The Girl in the Garden (8 page)

“Hello,” I mumbled, and went to wash my soiled hands.

Sadhana Aunty had let the servant women go early after they had finished preparing an elaborate meal. That night she, Amma, Nalini Aunty, and Gitanjali served the food. I noticed that Sadhana Aunty was extremely attentive to Dev, always giving him the largest portions before everyone else. He even sat at the head of the table, although Vijay Uncle was technically the head of the household. I watched Dev eat, shoveling the food into his mouth, then running his flat palm across the leaf, and licking off the remaining curry. Dev reminded me of a raccoon that used to steal food from our backyard bird feeder, with his rummaging paws, his long, pink tongue darting in and out, and his face expressionless. He ordered the women around in a sleepy yet demanding voice: “M-m-m-more yogurt,” “M-m-more dal,” “Another pap-pap-pap-papa-d-dam,” he would say, and Sadhana Aunty would immediately fetch it for him, though her mouth was compressed into a lipless line. When he had eaten three helpings and polished off the banana leaf so that it gleamed, he folded it over and belched. I eyed him in shock and disgust, but no one else seemed to react.

We ate in two rounds; first the men, children, and Muthashi, while the women stood around supervising the distribution of food; then the women ate, while the men retired into the sitting room, closing the door behind them.

Tired out from the day’s activities, I slept well that night, and the next morning Krishna and Meenu showed me all around the village, from the marketplace, where we used our pocket money to buy chocolates from the sweets stall, to the river, which was swollen from the torrential monsoon rains. When we walked down the main road, people came out of their stores to stare at me, whispering amongst themselves, and grinning. “It’s because you’re from America,” said Meenu. “And because you are a Varma. We are the most important family in this village.” Normally this kind of attention would have made me selfconscious, but the presence of my cousins on my either side, who seemed to accept me without any question, gave me strength.

“What’s going on with Dev?” I asked them at one point. “Why does everyone treat him like a king?”

Krishna was silent, but Meenu screwed her face up into a ball of resentment.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I can’t stand him. And I hate the way the grown-ups are always fawning over him. It makes no sense, but if I ever say anything I get smacked.”

In the afternoon we sat on the verandah listening to the thrum of bees in the banana leaves. Muthashi rocked back and forth in her chair, watching us. She still had that vacant look that made me afraid to go near her. I felt ashamed because my cousins would dutifully hug and kiss her, and when they did, I would see a flash of joy in her eyes, but somehow I could not bring myself to do the
same. That look and the way she kept repeating her sentences filled me with dread.

Meenu came over to me. “Want me to show you something I learned from a girl at school?”

Taking my hands, she folded them together, lining up each of my fingers. Then she opened them up and examined my palms. “Do you see how these two lines connect? That means you are going to have a love marriage.”

Krishna squealed. “My turn! My turn!”

Meenu did the same thing to Krishna’s hands. “You’re going to have a love marriage, too!”

We all erupted into delighted, embarrassed laughter.

“Chechi, let me see your hands,” said Meenu, going over to Gitanjali, who was sitting on the rail with a book in her lap. But she wasn’t reading, she was just staring off into space.

Meenu looked at her older sister’s hands and pronounced solemnly, “Chechi, your lines don’t connect—you are going to have an arranged marriage.”

Krishna and Meenu danced around Gitanjali in a wild circle, giggling and pointing their fingers at her. Gitanjali rolled her eyes, swung her legs off the rail, and went into her room. I watched my laughing cousins and felt warm inside, as if for the first time I was part of something.

During that first week I loved Amma’s village. I wanted to stay in Malanad forever. I loved having friends to play and explore with, and I was surprised to realize I did not want summer to end. But I knew that I could never stay there forever. I knew it when I lay in my narrow bed at night under my grandfather’s stern gaze and ached for home. I missed my cozy bed, hot showers, movies, ice cream, Merlin with his floppy ears. But most of all, I missed Aba. Even when I barely saw him at home, when
he spent hours and hours at the lab or in his study, just knowing he was nearby gave me a feeling of warmth and security. In India he was so far away and it felt as if a piece of myself was missing. The longer we remained apart, the more broken our family would become.

I wanted to hear his voice, to know that he was all right. I remembered Amma had told me that Minnesota was about twelve hours behind India. That meant it was a Sunday morning, so Aba would surely be at home, and maybe I could call him. It wasn’t an emergency, but surely missing him was a good enough excuse. I took from the bedside table the little keychain flashlight Amma had given me so that I could find my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I switched it on, crept barefoot into the hallway, and knocked on Amma’s door. There was no answer.

“Amma,” I said in a loud whisper.

Still no answer.

I opened the door and went inside, but Amma was not there. Her bed was still made up.

I went back into my own room, climbed into bed, turned off the flashlight, and stared up at the ceiling. Where could she be? I knew no one was still awake, since all the lights in the house were turned off. A mosquito whined in my ear; I slapped at it and settled back into the silence.

That’s when I heard it—the snap of a twig under soft footsteps, and the sound of a whisper. I sat up in bed and peeked out the window, my heart drumming against my chest. I saw two figures moving across the yard and climbing over the stone wall behind the house. I just made out the blue and pink saris of Sadhana Aunty and Amma before the shapes receded and disappeared into the forest.

I
t was late afternoon and Amma was lying in bed with the curtains drawn.

“Please, I can’t deal with this right now,” she said to me. “My head is splitting.”

“But Amma, why can’t you tell me what’s back there?” I pleaded. “Meenu and Krishna say a Rakshasi lives there, and that she eats children for breakfast.”

“Listen to me.” Amma heaved herself up with a sigh and her hair fell over one side of her face, shielding it. “It’s nothing that you need to worry about, all right? This isn’t like back home. It’s dangerous to wander too far. Please, just leave it be—this is not the time or place to let curiosity get the better of you. If you love me, promise you’ll obey me and stay out of it.”

“Fine.”

“Promise me, Rakhee.” She cupped my shoulders with her hands and gave me a slight shake. “This is very important to me. If you love me.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Okay, I’m trusting you. Now you need to trust me.” Amma gave me a firm look before she lay down again and let her head loll back onto the pillow. “Close the door behind you, please.”

I wandered out onto the verandah, bored. Meenu and Krishna were having their weekly music lesson. I could hear their voices—Krishna’s high-pitched and a bit sharp, and Meenu’s surprisingly melodious—rising up the scale in time with the jarring rhythm of the harmonium.
Sa-rega-ma-pa-tha-nee-saaa
, I heard them sing, up and down, up and down. I stretched my body out on the swing, rubbing my hand over the dull throb low down in my belly. The ache had followed me around since breakfast. It must be all the new foods I was eating, I thought.

I could not get my mind off Amma’s nocturnal journey. Was there really something living in the forest behind the house, and if so, was Amma helping Sadhana Aunty bring it offerings?

I was never superstitious; Aba always scoffed at any explanation that eluded logic. Once I saved up my allowance and bought a Chinese yin-yang necklace from a trinket store at the mall—all the girls at school were wearing them, and I did not want to be left out. When I came home Amma ordered me to take it off and throw it away. “Where I come from, that symbol is bad luck,” she said. Aba intervened when he returned from work and found me sulking. He told Amma she was being silly, that it was only a harmless trinket; he dug it out of the trash for me and refastened it around my neck. The next day I fell on the driveway and skinned my knee. The day after that, Amma was driving to the grocery store when she skidded on the ice in the middle of a busy intersection, and the car spun around and around like a compass needle until it finally smacked into a telephone pole, leaving a dime-sized bump on her forehead. “It’s that necklace,” she said later that night, sitting in bed propped up by pillows. “No, Chitra.
Sometimes people just have bad days. It’s part of life,” said Aba, as he stroked her forehead with a wet cloth.

“Penny for your thoughts.” Vijay Uncle had appeared, smiling, from inside the house and sat down across from me. I jumped up and smoothed my dress over my knees.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said, “Actually, I was thinking about trying to call my father.”

“I think we can arrange that later,” said Vijay Uncle. “There is a phone in the office at the hospital.”

“You mean you don’t have a phone here?”

“No, Rakhee, this is Malanad, not America,” Vijay Uncle chuckled. “So, you are a very talented artist, I see. Krishna showed me the picture you drew of Hari the other day. It’s very good, very lifelike—you must have inherited your artistic talent from me. You know, I used to be something of an artist. I once aspired to study art in Paris.” He pronounced it “Par
ee
,” in the French way. “I haven’t painted in years, though—not since my father died. I had responsibilities here. I couldn’t just leave.”

As if on cue, Balu wobbled out on two very chubby, unstable legs and fell over, landing with a soft thud on his little hands and knees. He looked from Vijay Uncle to me, his eyes wide with surprise, and began to cry—loud, tearless wails. Nalini Aunty came running out after him, huffing and puffing, mopping up the sweat from her red forehead with the edge of her sari.

“Oh, this child! I have to watch him every second!” she said, and scooped him up in her arms. “Vijay, why are you out here just sitting, doing nothing? Why don’t you go
down to the hospital and do some work like other husbands?”

Vijay Uncle let out a sigh and looked at me. His whole body seemed to have deflated with that one sigh. “Rakhee, would you like to come with me and see the hospital? It is a very important part of our family.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Nalini Aunty, wiping her free hand on her sari, “I will go along with you both. Valsala has just given birth to her first child and I have been meaning to pay her a visit.” Vijay Uncle stood up and looked at me.

“Shall we go, then?”

I hated being alone with unfamiliar adults—it made me nervous—but I couldn’t think of a way to get out of it, so I found myself following my aunt and uncle down the front steps and across the road.

The hospital was a long, rectangular building, similar in design to Ashoka but coated in a peeling pale blue paint. A dirty white cat lurked in the front yard distracting Balu, who ran toward it in glee. Nalini Aunty waved us in with one hand while simultaneously chasing after him. I followed Vijay Uncle past a long line of patients and he cast a guilty glance in their direction. Dev was seated at a desk in the interior office examining a young man’s tongue.

“Ah, hello, Vijay,” he said, standing up when he saw us. “G-g-great of you to come by—and you brought a little f-f-f-friend along.” He chucked me under the chin with a curved finger. I felt his nail scrape against the tender skin.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls of the office, all crammed with small glass jars containing various liquids, creams, and powders in striking colors—magenta and turmeric orange—just how I imagined the lair of an
old-fashioned apothecary might look. I knew then that this was not an ordinary hospital. It was nothing like the Plainfield Clinic.

“I wanted to give Rakhee a tour,” said Vijay Uncle.

“Of course, of course, p-p-please, go ah-h-h-head.”

I wondered why Vijay Uncle needed to ask Dev for permission, even though the hospital belonged to our family, not his, but before I could say anything Vijay Uncle steered me out of the office and into a hallway. A door, the only one in the entire hallway, caught my eye. It stood slightly ajar. Vijay Uncle had strolled ahead, so I paused and pushed it open. The room was as small as a closet, with weak light from the narrow window revealing a disheveled single bed, a scuffed wardrobe, and a floor caked with dust. It reeked of sweat.