The Girl in the Garden (3 page)

I went back into my room and climbed into bed. Merlin came to sit beside me and placed a heavy paw on my arm. The moon was huge and gold; it winked at me through the curtains. I didn’t want to go back to school tomorrow. I didn’t care if the others got ahead, like Aba said. I wished I could just stay there forever with Merlin and my books and my art supplies, and never leave.

I lay awake like that, stroking Merlin’s paw for a long time, and finally I heard Aba moving into the room he shared with Amma. Not long after that, the drone of his snores reverberated through the wall. The numbers on the face of my digital clock cast a green glow across the room and I stared at it. The numbers kept changing and changing until they began to blur and fade, and at last I fell asleep.

After that day our lives began to unravel quickly. A steady stream of blue envelopes addressed to “Chitra Varma” in that same flowery cursive began flowing into our mailbox. I never picked up the mail anymore because Amma always beat me to it, but all the same I knew they were coming. I found the blue shreds in the trash or ashes in the fireplace, which we hardly ever used; and Amma grew increasingly unpredictable.

Some days she behaved as she always had, but at other
times she would float around the house singing Malayalam songs and smiling at nothing in particular, or she would lock herself in the bathroom and sob. Some mornings she would be up early running around the house cleaning and preparing a huge breakfast for me and Aba, and other mornings she would stay in bed with the curtains drawn, and she would still be there when I came home in the afternoon. Even when she was in a happy mood I was afraid. She had this new faraway expression on her face, and I felt that she had retreated into a part of her heart where neither Aba nor I would ever belong.

Aba was so preoccupied with work that I don’t think he noticed anything at first. But one evening I heard them arguing. He had invited a few of his most important colleagues from the Clinic to our house for dinner, and Amma had left a steel knife encrusted with lemon rind inside the elaborate cake she baked for dessert. The day before that, she had dropped me off at the dentist’s office and never picked me up. I ended up shamefacedly accepting a ride home from the sympathetic dentist, who later informed Aba.

“Chitra, what is wrong with you?” Aba’s voice boomed into my bedroom. “I depend on you for certain things—to take care of our child and this house—I depend on you to do these things in order for me to focus on my work, and to provide you with all this.”

“I don’t care about
all this
,” said Amma in a harsh voice I didn’t recognize. “It means nothing to me.”

Aba was quiet and when he spoke next his tone was concerned, gentle. “Then what do you want? How can I help you? Has something happened that I don’t know about?”

“All I want right now is for you to go away,” Amma said in that same harsh voice. “Can you please do that for me?”

There was a long pause, and then I heard Aba leave the room, closing the door behind him. A week later he moved into the guest bedroom.

One day in the spring, I came home to find Amma fast asleep on the sofa. A letter was lying on her chest, which rose and fell in shallow breaths, like a wounded deer I once found in the ravine in the woods behind our house. Gingerly, I took up the thin blue paper and read it. It was short, only two sentences, and it had not been signed:

Remember the flock of green parrots that used to sit on the Ashoka tree outside your bedroom window? They were so perfectly green that you thought they were leaves, until a gust of wind would send them flying off into the dawn sky.

I placed the letter back on Amma’s breast, thinking what a strange thing it was to send all the way from India.

The week before summer vacation tension lived with us like a stubborn houseguest. Aba and Amma barely spoke anymore, and Aba would stay at the lab until long after my bedtime. But what scared me most was that Amma grew peaceful. The crying, the singing, the forgetfulness, all stopped. She was calm and balanced, as if she had come to some kind of important decision.

Even Merlin sensed something was wrong; he was normally well-behaved, but he became anxious and restless. One night I awoke to a high-pitched moan. I did not feel his familiar warm weight against my feet. A latch of fear pinched my spine.

“Merlin?” I climbed out of bed, put on my glasses, and tiptoed across the room.

I found Merlin cowering inside my closet, his long snout pointed toward the ceiling, his mouth opened into
the shape of a small triangle. The rack of clothes muffled his sonorous howl and his legs quivered above a wet patch on the carpet where he had urinated.

Amma came running into my room in her nightgown, her hair loose and rumpled. Two violet half-moons ringed the undersides of her eyes. “Rakhee, what is it? What is going on?” She switched on the light and I squinted. Merlin bowed his head.

Amma instructed me to fetch a sponge and a bucket from under the bathroom sink, and to fill the bucket with soapy water. I expected her to scold Merlin, but instead she just got down on her hands and knees inside my closet and scrubbed. “We’ll take him to the vet tomorrow and have him checked out,” she said.

The next night I was shaken awake. I sat up, alarmed by the rattling bed frame. Merlin was lying at the edge of my bed caught in the midst of what seemed to be an especially vivid dream. He was moving his paws back and forth in a frantic motion, as if he was chasing something, or perhaps running away. I reached across, placing the palm of my hand on his belly, and he grew still. One shiny black eye opened and he raised his head to look at me. He whined softly, then went back to sleep.

On the last day of school Amma picked me up in the car, instead of making me take the bus. When we got home, she asked me to sit down on a stool in the kitchen.

“Rakhee,” she said, “I must speak with you.”

My neck stiffened and I felt a pinprick of panic in my chest.

“It has been a long time since I went back home to
India. I’ve been thinking about how much I would like to spend time with my family, especially my mother—she’s getting old now, you know. Since you have vacation, this may be a good time for us to visit India together.”

I stared at her. She glanced back at me, trying to gauge my reaction before continuing in a tone that sounded artificial. “I think it’s important for you to learn about where you came from and to meet your extended family. Think about it, molay, it could be fun. You’ll have cousins around your age to play with, and it will certainly be more exciting than sitting around here all summer.”

“But what about Aba? What will he do about work?” “Aba won’t be joining us.” Amma bit her bottom lip. “It will be just the two of us, a girls’ adventure.” She gave me a forced smile.

“Are you and Aba getting a divorce?” I don’t know what made me say it, but as soon as the word slipped out it did not seem implausible. It made me choke, that word.
Divorce.

Some of the kids at school had parents who were divorced, and I thought it must be the worst thing in the world. I had a vision of Aba living all by himself in a sloppy apartment, having nothing to eat, and no company, and my having to live alone with Amma and her stupid letters.

“Rakhee, don’t talk like that.” Amma’s face blanched and she began rubbing her finger against an invisible stain on the kitchen counter. “We’re just going for the summer, and I really think you’ll have a nice time.”

“But why can’t I stay here with Aba? What if I don’t want to go to India with you?”

Amma’s jaw went rigid. “Rakhee, Aba is at work all day. He won’t have time to look after you, you know that. Why do you have to make this so difficult?”

I had no choice. It had already been planned and
decided and no one had bothered to consult me. In that moment I hated Amma. I scowled. “So, when are we leaving?”

“In a week.”

With the force of a few words, my entire world was smashed, and I was furious.

“I don’t want to go to India!” I shouted before leaping off the stool and stalking up the stairs and into my bedroom. Glancing around, my eyes fixed upon a small green plant in a clay pot resting on the windowsill. I stormed over to the plant and seized it in my hands.

Back in April, everyone in my class had been given a plant to care for. Within a month most of the plants had shriveled up. By the end of the school year only mine continued to flourish. The day before I had carried home the clay pot and Amma had praised the glossy green leaves. Just that morning I had watered it faithfully.

With one motion I sent it crashing to the ground. Streaks of dirt tumbled out of the pot. I lifted my bare foot and stomped over the leaves, flattening them and grinding the mess deeper into the carpet, savoring the feel of the crumbling soil under the arch of my foot. Then I burst into tears and flung myself facedown on the bed. Amma came in later that day and cleaned up, without saying a word to me.

I
had never left the country before and knew little about Indian culture. Amma sometimes told me stories about her village in Kerala—Malanad, it was called—of how they could pluck ripe mangoes and eat them straight from the tree, and of frogs so plump that when they leaped out of the river they looked like green bowling balls. She read me a Hindu epic called the
Ramayana
at bedtime, and once a year on Vishu, the Kerala New Year, she woke me up at dawn, before even Aba had risen, with the cool touch of her fingers over my eyes. She would lead me, blinded, down the stairs and into the living room. When she removed her hands the first thing I saw was a fantastically decorated table draped in a gold brocade shawl. A framed picture of the goddess Saraswati (“the Goddess of Knowledge,” she told me, “so you do well in your studies”) sat propped at the center, surrounded by a flickering lamp, roses, carnations, oranges, apples, bananas, and gold coins.

Aba had been raised as a Sikh but now was an atheist who disapproved of any organized religion. Amma kept a windowless prayer room in our house—a closet, actually—at the end of our upstairs hall. Every morning she
went in carrying a lamp, a bottle of oil, and a wick, and soon I would see a strip of light shining from the crack below the door. About ten minutes later the light would go off and Amma would emerge with a secretive smile on her face. I never joined her, and she never asked me to because she knew Aba wouldn’t like it.

The room confused and scared me, but there was also something alluring about it. Every now and then I crept in on my own and would be greeted by the sharp musk of incense along with dozens of sets of staring eyes. The walls were hung with pictures of different gods and goddesses—a big-bellied half man/half elephant, a fierceeyed woman with many arms, a blue man with a snake wrapped around his neck. The fear would return and I would run out, closing the door behind me. Later they would pay me visits in my dreams—the woman would dance at the edge of my bed, waving her arms around with a taunting smile, or the blue man would press his face against the window and his snake’s tongue would dart in and out, in and out. I always woke up in a sweat.

Neither Aba nor Amma was very forthcoming about the lives they had left behind in India. I knew that Aba was an only child who came from a wealthy Punjabi family in Delhi and that his parents had died suddenly in a car crash when he was a college student. Fueled by sorrow and ambition, he chopped off his hair, folded away his turban, cut ties with his extended family, and moved to the United States, armed only with his inheritance, to pursue his medical studies. Eventually the Plainfield Clinic heard of his research and offered to shower it with money. He accepted, tempted by the idea of a simple existence in a small town that would never remind him of what he left behind.