The Sandalwood Tree (22 page)

Rashmi arrived with chits from the butcher and the import store, and she watched me stuff them into the empty tea tin. She said, “Not for worrying, madam. I am making puja to Lakshmi, goddess of rich.” She nodded slyly, as if she’d given me an insider tip, then called, “Come, beta,” and went after Billy.

That day I felt an irresistible urge to clean the hell out of something. I took dirty clothes out of the hamper and filled the bathtub with hot water and washing powder. I knelt on the hard, cold tiles and bent over a washboard with my hair tied back in a kerchief like an antebellum mammy. The work was backbreaking and the bathroom steamed up, jungle hot. I scrubbed and sweated and scraped my knuckles on the washboard, wanting to wash everything away.
Thwack!
That one is for Martin rejecting me.
Slap!
That one is for Billy and Spike.
Whack!
That one is for every stinking war men
have ever waged. I battered Martin’s shirts, I clobbered his pants, I whacked my blouses, and walloped Billy’s pajamas …

“Arey Ram!” Rashmi stood in the bathroom door, holding her cheeks.

“It’s OK, Rashmi.” I wiped my cheek with a curled wrist.

“Nooo!” She rushed over and knelt next to me. “Madam is bleeding!”

My knuckles were torn and abraded; bits of skin hung off here and there, and soapy water on the washboard dribbled pink suds. The blue blouse, bunched in my fist, was splotched with red.

When Rashmi pried the blouse away from me, I felt bereft and grabbed another, but she stilled my hands and studied my face. She said, “Beelee is one hundred percent A-OK.”

“I know.” I smiled weakly, and then Rashmi held me. She didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. I sank into her embrace.

Later, with Band-Aids on my knuckles, Rashmi and I carried the basket of wet laundry out to the compound to lay it on bushes to dry in the sun. I liked handling the fresh clothes smelling of carbolic soap, and I shook out Billy’s yellow shirt, watching it flap at the sky like a prayer flag. Billy sat on the steps and stared.

Rashmi and I both knew that Billy was not A-OK. Without Spike, he shuffled around the house, breaking my heart with each soft step. When I tried to engage him in play, he played. When I told him to eat, he ate. At bedtime, he submitted to his bath and went right to sleep. I built forts out of blocks, and he watched patiently. I read Aesop’s Fables and he listened politely. I pulled him around our compound in his red Flyer and he lay down on the pillow and went to sleep. He was a little Gandhi, defeating me with passivity, and if the British Empire couldn’t fight that, what chance did I have?

While Rashmi and I spread the laundry on woody mimosa bushes, I recalled a moment of healing magic from my own childhood, a kind thing Da had once done for me. I went into the
house and rummaged through my bedroom almirah until I found the cardboard shoebox that held my black, open-toe pumps. I’d bought them for the high, sexy heel and the patent-leather bow at the toes, but on the dirt roads of Masoorla and the broken steps of Simla, they would have hobbled me like a Chinese woman with bound feet. I hadn’t worn them once since we arrived. I emptied the shoebox and drew a rainbow on the lid with Billy’s crayons. I wedged the lid in the box at a steep angle, and tossed a handful of shiny copper pice at the end of the rainbow and, voilà—a leprechaun trap.

Da had made one for me after Mum died. He promised that some greedy leprechaun would slide down the rainbow, aiming for the gold, and not be able to climb out. Leprechauns are tiny, you see, as small as Billy’s pinky finger. Da said after I caught my leprechaun, I could put the lid on the box and the little fellow would be pleased as punch to live inside with his pile of gold. I had checked my leprechaun trap every day for a month until I got bored, and then it disappeared. But it had gotten me one month closer to healing.

I showed Billy the leprechaun trap, and he said, “A real leprechaun?”

“Well, there are no guarantees.” I knitted my brow. “I’m not sure there are as many leprechauns in India as there are in Chicago, but we can try.”

He nodded like a sad little sage. “OK.”

I nestled the leprechaun trap in a stand of wild tuberoses, saying, “Any leprechaun worth his salt wouldn’t be fooled by a rainbow inside the house.” I figured we’d catch a few bugs, maybe a lizard—anything to distract him—but the next day, Billy came in with the shoebox under his arm. “Got one,” he said.

“What?”

“A leprechaun.”

“Really?” What the hell? “Can I see?”

“Nuh-uh. He’s shy.” He hurried to his room and closed the door.

I wasn’t sure whether to be glad or concerned. In the end I decided an imaginary leprechaun wasn’t any worse than a fake dog, but Billy’s leprechaun was not a garden-variety imaginary friend. Billy carried the shoebox everywhere, lifting the corner of the lid and whispering into the box, smiling a sneaky smile, as if he and the leprechaun were hatching a sinister plot. Whenever I looked at him, he stopped abruptly, but as soon as I turned away, he’d begin whispering again.

I said, “You know leprechauns are good guys, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“A leprechaun wouldn’t do anything naughty.”

“Uh-huh.”

But the sly, shifty whispering continued. At the kitchen table, Billy slipped food into the box, and I worried about it rotting. But if I removed the food scraps, would he think the leprechaun had eaten it?

Of course, he took the shoebox to bed with him, and one night, while he slept, it fell on the floor. The next morning he screamed like a banshee, and I came running. He was sitting in bed, sobbing and twisting the sheet the way Martin did during his nightmares. When I put my arms around him he collapsed like a marionette on cut strings. I saw the shoebox, half under the bed, and picked it up, but I had to press it against his chest and hold it there to make him understand he hadn’t lost his leprechaun. He could barely catch his breath. He hugged the box while his crying subsided into convulsive hiccups. I watched him, thinking I should never have tried to replace Spike. But by then, taking the shoebox away was unthinkable.

I took Billy out for short walks in the colonial district, pulling him and the shoebox in the red wagon, singing “Old McDonald,” but he didn’t join in. Once, I took him to the import shop
in a tonga, and he plodded through the congested aisles, inhaling the ripe air and hugging the shoebox under his arm. I offered him candy and toys, even with an empty tea tin and the rent in arrears. I would have bought him anything, but he said, “Nah. We’re fine.”

As always, the import shop was a cramped obstacle course with burlap bags full of rice and onions on the floor, tin cans and glass bottles lining the walls, mops and Borax and Jeyes cleaning fluid stacked in the corner. I lingered at a table heaped with apples and jackfruit, and selected six dull red Himalayan apples, which I set on the counter with a jar of strawberry jam for Billy’s roti. I asked, “How are you, Manesh?”

The round little man rocked his head from side to side. “I am keeping radiant, even with uncles and aunties sleeping on the verandah. In the morning, over bodies I am stepping.” He shrugged and smiled.

“Has your family come for some occasion?”

“Indeed yes.” Manesh laughed. “The occasion of Partition.”

“Excuse me?”

He explained that violence in the cities had caused thousands of people to flee to the countryside. In addition to his own relatives, Manesh was also sheltering a Muslim family who didn’t want to emigrate. He said, “Old friends they are. In the cowshed they are sleeping.”

Some families had taken in as many as forty displaced relatives. They lived shoulder to shoulder in their tiny houses, scraping by, sharing everything, always finding an extra potato to add to the curry pot, an extra handful of rice. And they seemed good-natured about it, accepting everything with enviable equanimity.

Listening to Manesh, I wished I could join them. I wished I could leave my comfortable bungalow with its emotional baggage and wrap myself in a soft cotton sari—pale green or maybe lavender would be nice with my hair—and sit on the floor of Manesh’s crowded house. Billy could play with other children, and I could
chop onions and grind coriander with other women, listen to an infant being comforted and the cow lowing out back. I’d feel the solid earth under me and wallow in the closeness of people who cared about each other. But I couldn’t find a place for Martin in my fantasy. Even with his dark skin and kurtas and bidis, he didn’t fit because I didn’t want him there. India wasn’t lonely; I was.

I bought Billy a shiny, blue-lacquered yo-yo and signed my chit, then I took him home to Rashmi, who was surprisingly versed in yo-yo tricks and eager to demonstrate. I told her I’d be gone the rest of the afternoon, and Billy said, “Where are you going, Mom?”

“To the Club, baby.” I was sick of being lonely. It was Tuesday, bridge day, and everyone I knew would be there.

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A
t the edge of Mr. Singh’s estate, the pavement ended and a dusty road wound past a sun-washed Hindu temple. A bundle of rags with two thin, brown legs sticking out of them huddled on the steps. While I fished around my purse for a few coins, I heard the eerie resonance of a conch being blown inside the temple, summoning the gods. Then came the clash of finger cymbals and low chanting. Mr. Singh had said he was not religious, but he seemed to have a spiritual side, and I wondered if he ever hungered for the comfort of ritual.

I placed a coin in the beggar’s hand and saw, through the open temple door, a statue of Hanuman, the monkey god with his wise simian face, smiling faintly. The god’s neck had been draped with marigold garlands, and people bowed before him in earnest obeisance. Some touched their foreheads to the floor and one man lay prostrate, holding incense in his outstretched hands. Aromatic smoke swaddled the air inside, and a woman knelt to receive a tikka from a spider-thin pandit. It struck me then that I had never seen a Hindu temple without people in it, no matter what time of day. Whatever the act of prayer might or might not accomplish, it clearly satisfied a profound human need.

I walked on, keeping to the quiet residential streets, enjoying the sight of women hanging strange but beautiful laundry on trees and a man in a doorway brushing his teeth with a neem twig.

Then I saw the corpse.

She lay on the ground under the thatched roof of an open-sided funerary hut. A few people dressed in white sat on their heels beside a mound of fresh flowers, and a man with a freshly shaved head moved the body so that her head faced away from me. Martin had told me that Hindus positioned their dead facing south, the direction of death, before they prayed over the body. I stayed back, not wanting to intrude, but I stood spellbound. Death breeds a queer fascination.

The dead woman was shrouded in yellow, and the chief mourner knelt beside her, trickling sanctified water over her face. He cupped his hands and carefully dribbled water on her forehead and cheeks. Then he took the corner of his sleeve and tenderly dabbed at one of her ears, where water must have pooled. I thought he must have loved her. Perhaps he was her son. He dipped two fingertips into a small pot to apply sandalwood paste to her forehead, and then other family members helped to lift her onto a bamboo stretcher. They covered her body with roses, jasmine, and marigolds until she was virtually buried in flowers but for her face.

The mourners lifted the bier onto their shoulders, and one man took up a drum and beat a slow, funereal rhythm as they began their solemn procession to the cremation grounds. When they carried her past me, I was startled to see that she was disturbingly young. The chief mourner was probably not her son but her husband, and, naturally, I imagined Martin preparing my body that way—or I his.

I watched them go and something seized inside my chest. I said, “We die.” It hit me like a train. This ordinary knowledge suddenly had emotional reality, and I stood there, trying to whittle things down to what really mattered to me—Billy and Martin. That was it.

As I struggled with the reality of death, something big and heavy hit me in the back of the head and almost knocked me over. I didn’t understand what had happened until I looked around and saw a monkey sitting on the ground, a few steps away, holding my sunglasses. I’d almost forgotten I’d been wearing them. He sat there, tawny and wizened and smug, dangling my glasses from one bony finger, like a taunt. The petty thief must have been sitting on a rooftop or in a tree, waiting. I stared at him, Hanuman incarnate, and in that moment, without my sunglasses, I saw the utter futility of guilt and regret. We just didn’t have that kind of time.

I didn’t care about the sunglasses. I hurried to the Buddhist temple with an urgency I didn’t understand. I found Harry kneeling at the feet of the Buddha, tidying scattered offerings, throwing dry brown apple slices and wilted flowers into a paper sack while he sang, “We’re off to see the wizard …” His voice was flat but completely unself-conscious. “… the wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Such a funny little man.

“Hello, Harry.”

He turned with his mouth open as his song halted. “Evie. How nice to see you.”