Free Tell It to the Trees by Anita Rau Badami

day, my father gave me a few small pieces of jewellery that had belonged to my mother. “This is your mother’s blessing, your insurance against bad times, my beloved child,” he said, pressing the soft velvet pouches into my hands. “Which I hope you will never have to use.”
    On that beautiful autumn morning, when the notes of the nadaswaram swelled out joyously over the wedding guests, when the mridangam players slapped their hands hard against the leather stretched tight over their drums in a rising crescendo to signal the auspicious moment when Vikram tied the thaali around my neck, I would never have believed that I might one day contemplate selling my inheritance to strangers in pawnshops halfway across the world.

Varsha
    Another memory. Stronger this time. I was almost seven years old. It was a cold, clouded morning in December. Snow floated down like flowers from a low grey sky. Papa was at work, Akka was dozing in her room. And I can see me: I am on the floor of the book-room working on some drawings. This room is special. It’s too small to call it anything as grand as a library, but it’s where our father reads to us some evenings after dinner, his voice, which I think of as being a sort of golden brown colour, and warm as toasted marshmallows on a cold evening, comforting as milk and cookies, carrying us into the worlds hiding inside those books. Our family photographs live on the walls: my grandfather with a black mouse of a moustache perched over his chubby lips, standing straight as an electric pole behind Akka who is seated and is resplendent in wedding finery, her beringed hands holding down her knees as if she’s afraid they might kick up and down and run away with her; Papa, grinning and missing two teeth, about Hem’s age in one picture, solemn inanother with a graduate’s robes and a degree roll in his hand, ready to go out into the world and light it up with his brilliance; Suman, wearing giant dark glasses that hide most of her face, her mouth painted pink and fixed in a tight smile, with Papa a handsome prince, arm draped around her shoulders like a python, his fingers, a bunch of bananas, hanging over her right breast; and finally one of all four of us, smiling as if our lives depended on it. Behind this you can see the space where my real mother’s photograph used to hang before Papa ripped it off the wall and threw it away. Sometimes when the new picture of Papa, Suman, me and Akka goes slightly crooked, I know it’s my jealous Mom fidgeting behind it, wishing she’d never left.
    This is the room where the Punishments happen, where Papa’s belt cuts through the air and lands on my calves, or where I wait with bated breath while he checks my report card. Is he going to smile, or will he frown? Pat on the head or punishment? A sweet or a slap?
    That morning Suman was perched on a stepladder in our book-room, dusting the books, her enormous stomach pressed outwards, her hair a mess of curls around her face. She’s expecting a baby, but I know she’s not happy about it. I heard her crying in Akka’s room the day she found out.
    A cow mooed somewhere above me. A cow? Inside our house? Am I imagining things? Is it my real mom being a clown, trying to get my attention? She was always one for attention, my mother, always wanting people tolook at her, to admire her, to tell her how beautiful she was. But she wouldn’t moo, it isn’t elegant. I looked up at Suman. She was gazing absently at the opposite wall and seemed not to have heard a thing.
    “Mmooaw!” she said suddenly. “MMOWAAW!”
    She was holding on to the bookshelf with one hand and touching her belly with the other. An expression of alarm clouded her face, she looked at me without really seeing me. “The baby,” she whimpered. “I think it is coming.”
    I stared at her, not sure what I was supposed to do. She was clinging to the bookshelf. I pulled at a long strand of hair. It felt good, the slight tingle of pain in my