Read Online Tell It to the Trees by Anita Rau Badami - Free Book Online
Authors: Anita Rau Badami
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mine to find him bright blue rope to tie his suitcases, they had exploded en route, leaving a trail of clothes and other belongings at various airports. Finally, only six of ten pairs of VIP P-front navy blue underpants, which the young man’s mother had packed into the case, six (out of sixteen) vests (with sleeves because the young man sweated a lot and the arms of his shirts suffered as aresult), one of several tins of mango-lime-ginger pickles especially made for him by his grandmother, and a single shoe had arrived at the end of his journey from the east to the west of the world. His other shoe, a winter jacket bought at great expense from a smuggler who operated out of a radio repair shop on Second Beach Road, and numerous books which he might have needed were all lost when the bulging suitcase gave way.
Madhu Kaki narrated these details with such certainty that I believed her. Besides, she and other members of our extended network of friends and relatives in Triplicane told and retold the story of the boy’s baggage so many times that even if it was not entirely accurate, the endless reiteration gave it the shine of truth.
I had known Vikram for less than a month before our marriage and wasn’t sure whether it had all been a dream—the good-looking man who had been brought home by my Appa one fine morning and who had asked for my hand in marriage in a week. Such romance was unheard of in our mundane lives, such passion was the stuff of cinemas. Now I know that neither romance nor passion had played a role in Vikram’s decision. He chose me because I am good-natured, easygoing, the perfect substitute for a wild dead wife, a patient nursemaid for his aged mother, a caring mother for his child. He gauged me correctly. I am the staying type, the sort who can be made to fit a mould, the sort who will always do what is expected of her. But I did not realize, until I came here, how afraid and docile I could become, how easy to push around.
Our neighbourhood could not stop talking about our marriage for the entire six months that I remained in Madras after my wedding. The gossips and the matchmakers, whose noses had been put out of joint by this alliance which they had not arranged, went around telling everybody how cunning my father was. “Pretends not to know anything about anything,” they whispered about my unworldly Appa, who had never harboured a single devious thought in his entire life. “Who would have believed? He must have planned it all in advance. Caught a fine cockerel for his little chickadee! And a foreign-returned one at that!”
Vikram was a distant relative of our front-door neighbour Ganesh Maamu. He was visiting India for the first time in his life and had somehow missed the party of relatives that had gone to the airport to receive him. Appa—on his usual Saturday morning rounds of the temple, the vegetable vendor, his friends at the Dramatic Society of Triplicane, the lending library—had found Vikram wandering around the crowded market near the temple, sticking out like a palm tree in a mango grove, stopping occasionally to check a map of Madras that he held. Vikram’s taxi hadn’t managed to locate Ganesh Maamu’s house and had dropped him off at the temple instead.
In his khaki trousers and T-shirt, he had that gloss of Abroad on him, down to his clean, baby-pink sandal-clad feet that looked like they had been hidden from the sun for years, and his way of looking you straight in the eyewhich some of the elders in our area mistook for a lack of respect. Appa knew who he was, of course. Everyone in our locality, on all the four streets forming a square around the temple, had been made aware of his visit, his exact and convoluted relationship to Ganesh Maamu, why he had never visited India before (these things happen what-to-do), what his father had done for a living (something to do with wood but dead for many years), what Vikram did (something brilliant, no doubt).
Faces lined windows
Madhu Kaki narrated these details with such certainty that I believed her. Besides, she and other members of our extended network of friends and relatives in Triplicane told and retold the story of the boy’s baggage so many times that even if it was not entirely accurate, the endless reiteration gave it the shine of truth.
I had known Vikram for less than a month before our marriage and wasn’t sure whether it had all been a dream—the good-looking man who had been brought home by my Appa one fine morning and who had asked for my hand in marriage in a week. Such romance was unheard of in our mundane lives, such passion was the stuff of cinemas. Now I know that neither romance nor passion had played a role in Vikram’s decision. He chose me because I am good-natured, easygoing, the perfect substitute for a wild dead wife, a patient nursemaid for his aged mother, a caring mother for his child. He gauged me correctly. I am the staying type, the sort who can be made to fit a mould, the sort who will always do what is expected of her. But I did not realize, until I came here, how afraid and docile I could become, how easy to push around.
Our neighbourhood could not stop talking about our marriage for the entire six months that I remained in Madras after my wedding. The gossips and the matchmakers, whose noses had been put out of joint by this alliance which they had not arranged, went around telling everybody how cunning my father was. “Pretends not to know anything about anything,” they whispered about my unworldly Appa, who had never harboured a single devious thought in his entire life. “Who would have believed? He must have planned it all in advance. Caught a fine cockerel for his little chickadee! And a foreign-returned one at that!”
Vikram was a distant relative of our front-door neighbour Ganesh Maamu. He was visiting India for the first time in his life and had somehow missed the party of relatives that had gone to the airport to receive him. Appa—on his usual Saturday morning rounds of the temple, the vegetable vendor, his friends at the Dramatic Society of Triplicane, the lending library—had found Vikram wandering around the crowded market near the temple, sticking out like a palm tree in a mango grove, stopping occasionally to check a map of Madras that he held. Vikram’s taxi hadn’t managed to locate Ganesh Maamu’s house and had dropped him off at the temple instead.
In his khaki trousers and T-shirt, he had that gloss of Abroad on him, down to his clean, baby-pink sandal-clad feet that looked like they had been hidden from the sun for years, and his way of looking you straight in the eyewhich some of the elders in our area mistook for a lack of respect. Appa knew who he was, of course. Everyone in our locality, on all the four streets forming a square around the temple, had been made aware of his visit, his exact and convoluted relationship to Ganesh Maamu, why he had never visited India before (these things happen what-to-do), what his father had done for a living (something to do with wood but dead for many years), what Vikram did (something brilliant, no doubt).
Faces lined windows
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