Ramya's Treasure
Page 24
Ramya presses the delete key.
The second message is from Lisa, good old Lisa, loyal and caring:
“Lameea! Have you checked your mailbox? If you haven’t, please do so immediately. You have a surprise waiting you.” She hurriedly added: “A nice surprise. You’ll like it.”
Ramya presses ‘delete’.
The third message is from Prakash:
“Ramya, I’ll be in Toronto for a week to attend a training program. I’d like to meet you.”
Ramya presses ‘delete’.
She tosses the phone away. Her eye catches the sandalwood box on the dining table. It’s empty — totally, comprehensively empty. All her memories lie scattered around it, orphaned and neglected.
She stares ahead wondering about life. Her life. Is a woman always an adjunct — somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s wife, somebody’s girlfriend, somebody’s keep, somebody’s mother, or even somebody’s godmother? Can she not have an independent existence?
She gets up and hobbles to the dining table. She picks up all the mementoes, except for the empty bottle of Tik 20 which has already found its way to the garbage, and stuffs them back into the sandalwood casket. She shuts the lid with an authoritative bang.
The landscape as seen from the dining room window is pristine. The ground is covered by lily-white snow, and a beneficent sun is shining. The day has a newly laundered look, like the clothes in the “after” panel of a detergent ad.
The cup of south Indian coffee has done her good. She’s already beginning to get a grip on what she’d like to do with her life. It’s just a germ of an idea. A tenuous notion — but will she have the stamina to go ahead and stick it out?
Taking Sanna Lakshmi, her vacuum cleaner, by hand, she goes down to the basement. She gives the place a thorough cleaning, something she hasn’t done for a long time. She can see the dust of ages swirling ferociously under the clear acrylic hood of the Hoover.
Ramya wipes all the furniture clean. She removes the last vestiges of Prakash from the small bar. Bottles with some dregs — gold, brown and colourless — at the bottom, as though saved for the day the prodigal returns. Glasses of various sizes and shapes. Ramya can never quite understand why tumblers must come in such a variety of forms. Could the shape of the drinking vessel have an impact on the quality of the contents? On its enjoyment, perhaps? Even though she’d been a barmaid manqué, she finds drinks, and drunks for that matter, difficult to comprehend. But it doesn’t matter now.
After exorcising the spirits from the basement, Ramya goes upstairs to fetch her old Dell laptop. It weighs a ton. And looks a bit superannuated, like its owner. She brings it downstairs, and setting it up on the office table, hooks it to an electrical outlet.
Ramya sits down on the swivel chair, and lifts the lid of the laptop. When she jiggles a few buttons, the screen springs to life. It works — never mind that it has seen better days. Again, much like its owner. No! This is all going to change, Ramya tells herself fiercely. Her best days are yet to come. She opens a new Word document, and enters the words:
THE TREASURE OF COMMON MEMORIES
By RAMYA PRAKASH
Then she presses the backspace button repeatedly until the letters h-s-a-k-a-r-P are summarily erased.
She goes to the next page to compose the dedication. She writes:
This book is lovingly dedicated to …
Before she can complete the sentence, unexpected tears film her eyes. There’s no debate at all in her mind as to whom she will dedicate her book.
Blinking the nascent tears away, she begins to type …
A new chapter in her life.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my editor Julie Roorda for all her helpful suggestions. If the book still has shortcomings the fault is all mine. I like to thank Diaspora Dialogues for the support they give immigrant writers. I would like to thank Connie McParland and Michael Mirolla of Guernica Editions for their belief in my story-telling ability.
About the Author
Pratap Reddy came to Canada from India in 2002. When he started writing fiction, he chose as his subjects new immigrants much like himself. His short fiction has been published in Canada, the USA and India. His first book Weather Permitting & Other Stories was published by Guernica Editions in 2016. Ramya’s Treasure is his first novel. He is working on a second collection and also a novel which is about contemporary India as seen through the eyes of a voluntary exile. He lives in Mississauga with his wife and son.