Read Online Tell It to the Trees by Anita Rau Badami - Free Book Online Page A

at the hour when the Foreign Boy, as he had come to be known, was to be borne home from the airport by Ganesh Maamu and his relatives, mothers busy in their kitchens had posted their young children at their front doors and shouted every now and again, “Have they come?” and the street urchins were all on alert to spread the word as soon as they descended from the two cars that Ganesh Maamu had borrowed from somewhere. The arrival of a long-lost relative, and an eligible man at that, was a matter of great ceremony, and so everybody in Ganesh Maamu’s house had gone to the airport.
    Besides, it was an opportunity to gawk at the planes as they took off and landed. We were all avid planespotters on our street. We all yearned to go away somewhere far from home, yet few had dared to leave the familiar sanctuary of our streets. So plane watching was a substitute for travel. We were fascinated by those winged creatures that roared overhead late at night and early in the morning. “Plane! Plane! Come and see, quickly!” thelucky spotter would yell, and everyone would rush out onto their verandas and balconies hoping to catch sight of that magical creation that could take you across the world. And sometimes, soon after the monsoons when the weather was cool, families got together and went on picnics to a spot near the airport. Mothers and aunts and older sisters would unpack tins and paper packets full of puris and curd-rice and lemon-rice, and we would all lie on our backs or lean back on our elbows, tilt our heads backwards until we developed cricks in our necks, and watch the mid-morning planes taking off, vapour trails streaming out across the light blue sky like the tails of exotic birds. These were the small pleasures of our lives. So the arrival of the nephew many times removed, who was coming from halfway across the world in one of those silver machines, was a moment that belonged to us all courtesy of his family here on our street.
    It was surely Fate, evil thing, that led my Appa to Vikram as he stood there poring over his map, trying to figure out which of the maze of lanes he should plunge into. And Fate that had brought the man to our home. I wish now that Fate had left us all alone.
    I don’t remember what I was doing when he arrived, carefully stepping around the rangoli that the cleaning woman had drawn in the dust outside, stooping to avoid the fresh mango-leaf torana decorating the door lintel. He had stood there blinking as his eyes adjusted from the sharp sunshine outside to the cool darkness of our front room.
    I remember that he kept those eyes on me right through the visit, following my movements as I served lemon juice and freshly made chakkuli, his face intense and serious. I was aware of his gaze even after Ganesh Maamu and his fifteen family members came rushing in to retrieve him, somewhat put out that we had claimed him first.
    In the days that followed, Vikram came frequently to our house. On one of those occasions he smiled, a rare occurrence, and told me that I looked like a blossom in my pale orange cotton sari. Nobody had ever likened me to a blossom even though that is what my name means. Madhu Kaki never failed to remind me that I was nothing like the beauty my mother was. (My aunt was fond of attributing rare talents and amazing beauty to the dead.) I don’t blame her, she was merely doing her job, which was to keep me a modest young woman with no great ideas about myself or my appearance and no correspondingly high expectations of anything so that I would never be disappointed by what life or the future had to throw at me. One of the matchmakers had remarked that I was not bad to look at but she didn’t know how to describe me. There was nothing she could praise to high heavens—not my colour, or my eyes, or any other aspect of me. I could neither sing nor dance and I was a middling student with a degree in Home Economics. Nor did my father belong to a famous or wealthy family which might