan escape. A moan with a tumult of emotion
behind it that I neither recognized nor understood, but that made me shrink away from the door nonetheless.

“God help me,” I heard her whisper, before I turned away and went back to my room with heavy hands and hot cheeks, ashamed both by the scene I had witnessed and for having spied in the first place. I felt dirty, disgraceful.

I hid the Shakespeare book under a pile of clothes in my suitcase and took the little poetry volume out into the yard.

The midafternoon blaze wrung sweat from my pores. It trickled down my face in rivulets. Carrying the book in both hands I went and stood by the moss-covered stone well situated in the corner of the yard. I had never come so close to the well before. On one of my first days at Ashoka, Nalini Aunty had caught me eyeing it and told me with a smirk that the long grass fringing the circumference of the well was a favorite haunt for cobras. By now I knew that Nalini Aunty wasn’t exactly trustworthy, but the damage had been done; the seed of fear had been planted.