Tell It to the Trees Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the occasion, but had never really seen anyone performing it until my trip to Agra where Lalli’s grandparents lived in a quarter of a crusty old building in one of the many dark gullies that criss-cross that city like veins in an ancient body. On the second night of our stay, all the women in the building began to prepare for Karva Chauth.
    “Come on, let’s go and join them,” Lalli whispered mischievously, pulling me up the narrow stairs to the terrace on top of the building.
    “Are we allowed to?” I whispered back. “Isn’t this for married women only?”
    “Yes, but who is going to know?” Lalli had pulled her sari pallu over her head. She grinned at me. “Come on, what are you scared of?” She pressed a small round mirror into my palm. “Don’t look up at the moon when it appears, look at it in the mirror.”
    “What will happen if I look at the sky instead?” I asked, mystified by this exotic ritual. We had our own rituals, but familiarity had made them ordinary.
    “You will have a hundred years of bad luck,” Lalli said dramatically, and giggled again. “If you believe such nonsense!”
    It was the first hour of the night and all around, on the terraces and balconies of Hindu homes which grew like mushrooms out of the dank filth of gullies, were other women waiting, like Lalli and me, to glimpse the sharp crescent of the new moon as it fell from the sky into their mirrors. It was forbidden for them to stare up at that silver C of light—I have no idea who forbade them, or why. No doubt some ancient seer, one of those bad-tempered, long-bearded old fogeys whose potent curses turned their wives into stone, their daughters into heaps of ashes or trees or birds for small transgressions—no doubt it was they who decided that a woman was not to look straight at the silly moon. It would be a wicked thing to do. No, worse, it would bring harm down on the hapless heads of their husbands, those idle gods who sat inside their homes, stuffing their bellies with food, andyelling out orders while their poor wives fasted for their well-being after slaving over the kitchen stove to turn out meals fit for maharajas.
    And so we stood there, with mirrors in our hands, to witness the birth of the new moon. Not too far away, despite the darkness, I could see the dome of the Taj Mahal thrusting up at the sky like a pale breast. I gazed at my face dimly reflected in the mirror. I . Such a sliver of a word to hold the meaning and the matter of all that I was and would be. I believed that I was tougher than that frail stick of a word, I could leap over its scrawny boundaries, I could become more than I was.
    Not too long after our trip to Agra, Lalli was packed off with a dowry of five lakh rupees and two dozen gold bangles and a Godrej refrigerator and a motorbike for her husband, only to end up hanging from the rafters of her new home, the mehendi from her wedding still wet on her palms. Her in-laws wailed and beat their breasts and said that a mentally ill girl had been passed on to them without their knowledge, but the rumours that swept around the gullies were that her mother-in-law wanted more gold bangles and her father-in-law wanted an air conditioner, and her new husband wanted a car instead of a scooter. When Lalli’s father refused to oblige, her in-laws strung her up like a criminal hung for murder. She had murdered their desires.
    I wept hard for my lost friend, swore that such sorrow would never come to me. Before Lalli’s wedding, I had sat at her mehendi, a swirling vineyard of dark green hennapaste drying on my hands, turning red from the heat in my blood (the hotter your blood, the redder the colour left behind), and wished that my father too had the money and the jewels to bribe a man to marry me. I was eighteen—a ripe old age for a woman, practically a toothless crone, if the talk around me was to be believed. Until Lalli’s death I had convinced myself that marriage was the best thing that