The Girl in the Garden (7 page)

“Good morning.” It was my cousin Krishna. Her short hair was wet and neatly combed behind her ears, and she was wearing the same faded party dress from the previous night. She smelled of soap and Nivea cream. Behind her I could see Meenu, also dressed, her well-oiled hair twisted into two thick braids. They were both grinning broadly. I had the feeling they had been standing there waiting for a long time. I was not used to this lack of privacy—even Amma always knocked before she came into my room back home.

“Come,” said Krishna, taking my hand, and yanking me out of bed and toward the open door.

“Wait,” I said, slipping on my sandals and trying to smooth my hair. Krishna pulled me into the dining room where I paused in the doorway. Amma, Sadhana Aunty, Nalini Aunty, Gitanjali, and Muthashi were all seated around the table already, sipping tea and eating miniature
golden bananas from a silver dish. Balu was crawling on the floor batting a half-deflated red balloon around like a kitten. They all looked fresh and fully dressed, as if they had been awake for hours.

“Oh, you’re up!” said Amma, who was wearing a cheerful pink sari. “Come sit, have breakfast.” Her accent sounded more Indian than usual. It surprised me how quickly Amma seemed to have settled in.

“Oh, see how tall she has grown,” said Muthashi in a flat voice, repeating her sentiment of the day before and gazing at me with pride.

Krishna smothered a giggle with both hands, and Gitanjali shot her a disapproving glance.

I felt suddenly angry at Amma. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I hissed into one ear.

“I wanted to let you sleep—here, try one of these,” Amma handed me one of the little bananas.

“Janaki!” called Sadhana Aunty, and a small, harriedlooking woman with a gold stud in her nose and droopy earlobes came running out. “Breakfast for Rakhee, please.”

“Ah,” said the woman, shaking her head from side to side, and hurrying back into the kitchen.

The idea of having servants made me uncomfortable, but Amma told me that all the good families were expected to employ servants and that they needed us just as much as we needed them; this was the way the society here worked.

Janaki bustled into the room carrying a round metal plate and a glass of milk, the sight of which alerted me to the hungry groan of my stomach. I ate two soft white rice cakes called idlis, with a minty green chutney. The milk was thick and soupy, and left a sour film on my tongue.

“Chitra Chechi, she looks just like your husband,” said
Nalini Aunty, watching me eat, “She really has that Sardarji look, no?”

I didn’t know what the word
Sardarji
meant, but I knew that it had something to do with Aba, and I didn’t like the sound of it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Amma, glancing down at her hands.

“Well, she must have gotten her bad eyes from him at least. Nobody in the Varma family has ever needed specs before old age.” Nalini Aunty peeled a banana and chewed it with her mouth open. I could see a lump of pale, doughy flesh creased with stretch marks jutting out from the space between her blouse and the waist of her sari.

“I’m going to go heat some water for Rakhee’s bath,” said Amma, pushing her chair back and leaving the room.

It annoyed me that Amma would just walk away like that without defending me.

I finished eating and went into the bathroom, where Amma was standing over a plastic bucket with her skirt hitched up around her calves.

“Where’s the shower?” I asked.

“There isn’t one,” said Amma. “You must use this bucket and a cup to bathe.”

Amma offered to stay and help me, but I rejected this idea, and found myself alone in the bathroom once again, struggling with the bucket and the cup, and keeping my petrified eyes upon a palm-sized spider basking on the wall near the window.

When I finally emerged, unsure of how clean I actually was, Krishna came up to me and said: “Would you like to play now?”

“Sure.”

Both my cousins’ English was shaky, as was my Malayalam, so we developed a system early on in our acquaintance where they spoke to me in Malayalam and I replied in English.

The sun was already burning the sand in the yard outside, so we sat under the shade of the verandah, on the swinging bench that hung by a rusty chain from the ceiling. I could hear the impatient grunts of cows and goats mixed with the rustle of wild creatures in the tangled greenery that boiled over the dilapidated stone wall encircling the house. The air seemed thicker here, more palpable somehow, swirling in and out of the drum of my ear like the ocean churning inside a shell.

I brought out my colored pencils and a sheaf of paper. I decided to draw Hari, the workman, who was pulling a cow by a frayed rope out of its pen. Amma told me that Hari had been with the family since he was a little boy; she said his mind was “not all there,” so he had never gone far in school. Instead, he had devoted himself to working for my grandfather. His black chest was slick with sweat, and his muscles strained and flexed against the stubborn cow. Krishna peeked over my shoulder.

“That is very good,” she said, and I beamed.

Amma came out to check on us, carrying two glasses of cold lime juice. She set the glasses down on a side table and handed Krishna a bottle of red nail polish. “Just a little something from America. Have fun, girls, I’m going in for a nap,” she said. Amma had spent a harried day at the mall just before our trip and had packed an entire suitcase full of gifts, ranging from expensive electronics to scented lotions to candy, which she parceled out to various members of the household.

We put down our drawings and began painting each other’s nails.

“Everybody is always just sleeping around here. It’s so boring. I’m very happy you are here,” Krishna told me.

“What about your sisters, and—your father?”

“My father is dead. He died when I was just a baby. And my sisters are not very good company. Meenu Chechi just bosses me around all the time, and Gitanjali Chechi thinks she’s too old to play with me.”

“Chechi?” I asked.

“Oh, that is the word for older sister,” responded Krishna. “Anyway, Vijay Uncle talks to me from time to time.”

“Doesn’t he work at the hospital?”

“He’s supposed to but he never does. He just sits around and chews paan all day and daydreams. Nalini Aunty calls him lazy. So now Dev practically runs the hospital.”

“Who’s Dev?”

Krishna stuck out her bottom lip, “He is just a man from the village. Do not tell anybody, but I don’t like him.”

I was curious, but something about the way she knitted her brow at the mention of his name prevented me from pursuing the subject of Dev right then.

Meenu sauntered out onto the verandah and interrupted our conversation, her face stretched into a languid yawn.

“What are the two of you doing?” she asked, nudging Krishna to make room on the swing.

“Look at what Rakhee drew, it is very good, isn’t it?” said Krishna, handing Meenu my drawing. I liked the lilting way in which she pronounced my name, effortlessly rolling the r, emphasizing the h. Not like the kids at school, who called me “Rocky.”

Meenu glanced at the picture and sniffed: “It’s all right, I suppose. For a little girl. Come, let’s do something—you want to walk around and see the place?”

I nodded. We got up off the swing and skipped down the steps.

“First, the cows,” said Meenu, leading us across the lawn toward a wide, wooden pen. Hibiscus curled in a neon pink tangle above the roof, and the odor of fresh dung hung in the air. “This is where we get our milk from every day,” she said, motioning to the stoic brown and white spotted creatures.

Beside the cows were a mother goat and her kid, both kept together in a small cage made of splintered wooden planks. The mother goat fixed her wide-set, disoriented eyes upon me and gave a loud bleat, which made me leap. Krishna and Meenu laughed hysterically.

Around the back of the house steam billowed out from the kitchen and women crouched over earthen vessels, peeling vegetables with large, curving blades and chatting amongst themselves, their voices blending with the birdcalls issuing from the trees. A few chickens clucked and paced back and forth across the yard, bobbing their heads. The women grew silent as we approached. One of their group was sitting apart from the others, muttering to herself and shaking her head back and forth. The deep lines in her face hinted at a hard life spent under the scorching sun, but her hair was snow white and surprisingly luxuriant. Her eyes were milky and unfocused.

“Who’s that?” I asked, nodding in the woman’s direction.

“Oh, that’s Hema—she’s the servant Hari’s sister. She works for our neighbors, but sometimes she hangs about here too. She’s—” Meenu whirled her finger around the
side of her head and crossed her eyes. “She’s been there for a long time, though, so they keep her around even though she’s useless. I think she used to work at Ashoka, but then our grandfather loaned her to the neighbors because they needed someone, and she just kind of stayed after that. She likes to come over here a lot, though.”

“What does she keep saying?”

“Nobody knows. All I know is that she’s always muttering about something or other. Anyway, who cares about crazy old Hema?”

Meenu sauntered off toward a nearby tree brimming with round green fruit. She plucked one off a low-hanging branch. “These are the best guavas in Kerala,” she said, rubbing the dusty skin against her skirt.

“Let’s go in and ask someone to cut it for us,” said Krishna.

“Wait, what’s back there, beyond that stone wall?” I asked, squinting out into the trees behind the house, the same trees I could see from my bedroom window.

“Oh, we never go into the forest,” said Krishna, shivering.

“Our mother forbids us to go beyond the stone barrier. She says a Rakshasi lives there, and that she’ll eat us if we invade her territory,” Meenu said.

“A Rakshasi?” The word sounded familiar—I remembered hearing it in the
Ramayana
, the Hindu epic that Amma used to read to me at bedtime.

“A hideous she-demon who feeds off the flesh of children,” said Meenu, widening her eyes for dramatic effect. I wanted to laugh, but I could see that she was genuinely scared. “Only adults are allowed to go back there. Our mother brings the Rakshasi offerings so that she doesn’t come out of the forest and eat us in our sleep.”

I laughed. “Come on, there’s no such thing!” How
could they really believe a flesh-eating she-demon lived in the forest behind their house?

Meenu and Krishna shrugged.

“Don’t you even want to go and find out what’s really there?” I continued, incredulous.

They both shook their heads emphatically. “If the Rakshasi doesn’t kill us, then our mother certainly will. Come, let’s go play cricket—we’ll teach you,” said Meenu, tucking the fruit into her dress pockets and tossing her plump braids.

I didn’t believe them. I couldn’t. I was too old to believe in witches and monsters. But still, when I looked over my shoulder as we went back toward the front of the house, I remembered the light I had seen through the trees the night before, and felt a chill, like a strand of cold silk, rustle up and down my spine.

Dev was not a tall man; in fact, he was slight of stature. But somehow when he entered the room he seemed to control, to possess, everything inside—the furniture, the walls, the inhabitants. He came to the house for dinner that night, and when I stumbled in with Krishna and Meenu, our hands and feet dirty from playing cricket in the front yard, I instantly knew it was the man whom Krishna disliked.

“Ah Ch-Ch-Ch-Chitra, so this is your daughter. H-hh-how are you, molay?” He spoke with a stutter and his voice, though gentle, still made all the fine hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand at attention.

I didn’t answer, just frowned up into his face, and he chuckled: “She’s a g-g-g-grumpy girl, eh?” He came
around the table toward me, and I felt Krishna and Meenu shrink away, leaving me standing alone, framed by the doorway. Bending down, he patted my head with his hand. A sparse mustache prickled his upper lip, and his plentiful hair, parted on one side, looked wet, even though I knew it was dry.

“Rakhee, say hello to Dev Uncle,” Vijay Uncle said. I looked at Amma, but her eyes were cast downward, and she was knotting her fingers together. I turned to my cousins, but they, too, had their heads bowed.