The Tamarind Tree Ghost

Ghosts

Great Aunt Ela would observe many years later, when the road engineers cut the trees down on the national highway to widen the width, that all tamarind trees were hollow.  “It’s amazing”, she said, “I saw them felled on the side of the road, not one with any insides! How do the trees stay alive? I thought they needed sap.” As far as I could tell, each one could have technically housed a ghost.  And all those ghosts now flew about angry and homeless on the highway, taking residence in truck and bus drivers, turning them into monsters hurtling down with maddening speed. If you saw a bus or truck overturned, you could be sure it was a tamarind tree ghost’s doing. It was their revenge for ousting them from their ancient homes. And in any case, every one agrees it is wrong to cut trees and a great crime to cut a tamarind tree.

But that summer, many decades before trees were cut on the highways, and soon after I went to the fourth grade, Mercy Stevens died. She was a boarder at the school and no one knew who her parents were or whether she had any. You never could ask boarders about their parents unless they voluntarily gave that information. They laid her body out in the school chapel and we all went to say prayers for her sprit to stay up somewhere in peace and not to bother us or her.  Only the children who believed in Christ got the manna in their mouths, placed on their tongues by the priest. We called him Father. I wanted to be like the Hebrews in the desert enchanted with manna spilling from heaven, I longed to taste the wafer, the light dollop of pale white, shaped like a potato chip, the color of bread, the smell of something I only smelt in the chapel, between the old brown pews, in the light that stirred dust through stained glass windows and threw their reflections on the aisle in quiet patterns. I kneeled on the padded kneeler and said my prayers, hearing the soft steps of newcomers who hid themselves in the benches somewhere like me, saying their unknown prayers. Meanwhile Mercy Stevens was in white, laid out in a glass coffin, like a tired fairy. Perhaps if she had opened her eyes, they would have been a glassy blue. After that day, death and priestly offerings could not be separated.  Death and ghosts could not be, either.

It was when I was in the fifth grade, when the rumor spread that there was definitely a ghost or more in the tamarind tree. It was a large tamarind tree in the far corner of the ground, close to the compound wall. When the annual school meeting was adjourned that spring, we overheard the school authorities talking about how it would make a good place for lunch. The main agenda for expenditure that summer was the renovation of the performance hall and the construction of a large concrete slab, a foot and something high, under the tamarind tree. Past noon at break time the sun shone brightly, the earth on the ground was brilliant and friendly and the grounds were filled with schoolchildren playing. Yet when we neared the tamarind tree, the leaves murmured and a strange dark hush grew over them like when rain clouds gathered and filtered out sun and sound. The trunk of the tree was hollow and ghosts could have definitely lived in all that space just behind the thick bark.   As a consequence, even though the concrete plaza offered a respite from sun and sand, not many of us ate lunch under the tree.  We did not feel the fear as much when we played Catch on the platform, running about constantly, keeping the shifting ghosts away.  It was when we stopped to think, that the ghosts grabbed us softly slithering about our senses.  It was they that threw the tamarind on our heads, startling us. Then the bell rang and I was relieved that recess was over. But even in the classroom sometimes I heard the whisper of the tamarind tree ghost. He, she or it was interminable, undeniable and un-stoppable like the terminator.

The ripe tamarind is a fibrous pulpy mass, chocolate colored, sour tasting with a hint of the sweet while the unripe fruit is green and chalky.  The fruit of the tree conserves its pulp within a brittle brown shell that holds two or more seeds.  Its surface undulates, becoming narrow between seeds like a green bean gone dry.  Beulah and Jasmine had a tamarind picking group and the whole lunch hour was spent in collecting edible fruit, ripe and unripe, scattered on the ground.  I watched them from afar, sitting with Pia under a mango tree more than halfway across the far corner of the ground.  Once when I bit into the raw green insides, its coating spread into my mouth and I spit it out. I decided then I had no interest in tamarinds. Victoria, our young nanny who also helped with the chores at home, brought us lunch in a tiffin-carrier four storeys high.  It was a lot of food to eat and we took a long time to get through all those courses, but Mamma wanted to be sure we had a good lunch. She sprinkled sugar over the top of the yogurt rice as I liked it that way. This went on for about a year. Then one day Victoria brought the tiffin and a photograph of the three of us and sat and cried under the mango tree. She had surely had a tiff with Mamma but we dared not ask. She was proud like the Queen of England and even if she had no rubies or diamonds, she seemed to wear an invisible tiara that made her tilt her head up high and keep her chin out. Now she sat under the mango tree and tore at the photograph of the three of us that my father had taken sometime, so that she was a separate part with a jagged edge and we two sisters were out of the picture. She held the pieces in her hand and we watched our childish figures with expectant looks crumbling into the mud of the playground. Pia and I suspected that there would not be too many afternoon four course meals after that day.

I saved those scraps of photographs from the sand that afternoon while Victoria packed our lunch box, sniffling all the while, wrapped up in her own distress so she did not notice me picking the pieces.  I put the pieces she had torn out - me in braids, my sister with her two ponytails on either side of her head and Victoria in her Sunday church dress - inside my Geography notebook. There were two bits unfortunately creased and crumpled from Vicki’s attempts at destruction, but I was sure that they would get flattened out, eventually.  I placed them carefully between the pages where I had written down notes that Master Nair our Geography Teacher had given us on Old Fold Mountains and Young Fold Mountains, Rift Valleys, Denudation and Erosion.  Master Nair had also given us a lecture on swamps and quagmires and quicksand, the last land formation gripping my attention so much that I stopped taking notes. For the sake of demonstration he explained, for instance, if we threw a pen in a field of quicksand, it gets sucked in and then vanishes forever.

“What about things larger than a pen?” I asked him.

“What about a bus?” Belinda Smith piped up, coming right on my trail.  She was the class teacher’s niece, plump and bossy besides, so no one could ever argue with her, not even Master Nair. Every afternoon when she got really thirsty she would drink up as much water from my large green water bottle, almost emptying it. She would leave a few mouthfuls and then wiping her mouth she would assure me, “I left some for ya”, as if she was doing me a favor. I swished the last of the water in my green bottle miserably, wishing I had the stomach to drink it all before she got to it. Belinda waited now expectantly with the rest of us for our Geography teacher’s reply. Master Nair assured the class that quicksand was capable of swallowing large items as well, perhaps not a bus though. The quicksand did not dissect lives or decimate bodies, Master Nair explained, comparing the sand to a large Anaconda, which had the appetite and capacity to consume and digest creatures in whole. There were many people in my young life already I would have liked to make vanish so the idea of quicksand was interminably fascinating and I read up all I could about it.  For a while, I was very happy with this idea of making things and people disappear without any evidence:  I imagined throwing in Belinda Smith so that she would stop drinking up all my water leaving me thirsty. It would prove to her the largesse of quicksand and serve her right.  I secretly wished for Sheila Jacob who had stolen my best friend Akila Coomaraswamy that spring term, to be gobbled by quicksand. Then, I visualized pushing in Sister Josephine who whipped our knuckles every time we jumped over a bush, flailing her arms helplessly in the quicksand till her nose, eyes and wimple all went in. I imagined the mire sucking in my Civics books so that I would not have to read them and I would have a valid excuse. It was exhilarating to dream of disappearances till that Saturday when I caught the butterfly.

At home, we had a garden and two trees, one of which was not fully-grown, bending over to the wall so we could climb over it like a bridge. The garden grew wild and was not the kind that could be tamed or controlled. Like the pieces of photographs I had stuck in the book, I was in the habit of flattening all kinds of leaves and flowers. Jay, who lived across the street, taught us how to do that and then make dry flower cards with the pressed materials after a couple of months. In the north-east corner of the garden, pale lilac flowers grew with sebaceous leaves and if we plucked any part - flower, leaf or stem, sticky white milk would seep out, uncontrolled, like the plant was bleeding: we did not usually pick flowers from that plant. Piya and I preferred to press the violet satiny flowers that grew in sprays, maidenhair ferns, rose petals and hibiscus petals. They all lost their juice and color, became fragile and dry, brittle sometimes, but if we handled them carefully enough, we had survivors for the making. This is what I was doing that Saturday afternoon, collecting flora samples, except Piya had gone for her singing class with Mamma and I was doing it alone. The grass grew wild and untamed and when I walked across it, sometimes it got crushed and there was a raw stench that emanated from the ground. It was not too bad, but it was not so great either. The afternoon was hot and all kinds of insects were biting me mercilessly. I probably should have given up my adventures for that day as they were all bordering on prickly and sweaty but I had half an hour more to myself before Piya and Mamma returned, and I valued private time.

It was late afternoon when I saw the butterflies. The sun went partly behind the clouds and a light breeze blew from somewhere chasing the patterns of crossing stalks of grass and flitting butterflies. Some of them were the colour of raw silk, a pale shiny grey, catching the slanting rays and becoming silver in the pale light. They were tiny, unlike the yellow butterflies that were larger and slower, every once in a while sitting on a flower, opening their wings and sunbathing. They sat sometimes on the wild daisies with yellow pods and opened and closed their wings, slowly, softly, communicating messages to each other. If I went near, they would flutter away in panic. I followed them like a cat, silently waiting for the moment when they would fold their wings. There was one, a single yellow flutterer. I went up behind the unsuspecting butterfly and caught it when it was in the closed position. Then, I quickly placed it between the folds of my book, the book I had for the leaves and flowers and shut the pages tight. I held my breath tight just as I had held the butterfly’s breath squeezed between pages without air.

Later, when I opened the book, the butterfly was still and flat. It was clear to me that it was dead and I had killed it. Something about that lifeless butterfly made me feel sick. I was quiet at dinner that day and Mamma tried to pull me into the conversation but I did not talk much. Afterwards I sneaked up into my room and in the light of the night lamp, secretly looked at the butterfly. There was a powdery residue deposited on the page and a stain of some body fluid. Not red; I guess butterflies did not bleed. Suddenly, I thought it moved and I dropped the book. It was Piya who had just come in. We shared a room and when she opened the door, the change of pressure induced a gust of air to come in and that was enough to lift the butterfly’s light fragments into the air.

Piya noticed immediately how flustered I was and asked, “What’s up?”

“Nothing”, I said, hastily collecting my things and slipping the butterfly back in.

The life in it that made it breathe, move, suck honey, flutter and fly had escaped to some other place I did not know about. I did not like the sound of quicksand anymore.

~

Our school building was very old, much older than we ever imagined. Sister Josephine told us one morning at assembly on Founders Day that the school was built by the Irish as part of their missionary work and it was over a hundred years old. I did not believe her at first, as no one I knew was a hundred years old, not even my great grandfather who had a long white beard and lived by the sea. Even so, we could see age creeping into the yellowed arches with the whitewash flaking and the cobwebs on the high roofs and the bats that flew about and hung upside down at sundown. We saw the bats on days we stayed back for art class. Between half past three and half past four, Miss Padmaja made us draw leaves and flowers in pencil first and then we had to fill in the shades with crayons. When we stayed back late and the sun went down and it turned more evening than afternoon, the walls seemed to want to tell us stories and I could swear I heard them sigh. The window shutters were made with many slats, like venetian blinds, and they were painted a dull green. Through the gaps between the wooden slats of the shutters, the sun filtered in making parallel bands on the wooden desktops and the stripes of light fell on my hand to camouflage. On top of the long shutters, there were wooden arches like half a wheel with glass affixed and these could not be opened. Through the glass, I could see the sky and the leaves of the neem turning darker shades as the sun went down.  I drew the neem leaves and the changing hues in my drawing book, learning from light, how to see, understanding without realising, how some things would be clear and others, not.

Part of our school was a convent for the nuns but that was a secret activity we never found out about. The sisters lived in their quarters in an extension to the school and late afternoon when the school bell rang for closing, we saw them with their starched habits walking to their rooms down the open corridor with its tiled roof and frangipani trees on either side, the flowers falling on the ground at arbitrary moments, soft white with yellow and pink centres like mouths of children caught swallowing peppermints.  On some days like All Saints Day, we would hear the sound of hymns sung in the chapel, amplified to more than the chorus of mere men and women singing as if the angels had also joined in vibrato. The doors of the chapel would be closed and at the end of the service, we could hear the Father’s voice intoning prayers for Lord Jesus. It was the most uplifting experience, but I could not go to their special service as I was not Christian, though I could listen to their songs and sermons from outside. I was perpetually curious about how the Sisters of the Convent lived and what they did when they were not teaching us but there was no way to find out. One wing of the residential accommodation was located just beyond the Section C classrooms and that was the only time I had the closest access. It was a colonial style two-story building with outer walls that were almost two feet thick, with white lacy curtains on the open windows of the upper floor billowing in the breeze. At the entrance, the sisters kept rabbits in a large hutch as pets and we would manage to get there sometimes to watch them nibbling on greens, their eyes like large rubies in fluffy white heads. There was no reason for anyone to let children beyond this point and they did not give House Tours. I used to sneak up there to where the corridor ended and peep beyond the wicket gate. It was always latched from the other side. That was as far as I got and our classroom was south of the wicket gate next to a small yard with an old rubber tree with broad shiny leaves on which crows sat and cawed, waiting for our scraps from lunch. My desire to find out about the Sisterhood did not leave and it grew inside me, making me long for something I knew I could never have. I told myself that I could always sneak in there and if I was caught, make up an excuse that I had gone to see the rabbits.

Our class teacher, Miss Mary Parker was teaching us English poetry the day I was sitting by the window. Miss Mary was perusing the pages, looking for the poem she wanted to read out. She was Anglo-Indian and rather tall and lanky with curly brown hair that bounced all about her fair face with its angular edges.  She was pretty, sincere and young and I was always quite enthralled with her presence and hung on to every word she uttered. Through the chattering of children, Miss Parker called in a tremulous voice, “Quiet please, children! Page twenty. We will be reading The Fly and the Bumble Bee.” There was a shuffling of pages as we all turned the pages of our poetry books. That day, Miss Mary Parker wore a dress with a pattern of pale green leaves and white daisies that ended just above her bonny knees looking rather like a songbird herself as she recited Fiddle de dee, Fiddle dee dee, The Fly has married the Bumble Bee. But I could not concentrate for some reason; maybe it was the real bumblebee that came buzzing in and out at high speed, whirring like a helicopter and taking me out of orbit. It went around my head and outside the window and then returned to buzz annoyingly around my head. Miss Parker’s voice came in through all the humming. “Fiddle de dee, fiddle de dee, the Fly has married the Bumble Bee”, she recited in her lilting voice. At that point, I could not see Miss Mary Parker; I could not see the classroom and my friends, as all my attention was on the rubber tree outside and the rustling noise that came from above. It could have well been pigeons consorting and the fact that they were invisible to my eyes made it more tempting for me to try and spy on them.  I did not expect at that hour for psithurism to dominate Miss Parker’s mellifluous rendering of Fiddle Dee Dee, but it did and when she called, “Anika, please stand up and recite the first three verses”, having evidently finished her part, I did not hear her. “Anika!” she called, more sharply this time and the entire class fell into a lull. I was looking through the leaves of the tree, quite oblivious to the high command.

It happened that way sometimes as a child that I was not quite in the world everyone else was in. Bomijaan my cat had more interesting tales to tell me than my mother and the smell of freshly cut grass was more intoxicating than curry and rice. In the class too I had gotten distracted. Miss Mary, after reading, had to make us do our turn one after the other to recite and ordinarily she would have had no trouble with me, but that day it did not work out. “Anika, can you please stand up?” It was Shailja Ghosh the Bengali girl with shiny plaits who nudged me with a small grin on her face and I awoke from my reverie to see the entire classroom staring at me. Some of them were smothering giggles. The fact I was Miss Mary Parker’s favourite put her in an even worse spot. She could not forgive me for my attention lapse, as others would see it as partiality, so she had to punish me. She sighed and said, “Anika, you will stay back after class and write a hundred times – I will henceforth pay attention in class.” After the class left, I sat and wrote that a dozen times on each page as she corrected notebooks. Outside, the sun slanted across obliquely and the birds chattered through the glow of the late afternoon light. Somewhere cowbells clanked as cows returned home and at four o’ clock, the muezzin yodelled his prayer from the tower. Miss Mary Parker looked up at me and said she had to go to the Staff Office and back. It was around the time the nuns went back to their residence and as soon as Miss Parker left the room, I looked expectantly at the corridor and at the windows above in the building at the end, hoping to catch some movement, a hint of a nun in a habit closing a window or drinking a cup of tea or munching on a biscuit.  In the flickering rays of light slanting into the corridors gently dappling the stone floors, as I wished, I saw two sisters walk down, their shoes clicking in the quiet. As they walked further down, almost at the end, it seemed as if there was a haze of light between them, like an apparition. It was that time of the afternoon when the light kept changing, diffident in its direction and some things were clear and others fuzzy, so I could not be too sure. The sun went behind clouds and inside the classroom it became dim. If Miss Mary Parker had been there, she would have turned on the light, but she was gone. I ran out of the classroom and sneaked up behind the sisters and followed them to the wicket gate. It squeaked and opened at their pushing. On the left, just beyond the gate, was the rabbits’ hutch and Sister Miranda, next in charge after the Principal, lived in the quarters there on the ground floor. I saw her feeding the rabbits from where I was and they twitched their noses and nibbled without bothering about anyone who passed. From above, the curtains parted and I saw a shadowy figure looking down. It looked like a young girl, not a nun. The thought suddenly flashed in my head: was it Mercy Stevens? Even as I watched, I saw the curtains quickly being yanked closed. Afraid of being caught and knowing I was trespassing, I ran back, scared and breathless. I had just got into the room and at my seat when the door swung open and Miss Parker returned to the class, her books and bag balanced between two hands.

“Miss Parker!” I said, nervously and she looked at me, surprised.

“Yes, child?”

“Is Mercy Stevens gone forever?”

Somewhat startled but quickly collecting herself, she answered, “Yes dear, she has gone up to the Angels. She is safe now.”

I was, of course, more concerned about my own safety, than Mercy Stevens’ but I could not confess to Miss Parker my selfish interests. She counted my writing which I had done fifty times and let me off the balance. For the rest of that afternoon, instead of making me write I will henceforth pay attention in class, Mary Parker taught me new words and how they were used.  I learnt about the rippling of the brook, the rustling of leaves, the whistling and howling of the wind. Normally these words would have brought me close to the world of nature, which I loved, but that day, howling, rustling and babbling only sent chills down my spine. At half past four, I put the books in my satchel, relieved we were leaving and Miss Parker locked up the classroom. On my way out, Mercy Stevens and the apparition kept coming back. I could not figure out whether I had really seen something or not, but there was no way of asking anyone. My world was different as I mentioned earlier. There was much that I saw that adults did not see and even if I told them, they would not believe me. It was best to keep it to myself.

At the end of the term, when I went with Mamma and Pa to buy a gift for Miss Mary Parker, I got her The White Woman. It was a ghost story and Mamma frowned at the choice. “What makes you think she’ll want to read that?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone want to find out more about ghosts?”

Mamma shrugged and paid for the book. Even though I had felt confident about my purchase when I bought it, I was nervous when the last day of school came and I had to gift it to Miss Parker. I waited till the class disbanded and pulled out the book from my bag and gave it to her, feeling embarrassed. She opened the front flap where I had written, “To my favourite Teacher Miss Mary Parker”. Miss Parker said she had not expected a present and she hugged and thanked me. She was wearing a dress of marigolds with a broad belt that had a silver buckle and high heels that day and she smelled as lovely as a flower whose name I did not know. It was summer vacation after that day and like many happenings in our childhood, I soon forgot all about Mercy Stevens in the coffin at the chapel and new quests occupied my appetite for life.