Oleander Girl by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

important it was to be truthful, have perpetrated such an enormous, criminal lie? All night I paced the temple veranda, trying to make sense of Grandmother’s confession. It couldn’t be true. I had my mother’s note, mourning her dead husband. But how did I know that? Could I have been reading it wrong this whole time? What if impossibly far away hadn’t meant he was dead, but only that he was in America? I tried telling myself Grandmother was confused. She was old and under a lot of stress. But deep down, I knew. It isn’t always possible to discern a lie, but truth has an unmistakable ring, and that is what I’d heard in her voice.
    How will I ever trust anyone again?
    I hear footsteps behind me and stiffen, but it’s only Cook, blundering through the bushes, carrying tea and biscuits.
    “I’ve been looking for you all over the place! Oh, goodness, look at those horrible ants! If they get hold of you, you’ll be swollen like a balloon. And the itching—I’m telling you, you can’t even imagine how terrible it can be.”
    She squats down, holding out the steaming cup of tea and my favorite cream-filled biscuits.
    “Here, have some tea, baby. Tea always makes you feel better. And then tell old Cook what’s wrong.”
    I’d expected to be too upset for hunger, but I find that I’m ravenous. I’m touched, too, by Cook’s efforts. I’m about to give her a hug. Then I remember that Cook has been in the family since before I was born. Was she, too, part of this deception? Each time she saw me, did she think, Poor girl! She doesn’t even know her father is alive!
    I turn my face away until Cook leaves the food on a pile of bricks andgoes back to the house. Then I dip the biscuits, innocent and delicious, in the tea, so they melt effortlessly on my tongue. A breeze blows through the neem tree, bringing me its clean, therapeutic odor. A dragonfly made of shimmery gauze alights on a bramble. Two crows are building a nest in the crook of a branch, their movements an intricate, precise dance. Yes, it’s terrible, what my grandparents did. It’ll take me a long time to recover from that blow. But the fact I learned last night—isn’t it also a miracle of sorts? A dead father brought back to life? And along with him, a way to finally know my mother, that silhouette forever glimmering at the edge of my mind, those few scribbles of love on a page?
    Eighteen years lost already—I can’t waste any more time. The need to find out everything about my parents, suddenly, is like an ache in my bones, a deep deficiency. So much that I’ve been deprived of all this time. I run back to the house, ignoring the thorns that catch at my kameez.
    I find her in her bedroom. She has opened the windows so the room is full of the wild, enigmatic odor of oleanders.
    “Tell me everything,” I say.
    “Sit down,” she says. “You’ll need it.”

    “Your mother came late to your grandfather and me, after three miscarriages. The doctor had warned us not to try again, but your grandfather couldn’t bear the thought of the family name dying with him. When I got pregnant a fourth time, he was delighted—and terrified that something would go wrong again. At the delivery, he insisted on remaining in the birthing room of the hospital, something men never did in those days. When Anu was born, he took her from the nurse even before I’d had the chance to hold her. Maybe that was why they loved each other so intensely and later hurt each other so bitterly.
    “Your grandfather brought Anu up as the son he never had. But he could never forget that she was a girl. Thus his two main passions—that Anu should excel in whatever she did, and that she should be brought up as befitted a daughter of the Roy family—crashed constantly against each other. When she was chosen for her school’s national debate team,he took a week off from court so that he could take her to Delhi for the tournament. But if they were in a gathering of his friends,