Chapter 17: Esha Phir Se — Present Day

The phone call from Esha came on the second evening in Goa, while Madan was cooking — cooking, not drinking, a development that I catalogued with the particular hope of a brother who had learned not to trust hope but who could not stop hoping — a fish curry from a recipe that Shantilal had dictated with the solemn authority of a man passing down sacred knowledge.

"Farhan." Her voice. Forty years of letters, four decades of correspondence, and I could count on one hand the number of times I had heard her voice in that span. Each time, the sound did the same thing: it arrived in my nervous system before my brain, the way her smile had arrived in 1978, the warmth starting in the chest and spreading outward, followed immediately by the particular ache of a door that had been opened and closed so many times that the hinges were worn but the door still moved.

"Esha. How are you?"

"I'm calling because Balli told Paramjeet and Paramjeet told me. Which means the parallel intelligence network is functioning as designed." A pause. "I'm sorry about Madan. Is he — ?"

"He's cooking fish curry. He's — better than expected. Worse than hoped."

"That's Madan's permanent condition. Better than expected, worse than hoped. It should be on his headstone." Another pause. This one longer. The particular pause of a person who had called for one reason and was working up to another. "Farhan. I'm retiring."

"From Khalsa College?"

"From Khalsa College, from Amritsar, from — everything. I'm sixty-one. I've been teaching for thirty-eight years. I've read Premchand to students whose parents hadn't been born when I first taught Premchand. I'm tired. Not of the teaching — of the repeating. The same texts, the same arguments, the same students who accept Premchand without arguing and the same students who argue without reading. I miss the students who did both. I miss — " She stopped. When she spoke again, her voice had changed. Softer. The softness was not weakness — Esha's softness never was — but the particular gentleness of a person who was about to be honest and who needed the gentleness to cushion the honesty. "I miss you."

The words landed on the beach at Shanti Shanti with the particular weight of a thing that had been unsaid for so long that saying it required the speaker to rearrange her entire emotional vocabulary.

"I miss you too," I said. Because it was true. Because it had always been true. Because the missing had been continuous, a background frequency that I had learned to live with the way a person learns to live with tinnitus: you stopped noticing it until someone mentioned it, and then it was all you could hear.

"I'm moving to Pune," she said. "My niece — Meera's daughter, you remember Meera from Pushpa's Dhaba? — she has a flat in Prabhat Road that she's not using. She's offered it to me. I'm coming in April."

Pune. Esha was coming to Pune. The city that I had gone to forty-two years ago on her instruction — "Go to Pune. Get into Fergusson. Become someone that even Daddy can't dismiss" — and that she had never visited, the city that existed in her imagination as the place I had gone and she had stayed, the distance between her staying and my going becoming, over four decades, one of the defining shapes of both our lives.

"That's — " I started. Stopped. Started again. "Nandini."

"I know about Nandini. Paramjeet told me. Years ago."

"And you're still coming?"

"I'm not coming for you, Farhan." The sharpness returned — the Esha sharpness, the particular edge that she deployed when she needed to be clear about something and didn't trust gentleness to carry the clarity. "I'm coming for me. I'm sixty-one. I've lived in Amritsar my entire life. My father is dead — five years now. My mother is in a care home in Jalandhar, near my sister. There's nothing keeping me in Amritsar except habit, and habit is not a reason to stay. It's a reason to leave."

"I didn't say — "

"You were going to say something careful. Something diplomatic. Something about Nandini and boundaries and the complexity of the situation. I'm going to save you the trouble. I know about Nandini. I'm not coming to compete with Nandini. I'm not coming to replace Nandini. I'm coming to Pune because Pune has a better art scene, better weather, better food, and because my niece has a free flat and I'm a retired professor on a pension and free flats are not to be dismissed."

"And because I'm here."

A pause. The longest yet. The pause of a woman who had been honest about everything except the most important thing and who was deciding whether to include the most important thing or leave it out.

"And because you're here," she said. "Yes. Because you're here. Because after forty years of letters and four phone calls and the particular disaster of your marriage and the particular loneliness of my not-marriage, you are the person I want to be near. Not with. Near. There's a difference."

"There's a difference," I agreed.

"Good. Then we understand each other."

"We've always understood each other."

"No. We understood each other at eighteen. Then we didn't understand each other for forty years. Then we understood each other again through letters. And now — I want to understand you in person. In the same city. With the particular complications that proximity creates and that distance avoids."

"Nandini will want to meet you."

"I would expect nothing less. I've read enough about her through Paramjeet's reports — Paramjeet provides dossiers, not gossip — to know that she's formidable and that she loves you and that she will assess me the way I would assess her: with the particular scrutiny of a woman who has found something valuable and who wants to know if the new arrival is a threat."

"You're not a threat."

"I'm always a threat, Farhan. That's not vanity. That's assessment. I'm the woman you loved first. The woman whose letters you kept in a tin box for forty years. The woman who forgave you when forgiveness was harder than anger. I am, whether I intend to be or not, a complication. And complications are threats to stability. Nandini values stability. Therefore: I am a threat."

She was right. She was always right about the things that I couldn't see because I was inside them. This was Esha's gift — the too-large eyes that saw everything, the intelligence that processed everything, the particular clarity of a woman who had spent forty years observing from a distance and who understood the landscape better than the person standing in it.

"Come to Pune," I said.

"I'm already coming to Pune. I told you. This wasn't a request for permission."

"I know. It was — confirmation. That you're welcome. That you're wanted. That the proximity you're describing is — it's good. It's right."

"We'll see," she said. Esha did not make promises. Esha dealt in assessments and observations and the particular currency of a woman who had learned that promises were the vocabulary of people who didn't know what was going to happen and who covered their ignorance with commitment. "We'll see how it is when I'm there. When the letters are replaced by conversations and the distance is replaced by — whatever proximity turns out to be."

"It'll be good."

"You don't know that."

"I know you. I know Nandini. I know Pune. The combination will be — at minimum — interesting."

"Interesting is the word men use when they mean 'I have no idea what's going to happen but I'm pretending to be confident.' Goodnight, Farhan. Give my regards to Madan. Tell him his fish curry needs more kokum."

"How do you know it needs more kokum?"

"Because Madan has never, in his life, used enough of anything essential. It's his defining characteristic."

She hung up. Esha, like Shobha, did not believe in goodbyes. She believed in final statements delivered with authority, followed by the click of a disconnecting phone, the particular full stop of a conversation that had said what it needed to say and was not going to dilute the saying with pleasantries.

I stood on the beach. The evening was — the Goa evening, the particular hour when the sun hit the sea at the angle that turned the water from blue to gold and the sky from blue to the colour that I had spent my life trying to paint and that I called, in my private vocabulary, "the colour of the thing before it changes." Every sunset was the thing before it changed — from day to night, from light to dark, from the visible world to the invisible one. And the colour of that transition was not a colour but a feeling: the feeling of standing at the edge of something and not knowing whether the next step was forward or down.

Esha was coming to Pune. Nandini was in Pune. And I was — as I had been for most of my life — between two women, in the particular space that was not a triangle (triangles implied competition, and neither woman competed; they both simply were, with the particular self-possession of women who had built their own lives and who did not need a man to complete the structure) but a geography. Three points. Three positions. The map of a heart that had loved widely and sometimes well and sometimes badly and that was, at sixty-one, being asked to accommodate one more proximity without losing the proximities it already held.

Balli was behind me. He had been watching — Balli always watched, the way I always watched, the two of us lifelong observers of the world and of each other.

"Esha?" he said.

"Esha."

"Coming to Pune?"

"Coming to Pune."

"Nandini?"

"Doesn't know yet."

Balli nodded. The nod was — like all of Balli's gestures — complete. It contained the entire assessment: the complication, the beauty, the risk, the particular messiness of a man's life when the women he has loved refuse to stay in the separate rooms he has built for them and instead insist on existing in the same city, at the same time, with the particular inconvenience of being real.

"You're going to need a bigger house," he said.

"I'm going to need a bigger heart."

"Same thing," Balli said. "Same thing."