Chapter 16: The Letter

EELA — 2010

The letter arrived sixty-one years late.

Or perhaps it arrived exactly on time — that was a matter of perspective, and perspective, Eela had learned, was the only thing that changed with age. The facts remained the same. Only the angle shifted.

She was eighty-six. She lived alone in the house in Koregaon Park — the house she had inherited from her parents, the house she had filled with journals and sketches and recipes and the particular accumulated evidence of a life lived stubbornly and completely. She had a dog — a wiry, intelligent pariah named Moti (the third Moti; the name was a tradition, not a lack of imagination) — and a garden, and a chair by the window in the breakfast room where she sat every morning with chai and watched the neem tree and the wall and, sometimes, the jackal that appeared at dusk like a ghost with amber eyes.

She was not lonely. She was alone, which was different. Loneliness was the absence of company you desired. Aloneness was the presence of yourself, and she had learned — over decades, through practice, through the particular discipline of a woman who had been broken and rebuilt and broken again and rebuilt again — to find her own company sufficient. Not always pleasant. Not always easy. But sufficient.

The post came at ten. She heard the gate open — the particular squeak of the hinge that she had been meaning to oil for three years and that she now regarded as a feature rather than a flaw, a natural alarm system more reliable than any bell. Moti barked once, assessed the situation, and returned to her spot by the door. The postman — a young man whose name she could never remember but whose bicycle she could identify by the sound of its chain — deposited the letters in the box and pedalled away.

She collected the post. Three items. An electricity bill. A notice from the school alumni association. And a letter — handwritten, on cream paper, in an envelope that bore no return address but that she recognised instantly, with a jolt so physical that she had to put her hand against the doorframe to steady herself.

The handwriting was Billu's.

Older now — the strokes thicker, the pressure heavier, the precision still there but overlaid with the particular tremor of age — but unmistakably Billu's. The same forward lean. The same perfectly formed capitals. The same way of writing Eela that made the name look like a drawing rather than a word.

She took the letter to the breakfast room. She sat in her chair. She did not open it immediately. She held it in both hands and felt the weight of it — not the physical weight, which was negligible, but the other weight, the accumulated weight of sixty-one years of silence, of unspoken words, of a love so complicated that no single emotion could contain it.

Moti came and placed her chin on Eela's knee. The dog's eyes — brown, liquid, possessing the particular wisdom of a creature that understood human emotion without requiring explanation — looked up at her with an expression that said: I am here. Whatever this is, I am here.

'Thank you, Moti,' said Eela. 'You are a good dog and a better therapist.'

She opened the letter.

*

My dearest Eela,

I have written this letter four hundred and thirty-seven times. That is not an exaggeration — I have counted. Four hundred and thirty-seven attempts, over sixty-one years, to say what I need to say to you. Each attempt has failed. Each version has been torn up, burned, buried in the garden, fed to the dog, or simply abandoned in a drawer. I have an entire drawer full of letters to you, Eela. It is the fullest drawer in my house and the emptiest, because none of them were ever sent.

I am sending this one because I am dying.

Not dramatically — I am not standing on a cliff or lying in a hospital bed with machines beeping. I am sitting in my kitchen in Panchgani, drinking chai, with a view of the valley that you would love if you could see it, and I am eighty-six years old and my doctor — a kind man, too young to understand what he is telling me — says that my heart is failing. Not broken, he says, as though the distinction matters. Failing. The muscle is tired. It has been beating for eighty-six years and it would like, if I don't mind, to stop.

I don't mind. I have lived long enough. I have lived, in fact, far longer than I deserved, given what I did to you.

And that is what this letter is about. Not the dying — dying is simple, it's the one thing that requires no skill — but the thing I did. The thing I have never named. The thing that sits at the centre of our story like a stone at the centre of a fruit, hard and bitter and impossible to remove without destroying the fruit itself.

I took your son.

I did not steal him. That would imply a single act, a moment of theft, a crime with a clear beginning and end. What I did was slower, more deliberate, more terrible. I took him the way water takes stone — gradually, persistently, over years, until the thing that was yours became mine and neither of us could remember the moment of transfer.

I told myself it was for his good. I told myself — and I told you, in that letter, the one that said "it is best this way" — that Rajan needed stability, clarity, a childhood unburdened by confusion. And that was true. It was also convenient. The truth and my convenience happened to align, and I chose not to examine the alignment too closely, because examining it would have required me to admit something I was not ready to admit.

I loved you, Eela. Not as a friend loves a friend, though I was that too. I loved you the way Heathcliff loved Catherine — completely, destructively, with a totality that left no room for anyone else. I loved you from the moment I saw you on that platform in Pune, lost and sweating and trying so hard to be brave, and I loved you every day after that, through the war and the cottage and Rajesh and Rajan and the arrangement and the break and the silence. I have loved you for sixty-eight years and the love has not diminished. It has only become more painful, because love without expression is a muscle that cramps, and mine has been cramping for six decades.

I took Rajan because I could not take you. I kept him because keeping him kept you attached to me — Dolly was right about that, God help me, Dolly was right — and when I felt you pulling away, when Keshav appeared and I saw the possibility of losing you entirely, I panicked. I wrote that letter. I moved us away. I cut you off from your son because I could not bear the thought of you belonging to someone else, even if that someone else was your own child.

It was the worst thing I have ever done. It was the act of a woman who loved too much and too selfishly and who confused possession with devotion. I have spent sixty-one years trying to forgive myself and I have not succeeded, and I no longer believe that I should.

But Eela — and this is the part that has taken four hundred and thirty-seven attempts to say — I need you to know that Rajan is well. He is a doctor. He lives in Pune. He has a wife — Anita, who is wonderful — and a daughter — Meera, who is fierce and clever and reminds me, painfully, of you. He is kind and serious and good. He is the best thing I have ever done, which is the cruelest irony, because he was never mine to do.

He knows about you.

I told him. Three years ago, when Tarun died and the grief stripped away the last of my defences. I sat him down in the kitchen and I told him everything — the war, the cottage, Rajesh, you. He listened. He did not shout. He did not cry. He sat very still and then he said: "Does she know where I am?" And I said: "I don't know." And he said: "Find her."

I have not found you. I have tried — or I have told myself I tried, which is not the same thing — but the truth is that finding you would require courage, and courage is the one thing I have never possessed in sufficient quantity. I was brave in the war. I was brave with Rajan. I was brave in every part of my life except the part that involved you, because you were the only person whose opinion of me mattered, and I was terrified — I am still terrified — of what that opinion might be.

So I am sending this letter instead. A coward's solution. A letter instead of a visit, words instead of presence, ink instead of arms. It is inadequate. It is all I have.

Rajan's address is on the back of this envelope. Go to him, Eela. He is waiting. He has been waiting since the day I told him, and the waiting is — I see it in his eyes when we speak on the phone — it is eating him alive.

Forgive me if you can. Forget me if you can't. But go to him.

I love you. I have always loved you. That has never been the question.

Yours, in every way that matters and several that don't,

Billu

*

Eela read the letter twice. Then a third time. Then she put it down on the table and sat very still and looked at the garden through the window and felt — what? She tried to name it and could not, because the emotions were arriving simultaneously, like instruments in an orchestra all playing their first note at once — a chord so dense that individual notes were indistinguishable.

Relief. Rage. Love. Grief. Gratitude. And beneath all of them, running like a bass note, something she had not expected: recognition. She recognised herself in Billu's letter. Not in the confession — the taking of Rajan, the possessive love, the cowardice — but in the architecture. The way a person built a life around a wound and called it survival. The way truth, deferred for decades, became heavier with each year of deferral until the weight of it was unbearable and the only choice was to put it down or be crushed by it.

She had done the same thing. Not with Rajan — that was Billu's sin, not hers — but with the silence. She had accepted Billu's letter in 1949 and retreated. She had not fought. She had not demanded. She had let Billu take her son because fighting would have meant confronting the thing between them — the love, the complicated, terrifying, unnamed love — and she had not been brave enough for that.

They were both cowards. That was the truth. Two women who loved each other more than they could say and who had spent sixty years saying nothing and losing everything.

She picked up the envelope. She turned it over. On the back, in Billu's handwriting:

Dr Rajan Deshpande

14, Sahyadri Apartments

Kothrud, Pune 411038

She stared at the address. Kothrud. He was in Kothrud. He had been in Kothrud — in Pune, in her city, perhaps passing her on the street, perhaps drinking chai at the same vendor, perhaps walking his daughter to the same park where Eela walked Moti — and she had been watching him from hospital corridors for thirty years, and he had been waiting for her for three years, and neither of them had known.

No. That was not entirely true. She had known where he was. She had known since Hema's letter in 1977. She had chosen to watch from a distance — to be the ghost in the corridor, the woman by the notice board — because approaching him would have meant explaining, and explaining would have meant revisiting the wound, and revisiting the wound would have meant feeling it again, and she had spent thirty years learning not to feel it.

But Billu had told him. Rajan knew. The secret that had defined Eela's life — the secret she had kept from her parents, from the world, from herself — was no longer a secret. It was a fact. A fact that her son possessed and that he was, according to Billu, eating him alive.

She could not let that continue.

She stood up. She went to the kitchen. She made chai — the last chai of the old life, though she did not know it then. Water, leaves, cardamom, ginger, milk, sugar. The ritual. The anchor. The thing that Hema had taught her to do when the world was falling apart: make chai. Make chai and drink it and wait for the shaking to stop.

She drank the chai. The shaking did not stop.

She went to the phone. She dialled the number on the back of the envelope. It rang three times.

'Hello?' A woman's voice. Warm, practical.

'Is this — is this the Deshpande residence?'

'Yes, this is Anita Deshpande. Who's calling?'

Eela closed her eyes. The kitchen was warm. Moti was at her feet. The neem tree was visible through the window, its leaves still in the afternoon heat.

'My name is Eela Chitale,' she said. 'I am — I was — I am Rajan's mother.'

The silence on the other end lasted five seconds. Then Anita said, very quietly: 'We've been hoping you would call.'