Where Earth Meets Water. Pia Padukone
do that?”
Raj smiles. “There’s a little catch here in the front. You push, slide, and the computer is open. Next, plug it in, like this. And finally, the most important thing—the power button.” Raj pushes it, and sound reverberates throughout the sitting room. Kamini jumps back while Raj chuckles. “You’ll get used to it. I’m assuming your neighbors have wireless connection, so until we hook yours up, we’ll borrow theirs.”
“I should take notes.”
“There’s really no need. It will all come to you. Just watch me and then you do it. I’m to stay here until you get the hang of things.”
“I’ll put on some tea,” Kamini says, and sweeps into the kitchen. “Don’t do anything until I return.”
* * *
It quickly becomes an urban legend: Kamini Auntie, Kamini Amma, Kamini Dadima, has email. She has a Facebook page. She knows how to instant message. Everyone wants to email her and they do; she can barely keep up with her correspondence. Her nieces and nephews, scattered about the country, learn about her latest venture and write to her. Gita and her sisters, Ranja and Maila, email furiously when they learn their grandmother has learned to type and send emails, but the messages peter off when other things arise or when Kamini sends them only three-sentence responses to their three-paragraph notes. She just doesn’t have time to respond and she doesn’t want to leave anyone out. Savita prefers calling, as she has every Sunday morning since she moved to America, but wants to encourage her mother, so she sends a few lines off every now and then. Kamini is exploring a whole new world, one at the very reaches of her fingertips. Her typing is getting faster, and she is getting increasingly curious, though Raj has warned her of the dangers of chat rooms.
Even her morning routine has been completely altered. She still awakes, does her ritual and has her tea. But while the bucket is trickling to the top, she turns on the laptop and checks her email. Raj has taught her to read the newspaper online, check cricket scores, read book reviews, even find comments and fan websites about her own book. There is no end to what one can learn. Her bucket usually spills over while she is engrossed with family letters—she will never learn to call them emails—and when her bath is over and her hair braided and pinned back atop her head, she settles back to the round table and taps away.
On her second week, Pinki rings. “Well, Kaminiji, settling in? Raj told me you were a natural.”
“It’s a lot to take in, but it’s very exciting. I’ve learned a lot already.”
“That’s wonderful. But my question is—what have you written other than emails? Any seeds of inspiration? Pearls of wisdom? Iotas of thought? See, this is why I’m an editor and not a writer.”
Kamini chuckles. “I honestly haven’t given much thought to the stories. I’ve been rather distracted.”
“Well, I don’t expect them to come overnight. Take some time and think them through. Spend time with your family, around young ones. See what sorts of things they are dealing with these days. What if I gave you six months to come up with a new collection? Nine months? One year is the latest I can go, I’m afraid.”
“Within the year, Pinki. I promise. I’ll come see you in three months with notes and an outline. Okay?”
So Kamini works furiously. She offers to babysit for her frenzied grandnieces and grandnephews, telling her family to drop the children off at her place if they have errands to run or friends to see. She watches them interact with one another and notes how they play with her. She gently pries handheld video games out of their hands and teaches them to play cat’s cradle with a piece of string, shows them the simplicity of jacks using backyard stones, introduces them to chess and checkers. She chats with them about what they fear at school or under the bed, what they want more than anything in the world, other than the next electronic game for their handheld console. She reads them stories from her past two volumes and inquires about their favorites. It is the first time she’s spent time with small children since Gita, Maila and Ranja grew up, and it is difficult at first to remind herself of how to associate with these smaller creatures, but she falls into it like a rhythm.
After three months she compiles her notes and scratches of observations from her family and types them up. Then she sits at her table, ignoring the siren call of email, and writes two solid stories in preparation for the meeting with Pinki. She takes a taxi to his office in Friends Colony and sits with him at his desk as he pores over them. At the end of the hour, he sits back, twirling his mustache and gripping his pipe between his teeth.
“I don’t know, Kamini. They don’t have the same fire, that grit that was so beautifully manifested in your first two. Your connection to these children seems superficial. Perhaps you can look at it from another angle. You need to keep working at it. Get some rest, and start fresh in the morning.”
Despondent, she takes the notes from him and climbs back into another taxi. How will she change things? She has access to only her family’s children, and if they proved uninspiring, well, then she will have to truly dig into the alcoves of her mind to find a nugget of a story. What is the matter with her? The other two books flowed like rivers, gushing out of her fingertips as her pen scratched across pages and pages. It was only after the collections had been written that she had revisited the words with Savita to make edits.
She steps back into her flat, releases the packet of notes next to her laptop and presses the power button, springing the machine to life. She puts a kettle of tea on and settles down to check her email. One from Gita, more details about her pending visit with Karom, some useless sirdar jokes from her nephew and one from an unknown email address. Her hand hovers over the mouse. Raj has also warned her about opening “spam” messages that can send a disease into her computer and erase everything on it, infecting all her hard work. But this email address has her own last name, Pai, so she inhales shortly and clicks on it.
Dear Kamini,
I heard that you learned how to use a computer, that you have one at home. That is a great feat, especially at your age. Myself, I am dictating this letter to a young boy at the internet café for the cost of a beer. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to you. My first notion was that any letter to you should be filled with apologies. A complete page of apologies. But pages don’t quite exist in email, so I am trying another route.
Forty-six years ago, I walked out our door. I don’t know whether you keep track of this, but I do with each passing day. I am not proud of having left you, but it’s also something I had to do at the time. I can get into why I did it but I want some sign from you that this is okay: Is it all right to contact you now or would you rather I stayed away? I know that you have done well for yourself; I find out bits and pieces from the guards at the gate. As you know, they work through Securicom, just as I did. We don’t email, however. I call them every few months. But you are legendary with your computer skills. Your email address was easy to obtain; everyone has been talking about you. I’m very impressed with you, Kamini. I’ve always been impressed with you. It’s partly why I left. But I refuse to depose the blame onto you, nor do I want to venture into those arenas just yet. It’s been forty-six years and I am an old man, as I can imagine you are an old woman, as well.
I have trouble picturing you as an old woman. It’s not easy for me to fast-forward the image of you I have in my mind and lighten your raven hair or sag your skin with wrinkles. I am sure you have all your teeth, as you were fastidious about brushing each and every morning and night. I imagine you have a silver sheath of hair that you continue to braid and pin atop your head after your bath. I feel these are things that I know inherently, but the things that I don’t know have been aching me. One thing I want you to know from the start: I am not dying. I haven’t written this to you in an attempt to guilt you into responding to me. I am as healthy as I will ever be without disease in my body. So you can decide to respond to me of your own accord. But the curiosity is killing me.
I wonder if we have grandchildren, and where our daughter is. I wonder if you have traveled outside the perimeter of our country. Have you ever been on a plane? I wonder if you have entertained the thought of remarriage, though the guards tell me that you