Chapter 8: Elina — 1981

I met Elina D'Souza in the college library on a Thursday afternoon in January, and she was reading Kamala Das with the particular concentration of a person who had found something in a book that she had been looking for in life and was not willing to let it go.

She was sitting at the table near the reference section — the table that nobody used because it was directly under the ceiling fan that made a sound like a dying animal and that the library staff had been meaning to fix since approximately 1967. The fan's noise created a zone of auditory privacy — a cone of white noise that allowed the occupant to read without the particular interruptions that a college library produced: whispered conversations, chair scraping, the librarian's periodic "SILENCE!" which was, I had always thought, a self-defeating instruction given that it required breaking silence to enforce it.

Elina had claimed this table with the particular authority of a person who had identified the optimal location and was not going to share it. Her bag was on one chair. Her sweater was on another. Her books were spread across the remaining surface with the strategic deployment of a person who understood that library territory was claimed by occupation, not by right.

I needed the reference section. Specifically, I needed the Oxford Companion to English Literature, which was on the shelf directly behind her, and which I could not reach without entering her territorial zone.

"Excuse me," I said.

She looked up. The look was — I need to describe this accurately, because it matters — not hostile but not welcoming. It was the look of a person who had been interrupted in the middle of something important and was calculating whether the interruption was worth the attention it demanded. Her calculation took approximately two seconds, during which her eyes — dark, steady, the eyes of a person who looked at you and actually saw you, which was rarer than you'd think — assessed me with the efficiency of a customs officer checking a passport.

"The Oxford Companion," I said, pointing at the shelf behind her.

"Third shelf. Green spine. Behind the Britannica." She returned to Kamala Das.

I retrieved the book. I should have left. The transaction was complete — information requested, information provided, book obtained. But Kamala Das was on my desk too, the slim collected poems that Professor Joshi had assigned and that I had been reading with the particular mixture of admiration and discomfort that Das's poetry produced in a twenty-year-old male reader: admiration for the craftsmanship, discomfort at the honesty, the way she wrote about desire and body and the particular prison of being a woman in a society that wanted its women decorative and silent.

"Which poem?" I asked.

She showed me the page. "An Introduction." The poem that began with Das declaring her identity in a language that was not her mother tongue and that she had made her own. The poem about names and bodies and the refusal to be categorized.

"Professor Joshi assigned it," I said.

"I'm not reading it because it was assigned. I'm reading it because it's true." She closed the book. Not in dismissal but in the particular gesture of a person who wanted to talk about what she'd read and had been waiting for someone worth talking to. "Kamala Das writes like she's bleeding. Controlled bleeding. Surgical. She opens a vein and shows you what's inside, and the skill is not in the opening — anyone can open a vein — but in the showing. The precision of the showing."

I sat down. The dying-animal fan whirred above us. The library continued its quiet industry around us — the turning of pages, the scratching of pens, the particular atmosphere of a room where knowledge was being transferred from book to brain through the ancient technology of reading.

"You're in English Lit," she said. Not a question. She had seen me in classes. I had seen her in classes. The department was small enough that everyone saw everyone, but seeing and noticing were different things, and we had been seeing without noticing until this moment, when Kamala Das had provided the catalyst for actual observation.

"Second year. You?"

"Second year. You sit in the back row. You take notes in what I think is Gurmukhi."

"Punjabi. Old habit. I think better in Punjabi."

"I think better in Konkani. But try getting a degree in Konkani literature from Fergusson." She smiled. The smile was — different from Esha's. Where Esha's smile was a force of nature, Elina's was a decision. She decided to smile the way she decided everything: deliberately, with full awareness of what the smile communicated and to whom. "I'm Elina. D'Souza. Goan. Catholic. Before you ask."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"Everyone asks. 'D'Souza? Where are you from? Goa? Oh, you're Catholic?' As if being Goan and Catholic requires explanation. As if the default Indian is Hindu and everything else is a footnote."

"I'm Sikh. I'm used to being a footnote."

"Then we should sit together. Footnotes should stick together."

We sat together. That Thursday, and the next Thursday, and the Thursday after that, until Thursdays became our day — the day that the dying-animal fan provided its cone of privacy and Elina and I discussed Kamala Das and then Eunice de Souza and then Arun Kolatkar and then the entire constellation of Indian English poetry that existed in the space between the languages we thought in and the language we wrote in.

Elina was — I should describe her completely, because she would become my wife and the mother of my daughter and the woman I would fail more comprehensively than I had ever failed anyone, and the description should be honest. She was tall — nearly my height, which was unusual for a Goan woman and which she carried with the particular posture of a person who had been told to slouch to seem less intimidating and had refused. Her hair was short — cut to her chin in a style that her mother considered "modern" (disapproval) and that her friends considered "brave" (approval) and that she considered "practical" (Elina). Her face was angular — Portuguese ancestry visible in the sharp nose and the particular shape of the jaw — and her skin was the colour of strong chai without milk, a colour that she was sometimes praised for and sometimes mocked for, depending on who was doing the looking and what they valued.

She was opinionated. Not in the way that Esha was opinionated — Esha's opinions were weather, arriving with force and energy and the expectation that you would be moved by them. Elina's opinions were architecture — built, deliberate, constructed from evidence and argument and the particular rigour of a woman who had grown up in a household where her father was a lawyer and dinner-table conversation was a form of cross-examination.

Her father, Advocate Michael D'Souza of Margao, had sent her to Fergusson because Fergusson was the best and because Michael D'Souza believed that his children deserved the best, a belief that he expressed through financial support and emotional distance, the particular combination of a successful man who showed love through provision and withheld it through presence.

Her mother, Conceicao, was — Elina said this without bitterness but with the clarity of long observation — "the most beautiful woman in Margao and the most unhappy." The beauty was visible — Elina had inherited the architecture of the face, the height, the particular elegance that came from a woman who had been raised to be looked at and had discovered, too late, that being looked at was not the same as being seen.

"She wanted to be a musician," Elina told me, weeks later, sitting under a banyan tree on the campus lawn while I painted and she read and the afternoon provided the particular intimacy of two people who had moved from library-conversation to lawn-conversation, which was — in the geography of college courtship — a significant migration. "She played the mandolin. She was — Daddy's sister told me — extraordinary. Concert-level. But she married Daddy at twenty-one, and Daddy needed a wife, not a musician, so the mandolin went into a cupboard and the cupboard was locked and the key was lost, and now she plays at Christmas and cries afterward and tells anyone who asks that she's 'perfectly happy,' which is the most devastating phrase in the English language because it's never true."

"My mother," I said, "wanted to be a teacher. She had a certificate and everything. Then she married Bauji and Bauji needed a wife, not a teacher, and the certificate went into a trunk and the trunk is still in the attic."

"Two women. Two trunks. Two locked things." She pulled a blade of grass from the lawn and twisted it between her fingers — the particular fidget of a person whose mind was working faster than her hands could express. "I will not have a trunk. I will not have a locked cupboard. Whatever I am, I will be it openly. Even if it's wrong. Even if it's a disaster. At least it will be mine."

I believed her. I believed her completely. And the completeness of my belief was — I understand now, forty years later — the first failure. Because believing that another person will be everything they promise to be is not faith. It is the abdication of the particular vigilance that love requires: the watching, the checking, the asking "are you OK?" when the answer might not be yes.

I did not write to Esha about Elina. Not immediately. Not for months. The letters from Amritsar continued — Esha's fierce, intelligent, carrying the particular energy of a woman who was reading and thinking and growing in a city that was simultaneously nurturing her mind and constraining her life. She wrote about the Akali Dal's growing militancy. About Bhindranwale, who was becoming a name that people said with either reverence or fear and rarely anything in between. About her father's involvement, which was deepening — the professor of comparative religion becoming a political actor, the classroom philosopher becoming a street politician.

She wrote: "Amritsar is changing. I can feel it. The way you feel weather before it arrives — the pressure dropping, the air thickening. Something is building and I don't know what it is but I know it won't be good."

I read the letter in my hostel room. Prakash was at his desk, studying for midterms. The desk lamp flickered. Outside, Pune was Pune — the gentle hum of a city that existed, in 1981, in the particular peace of a place where the pressures building elsewhere had not yet arrived.

I did not reply to Esha's letter for two weeks. When I did, I wrote about my courses, about the campus, about the painting. I did not write about Elina.

This was the first lie. Not a lie of commission — I didn't say anything false. A lie of omission — the particular dishonesty of a person who tells you everything except the thing that matters most. And like all lies of omission, it grew in the dark, fed by silence, until it was too large to bring into the light without breaking something.

But in 1981, I was twenty-one. And twenty-one-year-olds believe that silence is a solution rather than a delay. That what isn't said doesn't exist. That you can love two people simultaneously if you keep them in separate rooms of your heart and make sure the doors are closed.

The doors, of course, are never closed. Love is not an architect. Love is water — it finds every crack, fills every space, and eventually, inevitably, the rooms flood.