Where Earth Meets Water

Karom takes the watch off now, weighing it in the center of his palm. The skin underneath his watch is white and moist and gives off a peppery odor. The spicy scents of coconut and lentils waft down the corridor. He can hear Gita as she pads into the kitchen and muffled conversation as she sets the table. The watchstrap is fraying, but in a charming antique way. He rotates the dial, watching the hands spin freely. He picks up the flat pillow and the three sheets that are folded on his pallet bed, and for an instant, he considers leaving the watch on top of the pile. Instead he slaps it back onto his wrist and pulls it tight through the loopholes before pulling his sleeve to cover the face. Karom fluffs the pillow and places it on top of the pile before picking up his suitcase and rolling it into the hallway.

Kamini

Kamini has never considered herself religious. Her nieces and lady cousins all behave as though their community spiritual leader were a cult master and they follow him about the country glassy-eyed and full of praise. She has to give the man credit, though; he is learned not only in the heavenly scriptures but is well-read, inhaling everything from Popular Mechanics to New York Times bestsellers. He recently led a lecture on “How the Ethics of The Da Vinci Code Apply to Our Everyday Lives as Hindus.” It also doesn’t hurt that he is ruggedly handsome, with his scruffy beard and soft eyes. But Kamini has never bought it.

It’s not that Kamini is an atheist or even agnostic. She accepts and she believes. Just not the way the rest of the community might prefer. When those buildings were struck at the very point of New York City where the two rivers come together, she lit candles and prayed. When the terrorists attacked all the fancy Bombay hotels where the tourists, the business elite and their mistresses stayed, she did the same. With the tsunami, with her daughter’s first pregnancy—and then her second and then third, all bearing the nascent fruit of long, lean girls with thick glossy black hair. When Sachin Tendulkar played the test match in South Africa. And she prayed the night before the United States announced that they had voted in that president they called “Dub-ya” for the second time.

It isn’t religion. It is ritual. Just as writing has become her religion now in addition to her ritual. Her whole life, she’s always felt as though she is on the brink of something. Nothing has felt settled or fulfilled. There has always been a longing, a waiting, desiring. Nothing has felt as though she were fully in the moment, because she has learned that there is nothing she can get comfortable with. Nothing, that is, until she began to write.

Somehow, amid all distractions of raising her daughter in a single-parent household, she’d managed to discover a talent. One that would establish some sort of living for herself and her daughter once it was clear that it would be the two of them from here on out. From the time her daughter, Savita, was born, Kamini had a full stock of stories. She’d heard hundreds over the years, from her aunts and uncles, cousins and family friends. She unearthed the round-robin story hours from her year with her cousins in the small house, where they’d lain in circles passing morsels and beginnings of a story from person to person until a fable was born. She used the foundations of these tales as the source of new ones and changed details so they were unrecognizable from those tales she told with her cousins. The stories served as a source of quiet time for herself and Savita before the door barged open invariably at some witching hour of the morning and Kamini’s husband reentered their lives.

At some point, she began writing them down—those she’d created in her youth and those she spun at Savita’s bedside behests, and at some point, she sent one harmlessly to a children’s magazine. And they sent her back a check. So she sent another. And then suddenly, out of the woodwork, there it was: a living. It wasn’t enough to keep herself and Savita in riches but it afforded their basics and allowed them a meal or two out each month.

It was a strange living, one that she couldn’t admit to her family or friends, because during this time in their lives, in India it was considered uncouth for a woman—an abandoned woman especially—to go out and look for work. Never mind the strange dichotomy in this; if she didn’t earn a living, she and her daughter would starve because no one was offering handouts. Somehow she was just expected to go on with their lives as if her husband, Dev, was still there, bringing in his handsome salary as head of a security unit in Breach Candy. So she wrote. She devised stories of all shapes and forms, testing them out on Savita before she dared to seal the envelope and send them in to the editor. Savita would—true to character—challenge her on several endings.

“Mama, why would the troll so easily give up his control of the land? What does he have to gain from it?”

“Mama, sometimes you write these girls as if they are so stupid. No one would make such empty-headed decisions. Why would Princess Ajanta choose a man with brute strength over a man who can outwit anyone in the kingdom? It just doesn’t make sense.” At this one, Kamini had bristled. When had she ever made a decision in her life? she’d argued. Everything had been decided for her. From the clothes she wore to the schools she attended to the home she lived in to the man she married.

“Maybe I am stupid,” Kamini had spat back for the first time, “so you’ll have to help me guide these girls.”

Together they submitted hundreds of stories to children’s magazines and housewives’ digests, until eventually a magazine editor decided to publish an anthology of her short stories.

Kamini had been jolted into a harsh reality. “You can’t print my name on the cover,” she’d begged over the phone. “It has to be an alias.”

The editor had sighed heavily. “These are your stories, are they not? Come, now, aren’t you proud of your work? You’ve put years into this collection. Stand behind it. You never know what doors it will open for you.”

“As long as I am getting a paycheck, that’s all that matters to me. Please understand, Mr. Devindra.”

And so her collection had been published, with a pale blue hard cover with gold lettering: Tales of Girls and Animals by Shanta Nayak. It was most difficult for Kamini, publishing a book on her own and—save Savita—not being able to tell anyone about it. The book became her friends’ and family’s go-to bedtime bible and she would watch as some of her younger nieces and nephews would tote it about, dog-eared and stained, everywhere they went, hugging it to their chests as they sat meekly on sofas during family visits.

“This Shanta Nayak has really done a number on us all. Now on those long train rides to see my in-laws, the kids just sit and read quietly without chewing my tongue and driving me to pieces. God bless her, truly,” Kamini’s second cousin said.

“She must be from our community itself,” her sister responded. “Nayak is a Konkani name.”

“I hadn’t even thought of it,” the first second cousin said. “She should do a story hour with all the children. They’d love it.” For a moment Kamini’s blood ran cold. She’d be found out. Luckily, the editor wrote back to her cousins that Shanta Nayak was too busy for public appearances, that she was already hard at work on the sequel. And that was how Kamini was coerced into writing a second book. This time with new stories from the crevices of her mind and without the support of Savita, who was enrolled in college in America and had little time to help her mother concoct fairytales. These stories, however, were a little more biting. They were closer to home. Kamini wrote of a man who drank too much potion and tottered around in the background of the heroine’s house uselessly until the girl had to save him from the forest fire that would have otherwise consumed them all. Instead of an evil witch, there was a slave-driving auntie who would whip her young girl workers if they didn’t produce enough golden flax from the magic wheat that grew in their mystical fields.

“What are these, Kaminiji?” Pinki Devindra had demanded. “These are too bitter for children. I can’t print these.”

“They’re a bit more...realistic. We can’t have our children growing up without realizing the harsh truths of life.” The editor had harrumphed on the other end of the line but eventually printed them as they were, and Shanta Nayak’s True Stories of Make Believe landed on shelves the following month. At first, mothers were shocked at their brusqueness. They didn’t buy the books for their children, but True Stories of Make Believe became somewhat of a cult classic when children discovered it on their own, smuggling copies into their homes as though it were a trashy magazine with naked pictures of women. They read it under their covers and traded the same raggedy book among their friends. Soon parents had to admit that the stories were honest, though brutal, and began purchasing the book themselves.

Now—Kamini can hardly believe it—she has been living off her profits for the past thirty years. The books are still in high demand, and though she is still in her cramped East Delhi apartment, her books feed, clothe and keep her warm at night. She feeds Mr. Devindra—now Pinki to her—a short story from time to time, whenever she can no longer keep his ceaseless nagging for new work at bay. Savita married a man she met in college. They live in a state called Ohio—a place that Kamini thinks sounds constantly surprised to hear its own name. And though she misses her daughter, Kamini finally lives alone: with her routine, with her stories, with her ritual.

Which is why she is annoyed by Pinki’s phone call this morning. He has been hounding her for a few reasons: to purchase a computer, to learn how to use it and to write a third book. He is in his early seventies now but with skin stretched as tight as a young man’s and dark gray eyes that sparkle when he coaxes Kamini to write. He visits her from time to time, sometimes to drop off a packet of fan letters, other times a children’s magazine he thinks she will enjoy. But today he is calling to alert her that a package is on its way to her house by special courier.

“I’m sending you a laptop computer, Kaminiji. It’s one of the ones that folds, so it won’t take up any more room than is necessary in your flat. I’m also sending a boy to teach you to use it. It’s been fifteen years since True Stories of Make Believe. Leave a legacy, Kaminiji. Two books are insufficient. A trilogy is a legacy.” Kamini sighs and shifts her weight as she stands hunched over the phone in the kitchen. She is roasting chilies and the smell is starting to suffocate her. She turns toward the stove, pulling the phone cord with her, and applies a few more drops of oil to the pan, where they sizzle, thin wisps of gray smoke rising from the shiny red shards. She will dry these chilies out to make a pickle, allowing them to marinate properly for six months before her granddaughter Gita visits with her boyfriend in May. Boyfriend, Kamini muses. What an insipid word. It is so wishy-washy, so noncommittal. She has spoken to Gita about her relationship, and while Kamini agrees that there is no need to rush into anything, the word boyfriend makes her grimace.

She steps back and wipes her forehead with the tail of her sari.

“Pinki, my daughter has been out of the house for thirty years, and her children only visit occasionally. I haven’t been around children for such a long time. I don’t know how they act, interact. I don’t know their interests anymore. I’ve nothing to give.”

“Nonsense,” Pinki says, puffing on his pipe, a habit he hasn’t weaned himself off of even with the recent ever-insistent warnings of cancer. “Okay, you’ve been languishing. Maybe you’re a bit rusty. But practice on the laptop—get your fingers and your mind oiled and the words will pour out of you faster than you know it. This way you can send me stories and I can edit them as they come through. We can have a running dialogue. If you’re stuck, we can chat through the computer. It’ll be much better this way.”

Before she knows it, the doorbell is ringing and her chilies are scalding.

“Arey, you sent it now? As we were speaking?” Kamini asks, wiping her hands on a dishrag.

“The boy only left an hour ago. He made good timing. Good luck with it. I’m sure you’ll be a natural. I’ll call you later with details about deadlines, content, etc.”

Kamini hangs up the phone and answers the door. A young man stands behind it, clutching a rectangular satchel.

“Hi, auntie,” he says. “Parcel from Mr. P. L. Devindra.”

“Yes, come in,” she says, glancing at the floor.

He removes his shoes dutifully.

“Where would you like it?”

“What about there?” She points to the small round dining table, vacant unless she has company. The boy kneels down and unzips the bag.

“Please sit, auntie,” he says. “I’m Raj. I’m to teach you to use this.”

“Just a moment.” She scurries into the kitchen and puts the chilies onto a flat plate, flicking them with a few drops of vinegar. When she comes back outside, Raj is opening up the laptop like a clamshell, the black keys glittering like glass.

“Wait,” she says. “You’ll have to go very slowly with me. Step-by-step. How did you 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 still live alone. And at the same time, I realize that I don’t have the rights to wonder these things, because 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.