Where Earth Meets Water

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 kettle has been screaming on the stove for the past ten minutes, but 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 she is furious now. She sets her pen down, her hands shaking at the thought. How can she still be married? Just as there are common-law marriages, aren’t there common-law separations when a spouse has been absent for 75 percent of the union? She will have to look it up on Google. She wants to call someone, a cousin, a friend, to have someone reassure her and tell her that it will all be okay. But she feels shaken, unnerved. What rights does Dev still have over her? Is he justified in returning to the house—his house, really—and resuming his life from where he’d left it? Is he entitled to her royalties? To the profits from the new book that is taking shape? Is he to be granted access to her daughter and her children? Can he just pick up the relationships she has maintained with her family, with his family, even? She can feel her heart flexing rapidly against the thin skin of her chest.

All the plates are stacked on the shelf above the sink, the cups and glasses in their place. She opens the cabinet and holds a plate under her chin.

“I’m throwing a tantrum,” she announces, and dashes the plate against the stone floor. It splinters into bits and she jumps at the noise. She looks down at the wreckage below her feet and picks up another plate. She shuts her eyes before she drops this one and it too crunches to the ground, a few pieces of porcelain bouncing about the room from the force. She throws five plates altogether before she stalks into her bedroom and swings open the wardrobe doors adjacent to hers. The dust cloud that springs out of the closet like a dormant genie makes her cough, but she lets it settle and grabs at the playing cards, the sweaters, the Pathani suits, the undershirts, the trousers. She stuffs them into plastic bags and knots them at the top. Each piece of clothing, each shot glass, reminds her of an outing or a wedding or a memory of Dev, and she continues packing it all away until there is nothing left but the one pale blue sweater he’d been wearing when he had first gifted her with her very own copy of Great Expectations. This one she shoves to a back shelf and closes the doors to the closet once again. All the bags, bursting with her husband’s dregs, are placed outside her door, where the rag picker will collect them the following day. She summons the broom from the corner of the kitchen and sweeps the dish shards into a pile. Then she wipes her hands on a dishcloth, swipes the hair away from her face and settles down at the table to write.

* * *

Dev’s reintroduction into her life turns out to be the antidote to her writer’s block. Whether it is from anger or passion that she begins her third collection of stories, neither Pinki nor she can say. But the emotion, the rawness, the grit that had been lacking previously are all very present in the next draft that she presents to her editor three months later. Pinki sits back in his seat, puffing away at his pipe as the Delhi traffic swirls beneath them. The tea his secretary has brought Kamini is cold, and she perches at the edge of her seat, watching the changing nerves of his face as they tense and smile, relax and release.

Her new collection is just over three hundred pages, and they are filled with a new spirit: anger. These characters seek redemption and revenge; they are spiteful and boastful and cranky, but just enough so that readers won’t be exasperated. She has a winning piece. This is what he tells her before he stands up from his chair, comes around his desk and shakes her hand with both of his.

“These are different, Kaminiji,” he says. “They’re unlike the stories in the first two books. They’re for a more mature audience, I think. But I like them very much. I think we’ll market this one to the scores of children that grew up with Shanta Nayak who may now have children of their own. This one will be the nostalgia edition. I’ll get this into editing as soon as possible. I want to fast-track this one.”

“You’d better do that, Pinki. I’m eighty-two, after all.”

* * *

At home Kamini is greeted with an email from Gita.

Ammama, I am so excited! We leave tonight. Karom is over the moon, but he’s nervous about returning to India after such a long time. Please don’t mention any of what I’ve told you to him. You have always been such a good listener and I want you to understand him. I think you’ll both really get along. So we depart first for Bombay and then on to Rajasthan before we come to you in Delhi. It’s going to be so romantic. Send me a message ASAP if you want anything else from here. Hugs and kisses, Gita.

Kamini writes Gita back hurriedly to have a safe trip, that she doesn’t want anything other than the few novels she has requested and that she is looking forward to meeting Karom. Then she opens a new email from Dev.

Kamini,

The boy has finished his business in Bangalore, so I am typing this myself very slowly. I haven’t heard any news from your end, but I continue to write. I’m not sure what else to tell you. But I don’t want to sit here and stew in my past and feel sorry for myself. I’ve done enough of that, as I’m sure you have. We’ve both moved forward and I just want a few nuggets from the life I left behind in order to continue. I could never take it upon myself to write you a letter, but email is a whole other thing. When I send this, I’m not sure where it goes, in the millions of pieces over my head across state lines to you. It’s intangible to me, so it’s as if I haven’t written it. Your few responses in the form of punctuation have coaxed me to continue writing. But I’m not sure if I’m wasting my time and yours. I’m not sure what feathers I’ve ruffled over there. I won’t continue until you tell me to, in so many words. As it is, this is taking me so long to write. Please give me some insight, something, anything to hold on to.

Yours,

Dev

That morning, she had rushed through her ritual, omitting lighting the tiny lamps that accompany her shrine. Her shrine has grown, evolved, since Dev’s departure. When Gita had finished college, she and her two sisters had all backpacked through South India together, stopping in temples to collect tiny idols of Ganesh, Shiva and Lakshmi sculpted from stone, wood, shell and glass. Gita had brought them all back to Kamini, wrapped lovingly in T-shirts and tissues that she’d collected from restaurants and bathrooms. Kamini had given each one a home on her multitiered shrine. The shrine had new meaning now that her granddaughter had blessed it, fresh with new hope.

Now she shuffles into her bedroom and settles onto the low stool that has replaced her having to sink to the ground amid screaming joints. She strikes two matches before the third one allows her to light all seven of the lamps. The dais glitters with light and catches the shine of five small Ganesh figurines she has been given over the years, all from the local temple. She catches sight of herself in one of the glass frames. A shallow image of her spectacles peers back at her. Her jaw is set and she pushes a lock of hair away from her face.

He wants something to hold on to. She will act.

Back at her computer, she writes.

Dev—

Savita lives in Ohio with her husband, Haakon, who is a very good man. He is Norwegian. He has pale skin and pale hair and very light eyes. They met in college in America. Savita is beautiful. She has your build.

She and Haakon have three daughers: Gita, Ranja and Maila. They live in New York, Chicago and Ohio.

Savita is the head of a publishing company in Columbus.

Her husband is a patent lawyer.

Gita is twenty-eight. She has her own interior design company.

Ranja is twenty-six. She works in politics.

Maila is twenty-four, still in university. She is studying to be a veterinarian.

-I have lived here since you left. I am single. I never remarried. I have no callers or admirers. I live alone.

-I have written two books. I am Shanta Nayak. I don’t know what you wish to do with this information, but I can assure you that nothing you do to me now can hurt me. I’ve hidden behind that name for years now, seeking solace in a pseudonym that couldn’t hurt me and my daughter, gaining income from words that no one else knew I had written. The dichotomy that I wasn’t supposed to go off and be a self-made woman, yet I was still supposed to provide for the two of us—it angers me. It angers me that I have hidden behind it for all these years. When your letters came, they startled me; they forced me to question a number of things in myself that I hadn’t ever questioned before. Your correspondence has done nothing but create an empty haunting in my life that with the close of this mail to you I hope to banish forever. I’m in a safe place now. I have been for years.

-You were right about one thing in your correspondence: I always felt beholden to someone—my aunts and uncles, family friends, your father for seeking me out, you for taking me in. But I’m free of this now. I don’t owe anyone anything, and it’s now for the first time in my life that I feel right saying this.

-I owe you nothing. I’ve already given you something, but I will give you nothing more. I forgave you a long, long time ago.

-Having said that, to some extent, I appreciate the gesture, of knowing that you are still alive and out there. I can’t commit to more than this at this point in my life, but I know it couldn’t have been easy to reach out, to write, to say sorry. I accept it. That’s all I wish to say.

-I hope I have answered all of your questions. Take care of yourself and stay in good health. Please don’t write to me again.

Kamini

P.S. I still pray.

P.P.S. I have ridden in a plane. Six times.

She sends the email, and before she allows herself to think about anything else, she opens a new message and composes.

* * *

After a few days of anxiously checking her email, Kamini is sure that her exorcism has worked. True to form, Dev disappears from her life for a second time. At first, Kamini is jarred. What has she done? He comes crawling back to her, and she shuns him. She is sure her friends would have scolded her for this, but they will never find out. She won’t tell Savita about the email exchanges between them. Savita will be furious and demand his coordinates so that she can reconnect after all these years and give him a piece of her mind. But eventually Savita will soften; Kamini knows her daughter. Savita will imagine her father as a withered shell of the hulk he used to be when he banged about the house or brushed his teeth violently in the washroom. She will feel sorry for him in his old age, saddened that he has no family or ties to his past life. She will give in; she will cave. Kamini can’t take that chance, so Dev’s emails stay trapped in her computer.

Kamini busies herself with Gita’s visit. She visits the shop and buys coffee. Americans drink coffee. She buys whole biscuits, not the broken ones at the bottom of the bin that Shankar sells for half price. She has the floors cleaned and the sheets that have sat idle in the cupboards for years washed. She checks on her chili pickle, inhaling the pungent fumes that curl out from the jar. It will be at its peak in three days’ time, when Gita and Karom arrive. She is tidying the table that has become her work space, with papers and pens and nubs of pencils cluttering the space around her laptop, when the doorbell rings.

Raj stands on the other side, grinning widely.

“Hi, auntie,” he says. “You’re a legend. You’ve done me proud with your computer skills. You’re quite famous in the office.”

“Is that right?”

“No one can believe that I’ve taught someone of your age how to email and use a computer. I mean—” He looks down, embarrassed.

“I know what you mean.” Kamini chuckles, patting his hand. “Come, come, come inside. To what do I owe this visit?”

“I can’t stay. I’m just to deliver this.” He thrusts a package wrapped in brown paper forward.

“What is it?”

“Something you should open on your own. I’ve got to run. We’ll chat on IM? It’s been a while.”

“My granddaughter is coming with her boyfriend.”

“Ah, you’ve got your hands full. Okay, I’m off.”

“Bye, child.”

Kamini closes the door and sits down at her desk. The brown paper has been folded around the contents with twine. It reminds her of that first meeting with Dev, the paper-wrapped book, the string, Great Expectations. She removes the string in front of her, smoothing the paper against the table. There is a book inside this package, too. She removes it from its wrapping and lets the paper fall to the floor. She picks up the book and caresses the cover. It is shiny and pristine, reflecting against the sun that glints into the sitting room. She opens the cover, and the crisp pages creak with newness. She puts her nose against the inner spine and inhales the fresh, inky scent. She flips the pages. It is there—the table of contents, all twenty-eight stories, the dedication page to Savita and Gita and Maila and Ranja, the About the Author page and on the back page, within the fold of the dust jacket, a grainy picture of herself that she has taken with the camera built into her laptop. She is old. She can finally see it with her own eyes, through her thick owl-like glasses, without a partner to mirror how she has aged. Wisps of gray hair have escaped her bun and halo around her head. Her skin is abrasive, like used sandpaper. Rivers of wrinkles run from her laughing eyes. Her chin dips below itself to produce its twin. But this is her face.

And this is her book. No one can take this away from her and no one can expose her now. She closes the cover and looks down on it once again, running her gnarled rootlike fingers over the raised black letters that seem to tower above the rest of the world.

Fairytales of Freedom. By Kamini Pai.