Where Earth Meets Water

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.

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