Chapter 16: Anushka / Deepak

# Chapter 16: Anushka / Deepak

Tara left on Sunday evening. The goodbye at the airport was shorter than Anushka expected — not because there was less to say, but because Tara had a talent for compressing emotion into efficiency.

"I approve," Tara said, gripping Anushka's shoulders. "Of Shalini. Of Goa. Of the xacuti. Of all of it. Come home when you're ready. Not before."

"I'll be back next week."

"Come home when you're ready. That might be next week. That might be next month. I'll manage."

She hugged Anushka, tight, brief, the kind of hug that communicates more through pressure than duration, and then she was through security, her enormous backpack clearing the X-ray machine by margins that the CISF officer clearly found unacceptable, and she was gone.

Rhea drove Anushka back to Benaulim. They stopped at a petrol pump near Margao, and while the attendant filled the Omni's tank, Anushka stood beside the van and looked at the sky — the Goan sky, absurdly wide, unbothered by the buildings that Mumbai stacked between earth and heaven — and felt that specific hollowness that comes after someone you love leaves. Neither grief nor sadness Just the awareness of a space that was occupied and is now empty, the negative impression of a person's presence.

"You okay?" Rhea asked from the driver's seat.

"Yeah. Just — adjusting."

"To her leaving?"

"To having two places that feel like home. The adjustment never quite settles. You keep oscillating."

Rhea nodded. She understood oscillation. She'd lived it — Mapusa to Fontainhas, hardware shop father to restaurant mavshi, one family to another, the constant navigation between the place you came from and the place you chose.

---

Verandah became a vessel. Rain surrounded it on three sides, the water falling from the roof's edge in a continuous curtain, the world beyond the curtain blurred and shimmering, reduced to impressionist smears of green and grey and the dark red of laterite. Inside the curtain, the verandah was dry, warm, the air thick with humidity but not wet, the specific microclimate of a sheltered space during heavy rain, the temperature dropping, the light diffusing, the sounds amplifying.

Shalini brought coffee. Two cups, brass dabaras, the coffee already mixed with milk and sugar, the way she made it every morning and now, because rain demanded coffee the way celebration demanded feni, in the afternoon as well. She set the cups on the cane table between their chairs without speaking, because rain was a conversation that did not require human contribution, and sat down, and they watched.

Watching rain in Goa was not passive. It was participatory. Rain involved you. It misted your face when the wind shifted. It raised the smell of the earth and delivered it to your nostrils with the insistence of a cook presenting a dish for approval. It changed the sounds around you, adding percussion to the baseline hum of the garden, the tap-tap-tap of drops on the broad leaves of the banana plant, the tink-tink-tink of drops on the tin roof of the shed, the whoosh of drops hitting the surface of the river beyond the garden wall.

Anushka closed her book. Reading was impossible in this sensory environment. The rain commanded attention the way a symphony commanded attention, not through volume alone but through complexity, through the layering of sounds and smells and temperatures and textures that recruited every sense simultaneously and left no cognitive bandwidth for printed words on a page.

"Pavs aavdto tula?" Shalini asked. Do you like the rain?

"Ho." Yes.

"Tujhya baba la pan aavdaycha." Your father liked it too.

Second mention. The second time Shalini had mentioned Anushka's biological father. The frequency was increasing. The intervals between mentions were shortening. Something was loosening in Shalini, some internal mechanism that had held the past in place for four decades was beginning to release, slowly, the way ice melts in spring, not in a dramatic collapse but in a gradual, continuous yielding to warmth.

The next morning, Anushka asked Shalini about Deepak's grave.

They were in the garden, watering plants — their morning ritual, established without discussion, the way rituals establish themselves when two people live together long enough. Anushka had the lota; Shalini had the bucket. The mango tree threw morning shadows across the laterite earth.

"He's buried in Mumbai," Shalini said. "Shivaji Park Cremation Ground. But he wasn't cremated. He was Catholic. The Mhatres were East Indian Catholic. Khotachiwadi community, Girgaon."

"I didn't know he was Catholic."

"His family converted three generations back. Portuguese influence. Goa and Mumbai both have that history. Deepak wore a cross on a chain. He went to mass on Sundays at Our Lady of Glory in Byculla. He also went to the Ganesh temple on Tuesdays because his grandmother had done it and he saw no reason to stop." She poured water at the base of the curry leaf bushes. "He was a man of two traditions. Like you, in some ways."

"Me?"

"You were raised by a Hindu Marathi family. Your birth father was Catholic. Your birth mother is Hindu Goan. You carry all of it, even the parts you didn't know about."

Anushka set the lota on the well's rim. "Do you have anything of his? Besides the photograph?"

Shalini was quiet for a moment. The bucket hung from her hand, water dripping from its rim onto the earth, each drop making a small dark circle that the sun would erase in minutes.

"Come inside," she said.

---

The steel trunk at the foot of Shalini's bed had a lower compartment that Anushka hadn't seen. Shalini knelt on the floor, lifted the trunk's false bottom, a plywood panel covered in the same fabric as the trunk's lining, nearly invisible unless you knew to look, and revealed a shallow space containing a cotton bag cinched with a black thread.

She placed the bag on the bed and opened it.

Inside were: a man's wristwatch, silver, the brand name worn away to illegibility, the face cracked across one corner but the hands still pointing to 3:47, the last time the watch had worked. A taxi licence, laminated, creased, bearing a photograph of a young man with a moustache and a grin that Anushka recognized from the photograph on the almirah. DEEPAK SAVIO MHATRE. Licence No. MH02/TX/14923. Valid: 1994-1999. A rosary, wooden beads, dark with handling, the crucifix small and plain. And a piece of paper, folded into quarters, so old and so often refolded that the creases had become translucent seams where the paper had nearly worn through.

"His note," Shalini said. "He wrote it the day you were born. Left it on the table in the chawl room when he went to buy mithai from the shop. That's what he was doing when — " She stopped. Pressed her lips together. The sentence didn't need to end; its meaning was complete without its final words.

Anushka unfolded the note. The handwriting was large and looping, written in English with the pen pressure of someone who was excited, who was writing fast because the words were racing ahead of the hand.

Shalini,

She is here. Our daughter is here. She has your nose and my stubbornness (I can tell already, she refused to stop crying until the nurse gave her back to you). I am going to buy jalebi and gulab jamun from Prakash Sweets. I know you said we can't afford sweets but today is not a day for arithmetic. Today is a day for jalebi.

I have decided: I will work double shifts. Morning and night. I will save enough for the Goa trip by March. She will see the sea. She will put her feet in the water. She will know where her mother comes from.

I love you both. I have never written that before because saying it was enough. But today I want to write it. I want it on paper. Paper lasts longer than sound.

Deepak

Anushka read the note three times. The words blurred and sharpened and blurred again as her eyes filled and emptied and filled. The paper trembled in her hands. She could feel the man in the writing — his joy, his recklessness, his belief that jalebi was a reasonable response to a birth, his plan to work double shifts, his certainty that this daughter would see the sea.

He had been going to buy sweets. He had been happy. He had been a man with a plan and a family and a note on a table and a grin that made taxi passengers smile, and then a truck on the Western Express Highway had ended all of it, the plans, the family, the grin, the double shifts, the trip to Goa, in the time it takes steel to meet steel.

"He never came back with the jalebi," Shalini said.

"No."

"The shop owner — Prakash, he came to the hospital the next day. He brought the sweets himself. He'd heard what happened. He brought a box of jalebi and a box of gulab jamun and he wouldn't take money. He said Deepak had been his best customer. He said Deepak always tipped. He said — " Her voice broke. Not dramatically, a hairline fracture, a small structural failure in the composure she'd maintained for twenty-six years. "He said Deepak had been dancing in the shop. Actually dancing. Spinning in circles. The other customers were staring and Deepak didn't care. He was dancing because he had a daughter."

Anushka set the note on the bed. She looked at the watch, the licence, the rosary. The small, portable relics of a man's life. The things that survive when the person doesn't, the objects that carry the weight of a presence now absent.

"Can I visit his grave?" she asked. "When I go back to Mumbai."

"I'll give you the details. Plot number, section. I haven't been since 1998. The year I left for Muscat." Shalini picked up the rosary and held it in her palm. The beads clicked softly against each other — a small, wooden sound, intimate and old. "I should have gone. Every year, I should have gone. But going meant, it meant standing in front of a stone with his name on it and admitting that he was under it, that the man who danced in a sweet shop was under the ground, and I — "

She stopped. Her hand closed around the rosary, the beads pressing into her palm, leaving impressions.

"You don't have to explain," Anushka said.

"I want to explain. I want you to understand that my leaving — Bombay, you, everything, wasn't only about money. It was about surviving. Deepak's death broke something in me that I didn't know could break. Not my heart — hearts are dramatic, hearts recover. It broke my engine. The thing that makes you get up in the morning and do the next thing and the next thing. Without him, the engine stopped. And without the engine, I couldn't be a mother. I couldn't be anything. I was just, material. Fabric without a pattern. And fabric without a pattern is just cloth. It doesn't become anything."

"And now?"

Shalini looked at the rosary in her hand. At the watch. At the taxi licence with its photograph of a grinning man who had been, for a very short time, a father.

"Now the engine is running again," she said. Quietly, as if saying it too loudly would jinx it, would cause the mechanism to seize, would return her to the cloth-without-pattern state that had lasted two and a half decades. "I don't know why. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's the singing. Maybe it's just time. Enough years piled on top of the broken thing that the weight has pushed the pieces back together." She set the rosary on the bed beside the note and the watch. "But it's running. I can feel it. For the first time in twenty-six years, I wake up and the engine is already going before I open my eyes."

Anushka took the watch. Held it up to the light from the bedroom window. The cracked face, the still hands, the time frozen at 3:47. The moment, probably, of impact, of ending, of the world reorganising itself around an absence.

"3:47," she said.

"PM. January 14th, 1998. Makar Sankranti."

"The day of new beginnings."

Shalini looked at her. "Yes," she said. "The day of new beginnings."

They sat on the bed with Deepak's belongings between them, the watch and the rosary and the licence and the note about jalebi, and the morning light moved across the floor and the mango tree's shadow shifted in the garden and the house held them, as it had been holding them for two weeks, with the patience of a structure that has stood through monsoons and summers and the quiet, seismic events of women finding their way back to each other.