Tell It to the Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

doesn’t mind. She is just anxious to be my mother. She is glad, I think, she doesn’t have to fight with me for a space in our house like those fairy-tale stepmothers. She works hard to love me, she combs my hair like a proper mother even though I am perfectly capable of doing it myself now at thirteen, she fixes me breakfast and makes sandwiches for my lunch box, she folds my clothes and neatens my room. This has been very nice,especially since I don’t remember Mom ever doing anything like it and I love it. Then she gave birth to Hemant, a son for Papa, and I thought we would be happy as the sun in summer.
    But .
    Papa can’t forget. Mom was beautiful, Suman is not. Mom yelled back at my father. Suman wasn’t quiet at first, but now she doesn’t talk very much. Papa began to find fault with everything she did or didn’t do. He shouted at her, he called her a fool, and he told her she can’t wear anything other than saris. Akka said he is ridiculous, forcing the poor woman to wear saris in winter. Papa told Akka to keep her nose out of his business. She told him that if he didn’t watch out, he’d lose another wife. That Suman is a good woman and he should consider himself lucky to have her. Papa told Akka to shut up.
    Suman’s stopped smiling and cries a lot. She doesn’t sing when she does the housework the way she used to. She’s stopped telling me funny stories that her father told her when she was a little girl. She’s become silent as the walls and talks only in whispers when she has to, which makes Papa even madder and she cries some more. She still cooks all morning and cleans the rest of the time. She dusts, wipes, mops every single day, sometimes twice a day. I never see her without dusters and rags, brooms and buckets. You can eat off the floor of our house, perform surgery on it. The hum of the vacuum cleaner is our daily music. Papa will never love her. She does everything Papa expects her to, but he refuses to show whenhe’s pleased. He never comments on the things she’s done, always looks for the things she hasn’t. He makes surprise checks sometimes—he runs a finger across the tops of bookshelves, behind the spice jars in the kitchen cupboards, on top of picture frames, places that most people might forget to clean. If he finds a bit of dust, he swipes it up with a finger and holds it out without comment and Suman shrivels up like a slug. And then she gathers herself together and she starts all over again. She cooks up a feast of his favourite things, irons all his shirts, cleans the house until it sparkles like a jewel, dresses in her best clothes. Nothing works.
    She’s become a bit mean. I think she’s maybe stopped loving me. Now she complains to Papa about me. Maybe she hopes Papa will be mad at me and forget about her. So she goes whisper, whisper, whisper. She’s like a brown mouse scurrying around carrying tales. She refuses to eat her breakfast, it is not good for her to go to school hungry like that, I don’t know what to do with her, I try so hard, she lost her gloves again, what to do, she is so careless this child, I am finding it difficult to manage . Sometimes it works. Papa’s eyes fall on me instead. Nothing makes him feel more godlike than to discover our wrongness. Nothing makes him more heartbroken than to beat my naughtiness out of me, and more happy than to forgive me afterwards. He is doing it for my good, after all, he has no desire to see me turn into my mother.
    “VARSHA, COME HERE!”
    “VARSHA, WHERE ARE YOU?”
    “WHERE IS THAT WRETCHED GIRL?”
    Then the belt whistles through the air to scorch my back or legs, hidden places nobody can see. Never my face, he is careful about that, Papa, always concerned about other people’s opinion, always worried about our family name. What would people think if they saw belt marks across my face? It would never do, not at all. The Dharmas are spotless, ab-SO-lutely perfect.
    Afterwards Suman always feels so bad. She