Mrs Kamala’s Letters
Mrs Kamala’s yellow dal takes time to cook because the lid of the cooker is never closed, only half covered, for when the cooker whistles, Kamala’s chest aches with striking pain. The last whistle in her house was heard twenty-three years ago, in 1977, when an Air India Boeing 747 bound for Dubai nosedived into the Arabian Sea leaving no survivors. Sumit Dey, her husband, was the First Officer of the flight.
It was not a fear of hearing another devastating piece of news on the next whistle that made her switch to the new cooking method. She was a first-class science graduate from Delhi University and she knew better. But when after one month of Sumit’s death she realised she hadn’t cooked anything in the closed cooker since, she decided to continue with the practice. A small change to keep ‘after’ separated from ‘before’. Among the big changes was one where she shifted from the big house to a small apartment. Not to save expenses – she didn’t want to look after the big house, she didn’t want to meet people from before. The second change was that she became a prolific writer of letters – letters to her dead husband.
Her letters were anything but sparse. They were filled with great detail – not about Kamala’s loneliness but everything else. If she saw a new bird, she would pine to know everything about it. She would bring books on the fauna of Delhi from a public library, and spend days pouring through them, till she found all she wanted. She’d note down the exact shade of its colour – geranium red, turquoise blue, chartreuse green, the shapes of its feathers, its migration and mating patterns – she’d read everything then write it meticulously as if she was narrating all of this to her husband in the other world through the portal of letters just so he could still sense all of it even though she knew the exact geographic coordinates of where her husband’s instruments of senses would have met, and then dissolved, in the Arabian Sea. She had made sure to learn about the accident in as much detail and from as many sources as possible.
The only company she had was a small collection of books she inherited from her husband and a television, which stopped working for the first time since Sumit died, which she meant to get repaired immediately. In one letter she wrote about it:
Dear Sumit,
After two weeks of procrastination, I called in a tv technician. He was a sickly figure with sunken eyes, sullen cheeks, hair parted sideways and had a smell of mustard oil about him. His chequered shirt had sweat rings and hung loosely out of his trousers, perhaps after a long day at work. I wondered what he had had for breakfast, if anything. A paratha or just a tea with some biscuits, maybe some bread. I offered him water. He raised the glass to air and drank half of the water without touching his mouth. He threw the remaining half into the washbasin making a splash. The sudden familiarity he displayed with the place made me cautious. I showed him the tv and went to the kitchen, brought the rolling pin with a casual pretence and stood over his shoulder keeping an eye on him should he transgress his limits. He didn’t.
His old bag, which was once charcoal black, was now covered in dust, patched up at several places, but still torn at others – as if he had given up caring about it midway. What did he carry in it, anyway? Different sizes of screwdrivers and wrenches, pliers, a small box of nails and an electric drill with a neatly rolled long coil, and a small diary.
Once he sat on the floor, with the tv on a wooden stool in front of him, he lost himself in the work. When the fan stopped running because of the power cut, I sweated profusely, but he did not – as if he was so engrossed that he forgot to sweat. I looked at him and realised I was overthinking his familiarity with the place. How else could he visit so many houses a day and focus on the problem at hand unless he could make himself feel at home?
How many houses did he visit that day?
I wondered what it must be like to be so lost in a problem that one forgets where one is.
After tinkering noisily for about an hour, he closed the lid of the tv and said that he’d have to take it to his workshop. I closed the door and sat with a tea by the tv that showed only my face on the concave of its green screen. The tea mixed with silence brought a cool calm to my nerves, while the power cut continued.
Yours,
Kamala
At the end of each day, she put the letters in her husband’s book cabinet that was secured by an expensive lock. She kept the key carefully under the empty pillow of the double bed she slept on. The only piece of furniture she brought from the old house to avoid the discomfort of a new bed, which, she knew from experience, could take up to two months to feel right – an appropriately hard mattress had to be softened with the weight of her body, so it would be warmed, welcoming even, to the turns she made while sleeping. There could be no design on the surface of the mattress, so when her fingertips moved involuntarily, they didn’t come across a surprise. Despite all that effort, her sleep did not improve.
She wrote the letters and put the address of the old house where Sumit and she made love in all seasons and she remembered exactly how the rooms smelled with the fresh naked body of her husband roaming around the whole house after a bath in sweltering, humid September. Instead of bringing some relief, the fan made the humidity worse. But Sumit made sure it was switched on the whole day and night.
He was handsome: five-eleven, broad shouldered, always cleanly shaven, an arousing scent of aftershave lotion hung around his face, while two black and white beady eyes held your attention. His words charmed the women and made their husbands look at their wrist watches on more occasions than she cared to count. Sumit left nonchalantly, but she left with a mix of pride and jealousy, and arousal.
When they met for the last time, Sumit wore a blue oxford shirt, an analogue wristwatch, dark grey trousers, and black laced-up formal shoes, which accentuated his sexual appeal. She hadn’t thought about this until the realisation of his death hit her – after the news, after the last rites, after everyone else had left and she lay on the couch for days, sometimes thinking about sex for hours.
The same couch where two months before they celebrated Sumit’s twenty-sixth birthday. Almost a ritual by then – almond tea cake from an old bakery in the neighbourhood and two cups of tea.
They quarrelled more in summers than in winters, Kamala recalled. The longest spell of silence between them was sixteen days caused by a scented piece of paper with a phone number in the breast pocket of his shirt, patched on as an afterthought after Kamala had finished sewing the shirt. She knew at once that Sumit was lying when he scrambled for explanatory words. He knew his words and never went in search of them like he did then.
One summer day, Kamala had just returned from the local market store after a long day of buying groceries, cotton material to stitch her clothes, and some footwear. She bought everything in a spur or not at all. Her face and eyes red, her white handkerchief wet from wiping the sweat off her forehead and cheeks, her green blouse darkened. She switched on the fan and reached for bills to tally the total when she realised that she had left the purse in one of the stores. More than its other contents, she was concerned about the just-finished letter in the purse she had not put in the almirah along with the stacks of other letters now pouring out. She dashed out leaving unfinished water in the steel glass that bore a crescent of her red lipstick. Luckily, the shoe seller had noticed and had kept her purse near a mound of old shoes and instead of being relieved, she had felt rage. She shot a look at the shopkeeper, and he ignored her and looked outside soliciting more customers.
She took out the letter from the purse and read what she had written to make sure it was still there:
Dear Sumit,
The tea stain stayed there the whole day: untouched. In the evening, it darkened. Next morning, it had crusted when I scrubbed it with a bunch of worn-out steel wool. After washing the accumulated used dishes overflowing in the sink, clearing the cobwebs with a long broom, and deep dust cleaning, I showered under the cold water. I tested the new body scrub with a funny passion. I soaped and scrubbed, cleaned all the crevices – harshly, gently, softly. I did not wipe myself with a towel, I wore the bathing robe and let it soak up the water. In the bedroom, I took it off, rubbed rose water on my face, shoulders, and breasts, and put on a cotton hand-stitched set without any undergarments. The room smelled of fresh champa oil, moisture, and a sensual loneliness under a dim yellow light. I lay on the bed counting the rotation of the fan blades per minute when turned at the lowest speed. This fan has witnessed what no priest could imagine.
The next day, I awoke in an unexplainably happy mood. I opened the door to the bell by the garbage collector, smiled at him, and answered his namaste. I offered him a piece of pista barfi. He took it immediately as he didn’t know in which mood he would be greeted with on the following day. I watered the dying plants on the balcony – a mix of fern, spider plant, snake plant, money plant, cactus, and hibiscus – with no common theme, a random collection of plants picked one by one on the whim of the day. I wandered into the house, swept aside the curtains, put tea on the stove and hummed: tere mere milan ki ye raina.
That night a flowerpot fell off the balcony in the wind.
The next morning, I retrieved it piece by piece from the muddy ground scattered with broken plants from different homes.
Do you know I haven’t put up any picture of yours on the wall? I want your absence to be absolute.
I cooked peas and spinach khichdi for lunch to be accompanied by cold curd and freshly ground mint tamarind chutney. It took time to cook in the open cooker, and I was in no hurry. I sipped tea, looked outside. A busy street bustling with uniform clad children, unusually disciplined, making a silent march to their rickshaw; office going men in ties and crisp ironed shirts, women in colourful saris – everyone full of promise. And I on the other end of this circle sipping tea looking at all of them with joy.
Your white porcelain cup when filled with hot tea and cupped in my palms feels like a warm hand.
Yours,
Kamala
She placed the letter on the table under an empty steel glass.
The evening fell with rain tapping against the windowpanes. A soft drumming before a concert of thunder and storm, just as the lady on the radio predicted. Kamala turned it off to listen to the pattering of raindrops, still thinking about losing the letter, still angry at herself for breaking the ritual of keeping it secured, like secrets should be.
A power cut after a few hours had darkened and quieted the evening when she was startled by thunder in the living room. A shard from a broken window glass, felt before it was seen, pierced her heel, protruding out like beautiful shining steel. The darkness poured in from outside. It was quiet except for the sniffs of Kamala, fighting back tears, then her sobs, then wails. She cried with blood simmering out of her foot until her throat went parched and she couldn’t hear her own voice. No neighbour knocked on her door. Her voice died out a few feet out of the window. She limped to drink water, her foot touched the ground, and she realised in a flash of pain, that the absence she had tried to ignore all day hit her at her most vulnerable. She couldn’t stand straight. She was tired. The pain broke her body, the indignity, her soul.
She felt the chill of the wind, which swept in from the broken window. She limped back to the living room to the fluttering letter held by the wobbling glass. Of course, the glass fell and the letter flew out with the wind. She watched with resignation. It drifted in the wind, was soaked in the drain with a part of it fluttering out from under a small rock.
Only a part of it was legible:
That night a flowerpot fell off the balcony in the wind.
The next morning, I retrieved it piece by piece from the muddy ground scattered with broken plants from different homes.
No one read this lost letter again. The wind picked it up and carried on.