VI. Living Things
VI
Living Things
The papaya tree was the one living thing in our home that my father loved.
He pruned its wilted leaves, trimmed the branches at forty-five degree angles, sometimes applying Vaseline on the cut stems to protect them from germs. Because the tree bore fruit year-round, he always watched for the next ripening papaya, bringing it to the dining table with great ceremony, scoring it open, scooping out the squiggly black seeds and chopping it up into pieces small enough to be picked up with a fruit fork.
It was the only food-related chore I’d ever seen him perform.
I’m not even sure he knew where things like sugar or salt were kept in the kitchen.
The morning after the book fair was a Sunday. Priya and I were home. My mother said she wanted the papaya tree cut down.
Priya stared. “But why?” she said, not taking the tumbler of Horlicks my mother was handing her. Priya looked like she might cry.
“This is my home,” our mother said, shoving the glass into Priya’s hand. “And you are my children.”
There was something tender in the way she said it, my children. Her voice was full of possession, like every blade of glass in the yard belonged to her, and she belonged to it. “In my home, what I say goes. If I say I want that tree cut down, it will be.”
Before going back inside, my mother gave me gardening chores alongside cutting down the papaya tree.
I was to pull up the weeds that were growing between the pavers in our front yard, water the hibiscus tree and pull off all the flowers from it.
But I wasn’t to throw the flowers away like my father did.
She was going to dry the flowers in the sun and boil them in coconut oil for her and Priya to use on their hair.
The gardening chores were things our father used to perform for us, doing them so efficiently and constantly that it had taken months to recognize the unkemptness of our front yard.
By the time I was finished with the weeds, the sun was shining brightly.
I went inside and changed into a pair of old shorts, took off my T-shirt and threw it in the laundry bucket.
Back in the yard, I enjoyed the sensation of sunlight prickling my back, beads of sweat sliding ticklishly down my armpits.
I pulled off the red hibiscus flowers. There were hardly any flowers on the tree, and no matter how slowly I went, I was done in less than two minutes.
I checked for weeds again, and I was thrilled when I saw one growing around the roots of the hibiscus.
I got on my knees and tried to pull it up.
It was buried deep, and the leaves of the weed were like blades; sharp-edged and prickly, but they were only leaves, so I didn’t let go, I kept pulling.
I felt as though my palms were being scored by blunt knives.
There was the bloodless stinging sensation of papercuts all along my palms, in the grooves where my fingers met my palms. I crouched on my heels and pulled harder, using all my weight.
When it came out, I fell back but righted myself.
I threw the weed into the pile I’d made so far and looked at my palms, flexed them; all the places the skin was split and separating.
It was like when I was little, at school with friends, I’d run a safety pin under my skin to scare and awe.
I liked that sensation, the stinging pain.
It felt so good. I wiped my palm against my shorts.
I really had no choice but to turn to the papaya tree. I stared at it. How sweet the tree looked, dappled in yellow sunlight. Its wide leaves were so green they looked almost wet. It smelled like Ruhee.
“It isn’t going to cut itself,” Ganesh said.
He was standing at the gate, watching me. He was holding a long and wide blade by its hilt, resting the flat side on his shoulder. “It isn’t very sharp,” he said, handing it out to me.
How was he here?
“What?” he said. “Your mother called mine.”
When I didn’t reach for it, Ganesh took the blade back. “This tree?” he said, opening the gate without having to look at the latch, as if he lived there.
“Go sit in the shade.”
I sat in the shade, on the stoop, and watched Ganesh cut down the papaya tree.
He started with the branches. They fell one after the other, making rustling or swishing noises.
I stood up and sat back down several times.
In my mouth I could taste the shoots―my father used to break them off, the supple and soft newly sprouted ones, for Priya and I to blow soap bubbles.
From amidst the pile of soft green leaves, Ganesh bent and broke the branches, sometimes hacking with the long knife, sometimes with his hands. It was awful.
Ganesh wiped his cheek on his sleeve and turned around to glance at me but stopped.
I don’t know what was on my face. Might be I looked terrified, or sorrowful, or tormented.
Whatever it was, Ganesh snorted, letting the air out through his nose, then the laughter reaching the back of his throat he guffawed, still meeting my gaze.
It really wasn’t funny, it was so sad, but Ganesh couldn’t stop laughing, and suddenly neither could I.
It was a tree, a sweet-smelling beautiful tree, a tree like any other.
It simply got caught between a husband and a wife.
Who cried because a tree was chopped down?
Stupid boys, that’s who, Ganesh said. What a stupid boy.
My mother came to the door. We stopped laughing immediately, and I remembered Ruhee. How the papaya tree belonged to her memory too. Who cared? It was nice not to think about her for once.
“Arjun,” my mother said. “Ask your friend to come inside.”
She had her glasses on her nose, and a newspaper in her hand.
As we went in, I saw her sit on the stoop to read the newspaper, a small glass of tea in her hand.
I’d never thought of her getting older before then, with her newspaper and her glasses and her hot glass of tea she looked older, but cheerful.
We went in my room and I showed Ganesh the laundry bucket.
I turned to my closet and picked out a shirt for him to wear, a gray shirt I used to wear for football practice.
He walked around my room as if he lived there, pulling the shirt over his head and running his hands through his sweaty hair in a single movement.
He picked up my cricket bat and put it over his shoulder and peeked out the window.
Then he went and lay back on my bed, said Phew!
Turn on the fan will you? I switched on the fan, picked up the bat from near his feet and went to my desk, leaned it against the window.
I don’t know, I felt so happy just then, doing nothing.
Outside the birds were singing playfully, fluttering from tree to tree.
Some or other municipal worker was yelling about mosquito fumigation down the road.
Some or other banana seller was yelling mauz!
My mother was on the stoop reading the paper, the bright new sunshine falling into the clean yard. I felt so happy.
When my father came to pick me up, Ganesh was still there.
We’d just had lunch. It had been some time since my mother had spent a substantial amount of time in the kitchen. She’d made ukkera; a dish that took hours to prepare. The taste of roasted sesame and green chilies and fried egg was still in my mouth.
My father rang the doorbell. He stood in the yard, his back to us.
He was gazing at the place where the papaya tree stood.
The pile of branches and leaves. I felt tremors at my fingertips.
“Who did this?” he said, without turning around.
I opened my mouth but Ganesh touched my arm with the back of his hand.
“I did,” Ganesh said. My father turned around to look at Ganesh, but his face betrayed nothing.
Then he said to me, “Tell your mother to send Priya out.”
Not taking Priya to Gita Miss’ house had been a kindness he was doing our mother, I realized.
I was a man after all, like my father. And Priya wasn’t.
It made Priya more intensely my mother’s child than I could ever be.
I was afraid of doing this task, and Ganesh did this for me as well.
I sat on the stoop and did not dare go back inside.
My father looked at me sitting there, with my eyes on my feet and I knew what he was thinking.
Cowardly. Not self-possessed. Say hello to Miss.
I felt ashamed, sitting out here, letting Ganesh do what were my duties.
I felt ashamed but it wasn’t enough to make me want to go inside and deal with whatever it was that my mother was saying or doing.
I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing her crying again the way she did on the night I went to Gita Miss’ house the first time.
Was it really so bad? Not wanting to hear one’s mother weep?
Almost twenty minutes later, Priya came out. Ganesh too.
At the gate, Priya and I went one way, Ganesh went another. But my father said, “Call your friend.”
Ganesh didn’t say no. Then it struck me that my father and Ganesh recognized one another. They were people in whose nature it was to do as they willed. Will―willpower?―it ran through their veins like blood. These were people who weren’t afraid of life.
At the apartment gate outside Gita Miss’ building, Priya threw a tantrum.
She sat on the pavement and refused to come inside. “I want to go home,” were the only words she said no matter what our father asked. Ordered. She was the only one who could disobey him like that. He told us to go upstairs, he’d bring Priya.
“So, this is Ganesh,” Gita Miss said, smiling brightly when she answered the door. “Arjun’s best friend.”
It was so childish. Girlish? Juvenile? The words best friend, when Gita Miss uttered it in front of Ganesh. Even Ganesh seemed to think so; he snorted and it made my face burn. She shut the door behind us, “Priya is here too,” I said.