The Girl in the Garden (4 page)

Whenever I asked him about India he told me stories about its history—about Gandhi and the struggle for independence, about the old Mughal emperors, famous Indian mathematicians, and the Indus Valley Civilization. If I ever asked him about his own life there, he would brush me off: “There’s no point in dwelling on that, Rakhee. People who live in the past never get ahead, just remember that. We’re here now and we’re Americans.”

Amma grew up in Malanad, a rural village in Kerala, a sliver of a state at the southernmost tip of India. She came to Plainfield when she was only eighteen to live with her cousin Veena, who had gotten married and left the village a few years before. She attended classes at Plainfield Community College during the day and helped Veena Aunty around the house at night. Amma told me she left Kerala because she needed a change of scene and because Veena Aunty was lonely. I did not question this explanation at the time, but it should have struck me as odd. Veena Aunty was a vibrant, sociable woman who blended into the Plainfield community almost seamlessly, heading committees, power walking through the Hill with the other housewives in the mornings, swapping recipes, and grilling on the deck in the summers. But even after thirteen years in Plainfield, Veena Aunty was Amma’s only friend.

Veena Aunty’s husband, Chandran, worked with Aba at the Clinic. Aba was a bachelor at the time, living in cramped hospital quarters, eating frozen dinners, and working so hard he rarely went out and socialized. Because he was the only other Indian in Plainfield, Veena Aunty and her husband felt a kinship and began inviting him over for weekly dinners. This was how Aba met Amma and eventually married her.

Sometimes I wonder why he did it. She was a young, uneducated country girl with whom he shared nothing, except a common desire to avoid the past. Aba was a kind man, but he had a distant, professional demeanor, even with me, and he disliked showy displays of emotion. When I wanted something, I had to appeal to his logic; my tears only hardened his heart. But with Amma, he was different. She had a funny effect on him.

When we all sat together in the family room, he would look up suddenly from the newspaper, take her hand in his and stroke it, delicately, as if he were holding a dying bird. If she got up and walked away, he would watch her go with an expression of deep longing in his eyes. There was something otherworldly about Amma that we both sensed; it was as if she was not a flesh-and-blood woman but a dream conjured into existence by Aba’s and my love. Aba gave her whatever she asked for, which was never anything much. Not long after she came home from the hospital following her long absence, I heard him ask:

“Chitra, tell me what I can give you that will make you happy.”

Amma told him what she wanted more than anything else was a garden.

The next day Aba hired men to tear up the fortress of bushes at the front of our house to make room for a flower bed and a vegetable patch. That weekend, armed with a shovel, he lovingly turned up the earth himself.

Even when they were fighting, I saw the love burning behind his sad gaze.

I know they must have been happy once. Old photographs reveal to me two young souls with faces radiating love and hope: A windy beach shot of a rakish Aba with his arm wrapped around a beaming Amma’s shoulder.
Amma pregnant and red-cheeked, bundled in a winter coat, laughing in the snow. Aba holding me as a newborn at the hospital, awkward but full of proud joy. I wish I could remember it.

When I thought about India I felt a sense of dread. I had always dreamed of traveling, of leaving behind plodding Plainfield for some distant land. Aba kept a set of picturesque travel books, a gift from a grateful patient, in a neat row on one of the shelves in his study. Sometimes I went in when he wasn’t around and paged through them, imagining myself into the colorful photographs, drifting down the Amazon or on a safari in the Tanzanian jungle. It was what made school endurable, those pictures and the dream of escape that was both sweet and punishing. Sweet because it meant the end of my suffering at school, and punishing because it would take me away from Aba and Amma.

Maybe it would be different if the three of us went together to the Taj Mahal or to a tiger-infested forest or even to the ocean, which I had never seen. But staying on a farm in a rural Indian village with Amma, far away from Aba, did not hold the same allure in my imagination as any of the places I yearned after in the travel books.

I had never been away from home for such a long time. I was used to whiling away the dry summer days exploring Pill Hill on my roller skates, letting Merlin pull me along on his leash. Or I would run through the woods to the ravine, where I always found interesting objects: decades-old soda cans, stubbed-out cigarettes, the
occasional woodland creature. I could perch there and watch the sun sink low beneath the cornfields, and then I would go home and sit on my bed surrounded by pillows, reading or drawing to my heart’s content without having to worry about homework or being teased or ignored by my classmates the next day.

Some afternoons I helped Amma in her garden, the garden which pleased her more than anything else Aba ever gave her. She spent many hours shoveling soil, planting seeds, and watering flowers. One summer her garden was featured in the Home section of the
Plainfield Chronicle
; Aba framed the article and hung it in his study (now it sits under a pile of sweaters in my dresser drawer). I loved gardening with Amma because that was when she seemed happiest, kneeling among the roses and the anemones, a wide-brimmed hat shading her face, humming a soft tune. I would kneel beside her, obediently pulling out weeds and watching worms wiggle through the soil. There was a lulling rhythm to our work that comforted me. It drew us closer together, gardening side by side, Amma and me. At the end of the day we would gather vegetables that were ripe and ready to be plucked, and carry them inside in a basket, where Amma would pour them out onto the kitchen counter and gaze at our mini harvest with triumphant eyes. The vision of us returning home after the long summer to a stubble of dead stalks and stems flitted through my mind.

We would return from India just in time for the leaves to crumble from the branches, leaving them bare and ready to be weighed down by icicles. Plainfield winters were brutal, and we rarely went outside. The cold stabbed through my skin to the bone. Even the snow was altered so that I couldn’t shape it into a round snowball; it just
hardened in my mittened fist, a cluster of sharp, blue-tinged diamonds.

In the winters, when the garden was frozen over, Amma went into hibernation. She wandered around the house, restless and fidgety, and more often than not with a lost expression on her face. But she always came to life at night when we read fairy tales together, my bedtime ritual. I treasured that sacred hour when witches, princesses, sprites, and all manner of magical beings whirled around my room, and Amma’s eyes glowed. Even when I got too old for those stories, I still begged her to read them, and she always obliged.

But when the letters started coming, she stopped reading to me.

“I’m too tired,” she would say at first when I asked, and by spring, “You’re too old for bedtime stories.”

So I began to pore over books by myself at night, but not the stories I had read with Amma; I couldn’t bring myself to touch those. Instead I went to the library and checked out new ones—
Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter, Heart of Darkness
—books that made the librarian give me a perplexed smile, books that I didn’t fully understand, books that frightened me and flooded my nights with dark visions, but that also gave me a secret, uncontainable thrill.

Over the next few days, Amma and Aba did not speak to each other at all. I was their emissary, still furious at Amma, but somehow unable to leave her side.

“Rakhee, go bring your father his dinner in the study,” Amma would say.

“Why can’t you take it yourself?”

“Do as I say,” she would snap.

The thought of leaving Aba behind for an entire summer and the prospect of a divorce were unbearable. Even under the same roof our family was fractured—how could it survive being separated by an ocean?

Aba spent most of his time at the lab, and when he came home, he would retreat to his study, where he would work all night. He stopped shaving, and his eyes sank deeper into their sockets. “Thanks,” he would say, his voice cracking, when I carried his dinner in on a tray. He would hold my chin for a moment and force a smile before waving me away, even though all I wanted was to stay in there with him forever.

School was over and I had nothing to do—my heart wasn’t in my usual activities. So I followed Amma around as she packed and cooked. She prepared curry after curry, then sealed them in Tupperware containers, labeled them with a heavy black marker, and slid them into the freezer. “For Aba,” she informed me briskly. I did not understand why Amma cared enough to cook for Aba but not to talk to him.

One day as I was walking down the upstairs hall, I heard a noise in the bathroom. The door was ajar, so I peeked in and saw Amma standing over the toilet holding a clear orange bottle—her pills. She was turning it around and around in her hands, stroking the label with her fingers, a thoughtful expression on her face. She had taken off her clothes, which lay in a heap on the floor, and was wearing only a pale slip that revealed the pink crescentshaped scar that ran across the length of her upper arm.

That scar was a reminder of how Veena Aunty had once saved her life, Amma had told me the first time I ran
my fingers up and down across its strange silkiness. I was very young then, but somehow I can still hear her voice telling the story:

“We always used to go running recklessly around the jungle in the village together, Veena Aunty and I. One day, we were sitting in the forest, when a snake came and bit me. We were far away from home and I immediately felt my strength draining from my body. Veena Aunty carried me on her back all the way to the hospital so my father could give me medicine. If it weren’t for her quick thinking, I would have died and you would never have been born.”

The story was fantastic and frightening, and I believed every word. A few days after she told it to me she went away to the hospital.

Amma, unaware of my presence, shook the bottle like a rattle, and in one rapid motion, opened the lid and dumped the pills into the toilet. They fell in a white cascade. Amma laughed and hugged herself.

On Saturday morning, the day before we left, Aba woke me up early and told me we were going to spend the day together, just the two of us.

I dressed hastily. When I got downstairs Aba was pacing around the kitchen table, the way he did when he got excited. Amma was standing at the counter, ignoring him.

“Rakhee, I’m going to take you to my lab today. How would you like that?”

I grinned, pleased that Aba deemed me important enough to take to his lab.

Amma glanced up at us. “Do you think that’s a good idea, Vikram? She’s too young.”

Aba looked back at Amma. “It’s never too early to experience the thrill of digging for the truth and finding it.”

When we arrived at the lab, Aba outfitted me in a loose white coat and a pair of oversized goggles. He had to tighten the strap so they wouldn’t fall off my face. A blackbarred cage was on the counter, and inside it sat a white mouse. Although I was not sure what exactly was about to happen at the time, I felt chilled by the sight.

“Rakhee, we’re going to dissect this mouse,” Aba announced in a matter-of-fact tone. “You can see the inner workings of the body. I still remember the first time I saw real-life organs—the heart, the stomach, the lungs—right before my very eyes. It was truly remarkable.”