The Girl in the Garden (24 page)

I had an idea. “Let me take you out of here.”

“What are you talking about?” Tulasi’s eyes widened. “You know I cannot do that.”

“Why not?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I cannot. I cannot leave the garden.”

“Yes, yes you can.” I knew what I was suggesting was crazy. Where would we even go? And what if something bad did actually happen to Tulasi if she left the garden? But I felt so consumed by adrenaline at the thought that I couldn’t stop the words from coming out. “Just try it. Climb over the wall with me and you’ll see. Nothing bad will happen to you.”

“I couldn’t possibly.” The half of Tulasi’s face that was not covered in a pink cloud turned a sick, yellow shade.

“Trust me. Nothing will happen. Just climb over the wall and then you can climb right back.”

I knew that a week ago Tulasi would never have entertained my idea, but the Shakespeare book had changed everything. She hesitated.

“Do you promise I can climb right back?”

“Yes. Just see how it feels, then you can come back if you want.”

Tulasi stared at me and said, “Okay, but only for a minute?”

“Only for a minute.”

Tulasi walked over to the bed, knelt down, and slid the book underneath. “I’m ready.” The yellow of her skin had been replaced by a waxy pallor.

We went outside and stood before the wall. Sunlight danced on the gray stone.

“I’ll go first and you follow,” I said, and scrambled up the wall. “It’s easy, see?” I called out after I had jumped down to the other side. “Now, your turn.”

I waited for a few minutes, shouting words of encouragement as I listened to Tulasi moving around on the other side, struggling to make it up the wall. Finally I glimpsed her white, terrified face at the top.

“Are you sure it will be okay?”

“I’m sure.”

She dropped down beside me, and together we stood under the shade of the banyan tree.

An intense silence covered everything like a fresh blanket of snow. Gold filaments of sun flitted through the trees and lay on the forest floor like scattered beads. I glanced at Tulasi. Her knees were bent and her hands were outstretched, as if she were teetering at the very edge of a cliff.

I smiled, relieved. “See? Nothing happened.”

Tulasi didn’t speak. She was staring at the ground and breathing heavily, almost panting.

“Are you all right?” I placed a tentative hand on her shoulder.

“Let me go back, I have to go back,” she gasped. Flinging herself against the wall, she began fumbling at the stone.

“But you just got here. You really want to go back already?” I was disappointed that our little adventure was ending so soon, especially now that I knew for sure Tulasi would be okay outside the garden wall.

“I am in earnest, Rakhee.” She made a clumsy attempt to get her footing in between the stones, but slipped back
down. She tried again, and again she slipped. She began to make an inhuman rasping sound.

I watched her try to climb up the wall and continuously slip down.

“Help,” she croaked. “Help me.”

But I couldn’t get near her because her arms were flailing. “Hang on, be still for a second.” I tried to grab her foot and boost her up, but she was thrashing about so much that I couldn’t get hold of it. “You have to calm down and climb, Tulasi.”

“I cannot breathe, I cannot—” She began to sob.

In the distance I heard the rooster’s brassy crow.

I, too, started to panic. “Come on, you can do this, just concentrate.” But it was no use. Tulasi continued to flap about like a fish on the deck of a ship.

What if Sadhana Aunty arrived and found us like this?

I couldn’t let that happen. I pushed her aside and hauled myself up the wall. Draping my body over it, so that my stomach was flush against the top, my feet digging into the garden side, and my head and arms on the outside, I stretched my hands down as far as I could.

“Grab my hand,” I said to Tulasi.

She reached up. “I can’t.”

“Yes you can. You have to jump.”

She bounded up into the air and her fingertips brushed against mine. “I can’t, Rakhee. It’s too high, it’s too high.”

“You can do it. Come on, there’s no other way. Take a deep breath and jump.”

She jumped again, and this time our fingers latched. I grabbed her wrist with my free hand and felt my chin scraping against stone and my body falling backward with the weight of both our bodies. The next thing I knew I
was on my back in the grass. Tulasi was beside me. Her breathing had slowed down and she was gazing up at the sky without blinking, blood welling on the underside of her chin.

“Teacher was right,” she said.

“What?”

“I can’t leave this garden or I will die.”

I sat up and looked at her. “That’s silly. She’s not right, you just panicked. We can try again tomorrow.”

“No, I can never try that again. She was right.” Tulasi got to her feet and held her hand out to me, now calm.

I took her hand and she pulled me to my feet.

“Thank you for everything, Rakhee, truly,” she said, drawing Amma’s shawl around her shoulders. “Please come back tomorrow.”

“I will.”

I climbed back over the wall and ran as fast as I could through the forest, the scrape on my chin burning.

Ashoka was still swathed in the quiet of sleep, and I exhaled and paused on the verandah to catch my breath.

A howl of pain broke the morning’s silence. At first I thought it was a cat fight. Then I heard a dull thud and another howl. It was coming from the abandoned shed that used to serve as a bathhouse, tucked into the trees a few yards away from the goat pen.

The thudding and the howling lasted for a full minute. Finally the shed door swung open and Meenu, her face red and swollen, limped out, followed by a haggard-looking Sadhana Aunty, who was carrying a wooden paddle.

I ducked so that they wouldn’t see me. They went back into the house through the front entrance, and I heard Meenu’s door close. A moment later Sadhana Aunty reappeared on the lawn, without the paddle, but this time
carrying a notebook and a basket. She walked around the side of the house and disappeared, and I knew that she was going to see Tulasi.

From that morning forward, Meenu was different. For the rest of the summer she was haughty, sullen, and solitary. She no longer played or hung around with me and Krishna. Like Gitanjali, she rolled her eyes at our games and shooed us away when we approached her with the cricket bat. She had grown up.

N
ot long after the incident with Meenu, Muthashi got sick again. Her fever spiked and she was confined to her bed, except this time nobody gathered us around the table and told us not to worry.

I heard Dev and Sadhana Aunty speaking outside Muthashi’s bedroom.

“H-h-h-her heart is weak. P-p-p-preparations should be made.” Dev’s sleek stutter echoing in the corridor made my blood run cold. Nothing, it seemed, had been said about our encounter. He hadn’t been around for a few days, but the moment Muthashi got sick, he arrived like clockwork, and nobody, not even Amma, said a word.

I looked inside Muthashi’s bedroom when they left and saw not my neat, clean grandmother, but a mess of dingy white sheets and disheveled gray hair. There was that funny smell again, but this time it was more pungent. I covered my nose and ran to the verandah.

Krishna was sitting on the swing bouncing a small ball on the ground.

“I just saw your mother going down to use the telephone,” she said in a flat voice.

“Really?” My heart thumped. “Who was she calling?”

“She had the big telephone book with her. I know what that means. She’s informing people.”

“Of what?” I asked, and as soon as the words left my lips I knew the answer.

A few tears rolled down Krishna’s cheeks and dissolved in the lap of her dress. I had never seen anyone look so sad.

Later that evening, Sadhana Aunty went into Muthashi’s room carrying a bottle of medicine and a spoon. A minute later she emerged with a fresh brown stain spreading across the front of her sari.

“She won’t take her medicine,” she said to Vijay Uncle, who was hovering outside the room. “She spat it out and swore at me. Our mother, Vijay. Our mother, who would rather let a mosquito feast on her blood than slap it. She is not herself.”

“Let me try,” said Vijay Uncle, taking the bottle and the spoon from his sister. But he, too, came out defeated, medicine dribbling from his chin onto his white shirt like dirty raindrops.

At the dinner table, Sadhana Aunty turned to Amma. “Did you speak to Veena? I assume she’ll want to be here.”

“Yes, she’s trying to book a flight as we speak,” said Amma.

“What?” I tugged on her sari. “Veena Aunty is coming here?” The thought of seeing someone I loved from Plainfield was too thrilling to contain my happiness.

“Muthashi is her aunt. We all grew up like sisters, you know. She wants to pay her respects.” Amma’s voice trembled, broke, and gave way to tears. She pushed away her banana leaf and buried her face in her arms.

“Chitra.” Sadhana Aunty placed a hand on her shoulder but her face looked annoyed.

Vijay Uncle got up from the table and disappeared into the sitting room. My cousins all kept their eyes glued to the table, as if the knotty wood were the most fascinating thing they had ever seen.

I waited with morbid curiosity for Death to arrive. What would it look like? Dev had hinted at its arrival, but a few days passed and nothing happened, except a constant current of dread buzzed under my skin—that awful feeling of waiting for an unwanted but inevitable visitor.

I continued sneaking out of the house at dawn to visit Tulasi, and we never mentioned what had happened when she had climbed over the wall with me. Part of me wanted to try it again, and another part of me was afraid that maybe Tulasi was right. I did not want any harm to come to her, but at the same time, as the end of summer grew perilously near, I couldn’t help fantasizing about setting her free and bringing her back to Plainfield.

She kept asking me what life was like in the outside world, and the more I told, the more I felt I should stop, for Tulasi was changing. She was no longer the happy, accepting girl I had met only a few weeks before. Caring for the garden was gradually becoming less of a priority for her. Instead she spent much of her time holed up inside the cottage, hovering over the Shakespeare book, devouring each play, one after the other, over and over again, as if the words on the page were now sustaining her life. The garden was still fragrant and exquisite as ever, but I noticed small changes, changes that pierced my heart with guilt. The grass was not so pliant beneath my feet. Petals from the Ashoka flowers pooled at the foot of the tree,
waiting, like patient children, to be swept away. Weeds wound their way into the flower beds, and the magnificent roses began to droop.

Why couldn’t I stop spinning my long, elaborate tales of life on the outside? The reason, I admit, was selfish. I told myself Tulasi needed to know these things, that I was telling her the truth, but really no one had ever listened to me like this before, had hooked themselves upon my every word as if their life depended on it. I felt bold, brash, and, for the first time, necessary.

Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night and imagined I heard Puck’s mournful call echoing through the forest and into my bedroom, a message for me alone, of sorrow or of warning. I shielded my ears with my hands and tried to put Tulasi out of my mind.

Death finally arrived around four o’clock one morning, accompanied by a chorus of wails. I ran out into the hallway, where my three cousins had already gathered in front of Muthashi’s room.

“What’s going on?” I asked Krishna, but she did not answer. Her mouth was agape. Sadhana Aunty, Amma, and Vijay Uncle were all huddled around Muthashi’s bed. Amma and Vijay Uncle were clinging to each other and weeping. Nalini Aunty was standing with her back against the wall and her head bowed. Sadhana Aunty was not crying, but there was a haunted look in her eyes when she came to the door and told us:

“Muthashi is no more.”