Where Earth Meets Water

by Pia Padukone

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 al
ways 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.

  I went to college, so we are intellectual equals now. Unless, of course, you have taken another degree.

  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.

  I live alone and have never remarried and had no other children.

  I’ve given up drinking. I’ve been sober for thirty-seven years.

  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.

  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 someon
e 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.

  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.