Where Earth Meets Water. Pia Padukone
she hasn’t heard it. Dev’s words wash over her again and again. Steam puffs out of the spout of the kettle in the kitchen, scalding water spilling over onto the stove, but Kamini doesn’t shut it off. She stands up, slams the laptop shut, hurries into the bathroom and retches into the toilet.
* * *
Three days later she still doesn’t feel back to normal. She has eaten toast and drunk countless cups of sugary tea, but she hasn’t reopened her laptop or thought through the stories she owes Pinki. She watches mindless serials on the television, the dramatic music soaring around her, capturing her in melodrama. She focuses on fake problems, other people’s lives, only changing the channel when a story line threatens to mimic her own. The writers of these serials are either the stupidest people on earth or the smartest, because they create such insipid, flimsy plots that leave you with a cliff-hanger that any intelligent person can decode before the next day’s episode, but somehow you turn the television on anyway just to ensure that your hunch is right. And these actresses! They must hire only those women with the largest eyes for full dramatic effect whenever they are shocked or shamed or cuckolded. Kamini imagines the auditions, where they measure the circumference of pupils rather than dramatic talent.
She has abandoned her notes and the thoughts from the meeting with Pinki, wanting to approach the assignment with a fresh mind and new approach. It is unlike her not to respond to an email, as she has done for years to letters on ancient blue aerogram paper, so thin her pen would pierce it numerous times during her vigorous scratching to her granddaughters or a cousin abroad. Even if she is busy, she will at least begin her response within a few days. Raj has explained a little about email etiquette to her. He has told her about junk email and spam; he has shown her how to block someone’s email address if they become a nuisance and he has shown her how to report someone sending impertinent messages. She isn’t sure what she is going to do, considers whether her silence is a message enough, but on the fourth day, she opens her clamshell and types: ...
The response is almost immediate. She should have held out.
Dear Kamini,
Thank you, thank you thank you thank you. This was a great sign from you, though any response would have been welcomed. Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure what it means. If you have found it in your heart not to reject me completely—even if that’s the extent of it—I am grateful. The same boy is typing my note to you, free of charge. He says that this is a great exchange, a great love story, and he wants to see how it will turn out. I told him not to hold his breath, but as you know, at our age, every rupee counts, so I haven’t turned him down.
I can tell you more about myself, as that’s how I interpret your ellipsis. It’s absolutely fair that I show my hand before you consider telling me anything. I will go back nearly half a century to when we were still technically living under the same roof, though I was rarely home and would sleep most of the time that I was there. You prepared meals lovingly, and though we were never friends, we threaded together some loose seams of courtesy and acceptance within one another. You realized that my job kept me out all night, caring for office buildings that I could never work in, and you raised our daughter, silently and without fuss. I realize what a step down for you our marriage was. You were college educated. You could have had your choice of men, of paths, of professions. You could have been a self-made woman. My father told me your scores from university were flawless. I was impressed but also extremely humbled and scared.
My parents, my mother especially, had always impressed the importance of studies on me. It’s not a revelation; I think you must have received the same from your aunts and uncles. One could never achieve their passion in life without the grades necessary to prove oneself. Praying, in my household, was part and parcel of receiving these good grades. Saraswati would smile down on me if I beseeched her before a final exam. I should bow my head in quiet contemplation before I sat down to my books. But what I failed to mention was that I was useless. I could study my whole life and it just wouldn’t stick. I had tutorials, extra classes. I wasn’t built to excel on these exams. So I would invest all my attentions into prayer and of course that would never work because I hadn’t put in the work required to help me learn in the first place. Nothing would come of it. Prayer became useless to me because I would pray nonstop and receive nothing in the end as benefit. So I turned my loathing from studies to prayer because it was an easier thing to hate; it was a less caustic and obvious thing to hate. You couldn’t hate studies; if you hated studies and learning, it meant that you were an imbecile. If you hated prayer, you were simply a nonbeliever.
At first, I thought marrying an intelligent woman would somehow bring me up in status, but among my other doltish friends, it just lowered me in their eyes. I was the pea-brain, the brute, the workhorse. You were the quietly strong woman who had been through it all—a multitude of homes, ever-changing fathers and mothers—and now you had a degree and a know-how that I would never obtain. Not to mention that you appeared street-smart on top of your scripted education. That’s not why I drank. Or why I chased women—at the time believing that you were none the wiser. How could I have imagined that you wouldn’t know, when my uniform would come home stinking of perfume and you were the one who did the washing, scrubbing away the evidence of lipstick and whiskey stains as though it had never occurred?
No, I take full responsibility for my actions, and my actions were wrong. I shouldn’t have done that to you, Kamini, or rather, I shouldn’t have married you when I knew what a wrong union it would be. I knew how desperate you were to make your own home and to start a new life away from the constantly rotating merry-go-round of your youth, tripping from one threshold to another just as one family tired of you. I knew you didn’t want to become someone’s charity case, so perhaps that’s why you cooked and cleaned and played dumb as you did for the ten years we were married. However, having just dictated that, I don’t know. Are we still married? I never put in for a divorce and my guards at the gate don’t know the particulars of your life now.
Kamini stops reading. She closes the window that looks into her past with Dev and sits back in her chair. She hits the power button and the computer hums to sleep. She reaches for the notebook where she has carefully taken Pinki’s notes and begins to scribble.
* * *
The first story trickles out of her at first, the words edging their way hesitantly, but gradually, they gather speed, and before she knows it, she has sheets and sheets in front of her in her tiny curly handwriting. She can never type as fast as the words appear from her brain, and the insistence with which the story tumbles forward seems no match for her computer skills. She laughs at times at her foolishness and then pities herself for her oversight. Eventually, though, once the whole thing is down on paper, she is angry.
Kamini doesn’t get angry. Her family has always teased her for being levelheaded and neutral, for taking everything in stride, for accepting the world and its people as they are. But the fact is that growing up, Kamini couldn’t afford to be angry. She couldn’t risk a temper or a tantrum when something didn’t go her way, because she was on someone else’s turf, and the moment she irked them or reminded them that she really didn’t have to be there, she’d be packing her few possessions and on her way to the next aunt’s, uncle’s or family friend’s home. So even when her cousin trampled across her only school uniform with his baby feet, leaving a trail of soggy, muddy footprints across the collar, she swallowed her fury and washed it quietly in the courtyard. When her uncle jolted home thunderously drunk on the eve of her university admittance exams, she lay still and allowed him to sing loudly in the living room where she slept—even clapped for an encore when he indignantly demanded one. She didn’t speak up—though her temper was flaring—to accuse him of sabotaging her chances at stepping off the roulette wheel that had become her life. In their youth, cousins and nieces and nephews had taken advantage of her, taking the ice cream bestowed to her because they knew she wouldn’t yowl, leaving her with the ratty ribbon for her hair, running ahead to the school gate so she would have to dodge traffic on her own. Kamini’s temper was like an eclipse: rare and always obscured by her fear of dismissal.
But