Tell It to the Trees Read Online Free PDF

cries and kisses me, combs my hair. She says, “I am sorry, I am sorry. How could I tell him? I don’t know why I told him. Oh poor child.” And I hold on to her hard, glad she is there, that she still likes me after all, grateful for the softness of her touch as she examines my bruises and soothes them with a towel wrung out in ice water. “It’s okay, Mama,” I say, stroking her face. “I deserved it, I was a naughty girl. It’s okay.”
    Akka is on my stepmother’s side. She can’t bear to see her unhappy. I hear her telling Suman that she should leave. “Run, girl, run as far as you can,” she says.
    Once she offered Suman her gold necklace to go away. I adore my Akka, but I was mad at her for doing that. “Why did you tell her to go?” I asked. “She is mine.”
    “I can’t see her suffer, pearl of my eye,” Akka said. “It is not right.”
    I was real scared afterwards. I didn’t want to lose my new mother too. So one day I took her passport from her dressing table drawer. I taped it behind the photograph of my dead grandfather. Suman will never dream of looking there. You can’t go anywhere without ID. She doesn’thave a driver’s licence, so the passport is her passport out of this place and now she doesn’t have it. I catch her sometimes, looking, looking, looking for that passport, and when Papa asks her, irritated as all heck by her fidgety looking, what on earth she is searching for, Suman shakes her head and mumbles that she is not. Not searching, only tidying up. After a while she gives up, and I breathe a sigh of relief. She isn’t going anywhere. I am glad. I will try to love her as if she is my real mother, I promise Papa’s gods and Jesus Christ and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and all the good guys up there who might be listening. Suman is my real mother. I will love her to death and make sure she never ever leaves us. Never. Ever.

Suman
    Until my marriage, I had travelled out of Madras only occasionally: with Madhu Kaki to Tirupati a few times so that she could pray for the welfare of our family to her favourite deity, and once when I was seventeen on a school trip to see the Taj Mahal. The only reason I was allowed to go was because I would be staying with my friend Lalli at her grandparents’ home in Agra.
    Lalli’s father was a merchant whose family had descended to Madras from northern India years ago and had settled there. He owned several small corner shops that sold magazines and sundry items like biscuits, batteries, cigarettes. Although Lalli spoke my language fluently and could easily pass for a South Indian girl with her long oiled braids, her flashing dark eyes, her clothes, her accent and gestures, the inside of her home was a foreign place for me. There were several families living together in that large home with its barred windows and narrow corridors opening into numerous small bedrooms—Lalli’s parents and her three brothers, two uncles andtheir wives and children, and several other indigent relatives who cooked and cleaned and worked for the family in return for a roof over their heads. The women were soft-spoken, unlike my own noisy Madhu Kaki, and drifted around with their sari pallus draped over their heads, shadowing their faces so that I could never figure out who was who except by their whispering voices, like wind rustling through leaves. Their continuous state of quiet busyness became frantic in the evening when the men returned home and had to be pampered with tea and juice and snacks and inquiries after their day or their health.
    Most of the time the women wore simple starched cotton saris, but once a year they would all explode into a passion of colour, dress up like brides, even the oldest of them all, an aunt who was in her sixties, to celebrate a festival called Karva Chauth when prayers were sent up to the god Shiva for the welfare of their husbands. I had heard about this festival from my friend, who always brought us trays of sweets made