The Girl in the Garden (25 page)

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.”

“But is it safe to keep her around here?” Amma’s hand was at the base of her throat.

“She is too old and sick to be turned away. I will keep an eye on her. She will do no more harm to this family.”

I left the room to find Krishna so I could tell her about what had just happened, and found her on the verandah steps, holding a striped cat in her lap, and watching something.

I sat down beside her and followed her eyes to Hari, who was holding an axe and standing in front of a mango tree near the well in the corner of the yard. The tree had a giant gash in the side of its trunk and was beginning to droop. Hari was shirtless, and his thin, dark chest was glazed with sweat. He twisted his palms around the handle of the axe, pulled back and struck at the gash with all his might. The trunk swayed and dipped.

“What’s Hari chopping down that tree for?” I asked.

“They’re going to use it to make a pyre for Muthashi—you know, for the cremation,” Krishna said, stroking the cat’s bristled fur. I had never seen Krishna, or anyone for that matter, holding that cat. It stalked around the yard, the fur along its spine raised in a perpetual mohawk of disturbance, its eyes wide, yellow, and unblinking. Occasionally it would turn its head to look at you and hiss. As far as I had known, it was feral. The servants fed it out of pity and the family tolerated its lurking presence, but
nobody ever touched it. Now here it was, snuggled in the crook of Krishna’s arm, its ears flattened against its head, meek as a gurgling baby.

“I pluck mangos from that tree every spring. They are so delicious,” said Krishna. She nuzzled the cat against her cheek and it purred lethargically.

“Chee, get rid of that thing and wash your hands.” Nalini Aunty was standing behind us. “You both must come with me. We are about to start.”

Villagers began to arrive, moving up the stairs, across the lawn, and into the house. Eventually a single-file line of mourners snaked from the sitting room all the way to the lawn, spilling down the steps and onto the road. Krishna knelt in the doorway and I crouched above her. Amma, Sadhana Aunty, and Vijay Uncle were all standing near Muthashi’s body and watching as one by one mourners stepped forward, each placing a magenta and gold cloth over Muthashi’s head until a massive heap had accumulated, obscuring her face.

A miracle seemed to have occurred in the few hours since I had last been outside. Someone had strewn multihued petals—orange, white, red, pink—all along the ground from the edge of the verandah to the bottom of the steps of Ashoka, forming a pathway that was surrounded on either side by a border of lamps in full flare. Flames shivered and blazed, and the smell of smoke rose into the air, choking, intoxicating.

Women were not allowed to be present at the actual cremation site, so the last time I saw Muthashi she was being carried out of the house on a bamboo stretcher by
Vijay Uncle, Prem, Dev, and another man whom I did not recognize. I ran after them as far as I was allowed to go, across the lawn, through the wrought-iron gate, and down the steps, where I halted, slightly out of breath, watching as the men carried Muthashi through that path of flame and flowers as though she were a bride on a palanquin.

They brought her across the road and vanished into the grove of trees behind the hospital. Krishna had told me the land our family owned stretched far beyond the perimeter of the hospital, and that the cremation would take place about half a mile away from the house.

I stood at the bottom of the steps for a long time, even after the final scarlet streaks of sun had been erased by a shimmering blue twilight. In the distance I could see a thin plume of smoke curling through the treetops and into the sky like a sinewy black finger.

Veena Aunty came outside to join me. “Rakhee, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you still out here, why don’t you come inside? It’s been a long day,” Veena Aunty took my hand, but I resisted. I had been waiting to talk to her and now was the perfect opportunity. She was the one, out of all the grown-ups, who I could rely upon to tell me the truth.

“Veena Aunty, it’s been a weird summer,” I began.

“I’m sure it has been,” she said with a laugh that struck me as uncomfortable.

“I have so many questions—”

But Veena Aunty interrupted me with a sorrowful expression. “Hush, not now. We’ll talk about everything soon, I promise, but I just can’t do it today.” She wiped away a few tears that had begun to pool in her eyes. “You know, I loved your Muthashi like she was my own
mother. When I was a kid I was over here even more than I was at my own house. It’s different for my sister Valsala; she was too young, so she never really hung around with our group as much. It was always me, Sadhana, Chitra, Vijay, and Prem, and your grandmother treated us like she had given birth to us all, there was no difference.” Veena Aunty sighed and rubbed her chest as if she were in pain. “Now that she’s gone this place doesn’t feel the same. She was the heart of this family. Even in these last years when her mind was starting to go, she never stopped being the heart of this house.”