Where Earth Meets Water. Pia Padukone
I chose to abandon them so long ago. I don’t wish to reenter your life again, because I am positive that you have made a new start, and a great one, at that. I am sure that you have provided for Savita and made a home for yourself. This doesn’t pardon what I did, and please try to believe me, I have spent many years trying to correct it in my head. But I can’t correct it in life, nor can I erase it from memory. It happened and I have spent a great many years hoping that I can one day make it up to you. The fact remains that we don’t have many days left. I’m not writing to be morbid or, again, to guilt you into responding to me. God knows that you are your own person, a strong-willed person who has made her own life. No one is going to tell you what to do now, and certainly not me, your heel of a husband who comes slinking back with his tail between his legs decades later, wanting to know what became of the life he left behind.
Here are some things about me since I left.
1 I went to college, so we are intellectual equals now. Unless, of course, you have taken another degree.
2 I live in Bangalore, where you would think I would have learned computers ages ago, but as you know, I was always a bit of a dullard.
3 I live alone and have never remarried and had no other children.
4 I’ve given up drinking. I’ve been sober for thirty-seven years.
5 I’ve given up women. I am not an ascetic and don’t isolate myself from society, but I don’t see women anymore. I don’t run about with different girls and make a spectacle of myself.
6 The impetus behind numbers four and five was your story “The Invisible Husband.”
I know that you are Shanta Nayak. I knew it the moment I read the first few chapters and stories in True Stories of Make Believe. I kept seeing people engrossed in the book on the bus and clutching it as they walked down the street. The cover looked like a children’s book, but adults were devouring it. So I went to a bookshop, sank down in a corner and read it from cover to cover. I knew it was you. The characters and style were unmistakable. It was me, and you, and Savita and my family and your family. The stories were so honest. The book was a mirror with my face reflecting back. The shopkeepers had long before given up on shooing me out, but the moment I finished the book, I went back to the small room I was renting at the time and looked at myself in the glass. I was despicable. I couldn’t stand myself. And it only took some serious anger issues, an alcohol problem, womanizing, an abandoned marriage leaving behind a wife and a daughter, and a book of fairytales that illustrated our lives to show me that. But I made a change.
I want you to know that I am not telling you this because I want a piece of your success. You have worked for it and earned it. I want no part in it.
You know, for some time, I holidayed each summer, alternating between Goa and Kovalam with the same pack of useless friends who I’d see once a year when they would leave their wives for some fun. I didn’t enjoy their company as much after I read your books. I didn’t even enjoy my own company, for that matter.
But, for what it’s worth at this point in our lives, I do want to say this: I am sorry. I feel those are futile words, but I need to say them. I am sorry. And if you’ll let me hear all that I have missed over the years, I will say them again and again, each time we correspond. I will wait as long as I have to, or as long as I physically can, for your response and your blessing to learn all that has passed me by over the years.
If you have reached this stage of the letter, thank you. Thank you for listening to me. You don’t owe me anything. But thank you for hearing me out and considering my plea.
Yours,
Dev
Kamini sits back and breathes for what feels like the first time since she began scrolling through the letter. She thinks about herself—getting old, as he said in his letter. She isn’t sure it has happened. That is the thing about growing old with someone; they remain as a mirror for your own eyes. You can watch as their hair grows curly and wispy with loss of strength, then slowly metamorphoses to paper-thin and charcoal, stark white, sometimes even a dull, tepid brown not unlike leaves in Northeast America, from where Savita sent her pictures from the family trip driving up the coast in the autumn. This phenomenon doesn’t happen in India; the changing of the guard from lush to stark, from green to brown, from leaves to mulch. You can watch the slight smile wrinkles when they curve and peek out in the corners of eyes; at the time they are considered charming because you are considered young then. But you can watch as they pave the way for deeper grooves, etched into the face you know so well. You can watch as those grooves eventually take over to redefine the person you’ve known for so long without them.
You can feel the coconut-soft of someone else’s skin, measure it against your own and realize that there is a richness, a fattiness within the epidermis that continuously churns out that buttery-leather feeling, unlike when you age, and the same finger that you use to check yourself is already leathery without the butter, so you can’t quite differentiate what has changed and when. You can watch in that mirror as someone goes from tall, proud, confident, upright, the angles somehow shifting, like the plates beneath the earth during a quake, ever so subtly forward to humbled, tired, shoulders sagging and stooped. You can watch the bright white squares of teeth in a mouth that smile, bite, laugh, brush, before they yellow, shrink and become brittle like the former husks of themselves. And there is never a question if or when or how these things happen to you, because you see them happening right there across from you at the dining table, lying parallel to you in bed, brushing their teeth with the same movements as yours, mimicking your every move. If they are happening in that body across the way, they are happening within you. But a looking glass doesn’t act as quite the same mirror; she hasn’t watched these changes gradually, over time, so has she aged? She can’t tell.
Twice. He has used the word sorry twice. This is a foreign word to Kamini, just like please and thank you. In Konkani, her familial language, these words don’t exist. Gita had brought this up to Kamini when Kamini had pressed her and her sisters to try to speak it more often, lest it die out with Savita. As it is, Savita has only taught them nominal Konkani, the kind that young children want to hear in order to gossip about others in front of their faces or insult Americans without their knowledge.
“Why don’t we have words for please, thank you, for sorry?” Gita had asked. “Is Konkani so impolite that we can’t offer these soft words of solace?”
Kamini had clucked at her. “On the contrary, Konkani is so polite and spoken so sweetly that you never have need for these words. These are English ideals—harsh, unbecoming. So what? You insult someone with rotten words and with the same breath tell them that you are sorry? No. You ask for something nicely, so it doesn’t necessitate having to use please. You take it from them the same way, with a smile, gently, so thank you becomes obsolete, too. And you don’t hurt someone intentionally or insult someone intentionally or cross someone intentionally, so that your American idea becomes in our language ‘my mistake’—never something we have done that we regret.”
So where has Dev picked up this foreign idea of sorry? Has he watched American television shows where husbands and wives defy one another to do things they shouldn’t and then with three minutes remaining to the episode murmur an unfeeling sorry, hug one another and then roll the credits? These sorrys; whether his boy has typed out one, two or forty, they will never penetrate into Kamini’s conscience.
And the defiance of him—telling her who she was. He has no right. He has no idea who she is. He has never known who she is, and besides, if he’d had an inkling, he’d lost that privilege the moment he’d stepped out the door for the last time. Her stomach churns with these things—aging, sorry, his arrogant outing of her through a long-overdue email.
Suddenly, she starts as though she hears his boots in the hallway once again. She flinches as though he has raised his hand to upset the lamps and deities for her morning ritual. She can hear his rustling in the bathroom as he prepares himself for his bath, the gentle scuffing of the shaving-cream brush against his stubble, the dull scraping of the razor against his skin. She can hear the wardrobe door slamming open as he sorts through his clothes and selects a fresh shirt to wear with his uniform.
The