The brass bell above the letter box rang for the first time today. Arati had installed it a week ago. She ran out to meet the postman, but caught only a glimpse of his khaki-clad back, as he peddled away furiously on his bottle-green bicycle with rusty fenders. Her heart raced as she unlatched the wooden letter box. She broke into a smile seeing the postcard—pale-yellow in colour, fourteen-by-nine centimetres in size (she knew this by heart), one of the four corners curling up slightly. It had been four months since she last received one of these. Bapa’s handwriting had become squigglier, but it was still legible.
02 March 2002
Dear Arati,
Trust you are well. You were supposed to move to Sultanpur two months ago. You haven’t called. Has the telephone connection not been set up yet? Anyway, I prefer to write. I couldn’t locate your address. I had scribbled it and kept it safely, but I can’t remember where it is now. Samir had your address—being the youngest of all you siblings, he is quite responsible. I admire that. Please write to inform regarding the safe arrival of you and Ravi Babu in Sultanpur.
Blessings and love,
Ramnarayan
The move had been harder than anticipated. It was a seven-hour drive from Delhi (Ravi thought a company car would be more comfortable than the train). Their belongings arrived two days later in a container truck. They initially stayed at the company guest house for a week until their allocated quarters was partially setup. The house was beautiful: slanted roofs stacked with terracotta tiles, a flower-lined driveway blooming with roses, and a sizeable backyard for growing vegetables. It was one in a row of similar houses opening out to a vast grazing field dotted with cows, goats and the occasional sheep. Delhi’s concrete and clamour had given way to Sultanpur’s pastoral charm, but with it came a slowness hallmarking everything: the telephone connection that took weeks to get set up; the light fixtures got delivered after a month (they had to be sourced from the nearest big city—Lucknow); the heavy summer afternoon air; the evening hours, waiting for Ravi’s return from work. Even time moved slower in Sultanpur, Arati was certain of it. The days leading up to the move had been very hectic—Tara got married and Meera left for college within a span of two months. Arati had been looking forward to some quietude after having been swept by the recent tornado of activities, but she hadn’t quite anticipated what life as an empty nester entailed.
13 March 2002
Dear Arati,
Ravi babu had telephoned Samir from his office to inform about your move. Hope you are settling in well. If the telephone setup at home is taking time, no harm in going back to postal communication. You visited a year ago; I haven’t seen you since then. It was nice of Ravi babu to have spent a week with us during your last visit. I don’t know when I will see you next. Please write soon. Your sisters Asha and Abha don’t write; I don’t expect them to. They live close by and visit more often. Anyways, I don’t share as much with them—you know that.
Blessings and love,
Ramnarayan
Mornings were a bustle between six cups of tea—packing Ravi off to work, giving instructions to the house help, reading Tagore or the Bronte sisters, tending to the kitchen garden, and doing yoga. But the afternoons pitched a pall of gloom over Arati—no Meera trudging back from school, hauling her bag of books, full of stories to share: about the unreasonable chemistry teacher, and the school presidential elections, and the class prick Navin living up to his reputation. Arati had no friends in the new town, no cadence of the customary to move her along. Ravi was mired in the new factory setup with a tyrannical boss, impossible production deadlines, and labour issues—barely getting home in time for dinner. After the first few weeks in the new town time stood still for Arati until her father’s postcards established a new rhythm. Time became metrical again. It moved by the gongs of the brass bell above the wooden letter box.
15 April 2002
Dear Arati,
As you know, I couldn’t attend Tara’s wedding. I would like to meet her new husband. She called yesterday and said they will visit next month. Let’s see if they make it. I feel quite tired these days and have stopped going out on my evening walks. Do you remember Pitambara, the mason? His son drives a rickshaw now, so I hired him to take me around the bazaar after sunset. I drink my evening tea alone on the little balcony overlooking the street, and think about your mother. Twenty years is a long time, but I can feel her presence, smell her everyday: in the tea, in the detergent, in the bed linen, in the incense stick Malti offers during her evening prayers. Malti is a good daughter-in-law. I read to her a new poem by Tagore, which I found in my collection. I don’t think she is into literature. She is busy with household chores and watching soaps on television. You wore Ma’s navy-blue-and-white ikat saree the last time you visited. You looked just like her.
It will be good if Tara comes, but Tara is not you. I am sending you a few lines from Tagore’s poem.
The Boat by Rabindranath Tagore
I must launch out my boat.
The languid hours pass by on the
shore—Alas for me!
The spring has done its flowering and taken leave.
And now with the burden of faded futile flowers I wait and linger.
The waves have become clamorous, and upon the bank in the shady lane
the yellow leaves flutter and fall.
What emptiness do you gaze upon!
Do you not feel a thrill passing through the air
with the notes of the far-away song
floating from the other shore?
Blessings and love,
Ramnarayan
Arati’s thoughts kept wandering back to the year she was home with her parents, before she got married thirty years ago—a time when she felt her bond with her parents was strongest. She was the eldest of six siblings—three brothers and three sisters. She had just been accepted to the master’s course in physics at the state university. The evening physics practical class usually ended by four, and she was home by five to find her parents sitting in the kitchen on wooden stools, ready with piping hot tea in a kettle, and a snack of roasted puffed rice mixed with peanuts. They would talk at length about the happenings of the day, share excerpts of interesting things they might have read, or just sit quietly listening to the voices of Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi crooning on the All India Radio. As the evenings progressed, the entire family would congregate at the central courtyard of the house, the epicentre of all activity. Regular power outages meant that a few kerosene lamps became little light houses guiding the evening routine: the children studying, Ma making dinner, and Bapa reading the last few pages of the morning newspaper, nodding off every five minutes. It was a simpler time. It was the only time Arati had felt pure joy—unblemished by loss or longing.
Ma succumbed to cancer a few months after Meera was born. It had gone undetected for a long time. Arati witnessed Ma’s well-rounded structure shrinking; her glossy skin withering; her weakening body lumbering, devoid of the swift sense of purpose always evidenced in her movements before; and finally, her pelvis crumbling under the weight of the six children she had borne one after the other, and of the cancer. She bled out sitting on a wooden chair with a hole cut out on the seat, a bucket underneath her filled with blood, as the doctors looked on helplessly.
It had been a tumultuous time. The entire country was ablaze after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Arati and Ravi were stationed in Kanpur, living in a small rented house that had a shared wall with the neighbouring house, owned by a Sikh family. Riots broke out in the city and a curfew was imposed that lasted for months. Schools, offices and shops were closed. Ravi had to go the factory every day since he worked in the defence sector and the government had issued him an emergency services pass. On most days he covered two eight-hour shifts. Homebound with two young children, no school, no milk and dwindling supplies, Arati was still grieving her mother’s passing. One day, in the middle of the night, she heard screams and ran to the window next to the front door, and saw the neighbours being dragged away from their house. Such arrests were becoming commonplace as part of the state’s crackdown in retaliation for the Prime Minister’s assassination. Ravi was covering the night shift and wasn’t home. Arati stood by the window and kept looking, unable to move, her hands gripping the iron grill of the frame so hard that her knuckles, when she finally looked away from the scene before her, were a ghastly white. Tears evaded her. Shock gripped her body and she stood there for what felt like hours. Rooted. Empty.
Arati was relieved when after a few years Ravi came home from work and informed her that he had been transferred to Delhi. For once, she willingly uprooted herself in the hope of a new beginning, to make new happy memories to fill herself with.
Now, many years later, in Sultanpur, she felt emptiness growing within her again. Her thoughts flitting between memories of joy in her parents’ home and reliving the trauma of her mother’s death. No Tara and Meera. No sweet and salty smell of their baby cheeks. No ruddy faces with dangling pigtails running towards her. No Bapa. No smile to greet her return home. No Ma. No songs she hummed. Arati was more conscious of what wasn’t, of nothingness. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to write back to Bapa’s letters until she received the one with Tagore’s poem.
1 May 2002
Dear Bapa,
Sorry for not writing back earlier. I have been busy setting up the house. We are doing okay here. I am rereading Gitanjali. I, also, gaze upon an emptiness, but no song drifts towards me. I see an abyss. I see Tara’s and Meera’s faces sometimes. Meera was inconsolable when she boarded the train to college. I told her to look at the moon each night and know that I will be looking at it too; and in that brief moment, we will be connected, even though we are thousands of kilometres apart. Bapa, do you look at the moon each night?
With love,
Arati
Samir called to inform about Bapa’s declining health. That explained why the letters had stopped since May. Arati had tried calling him, but someone else at home had always picked up and said that he was resting and unable to speak then. He never called back. She understood now. Within a week she was by his bedside. Ravi couldn’t accompany her this time, due to his work obligations. Bapa had been bedridden for the last two months. Her brothers and their teenage kids were taking turns at caregiving: cleaning his bedpan, sponging him, changing him. Arati took on the task of dressing his bedsores each day, and sat by his side, reading to him. He was mostly delirious and unresponsive. Sometimes he was irritable, as he had been, increasingly, since Ma’s passing. As the little grandkids were growing up, he would reprimand them for not washing their hands, not bathing on time, not studying, and not changing their ‘‘outside’’ clothes immediately after they had set foot back into the house. He would still mutter admonitions, barely audible, except now the grandkids were either teenagers or budding adults; that they were helping to keep him alive seemed lost on him. Every now and then, he would call out Ma’s or Arati’s name and smile when Arati held his hand and spoke to him.
Bapa had a sudden spurt of energy the day he died. He sat up in bed in the morning and demanded to see his diary. After breakfast he asked Arati to put on the radio—they were playing sixty minutes of nonstop Mohammad Rafi songs. No Colgate ads interrupted. He asked to be left alone. After lunch, he called Pitambar’s son, gave him some money, and asked him to buy him a big bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. He refused his evening tea and ate the whole Cadbury bar instead. Then he slept. Arati brought him tea the next morning. He had chocolate goo around the corners of his mouth. She began to clean it with a wet cloth, expecting him to wake any second. He did not.
Three months later, Arati and Ravi moved to Bangalore. Ravi had been promoted and transferred to the company headquarters, considered a plum posting, with a big bungalow and two chauffeur-driven cars. Many of the Delhi factory officers, old acquaintances of Arati’s and Ravi’s, were also stationed in Bangalore, adding a vague sense of familiarity in yet another new town.
One day as Arati was steering out of the driveway in her Maruti hatchback, she spotted the postman walking up, pulling a letter from his bag—she’d never seen a postman in Bangalore before. Tara and Meera both had cell phones and called regularly. As did Samir and all her friends. She assumed it must be a wedding invitation from a distant relative until she saw the pale-yellow envelope stretched out in the postman’s hand. It bore the Sultanpur address, and she recognized the handwriting. In a different handwriting, presumably of the Sultanpur post master, in the last line of the address section, barely squeezing in the pin code, was scribbled her forwarding address in Bangalore.
She tore the envelope. She recognized the handwriting. A deluge of thoughts flooded her. Feeling wobbly in her legs, she walked back to the porch and sat down. The letter was dated the day Bapa died.
20 January 2003
Dear Arati,
I saw your mother last night. She was wearing the navy-blue-and-white ikat saree that I like so much. We were sitting in the kitchen and having tea and listening to Mohammad Rafi songs. I am not keeping too well these days. I woke up this morning feeling a little better, and thought of writing to you. It has been more than a year since I saw you. When will you come and visit? Waiting for you …
Blessings and love,
Bapa
*****
Smita Pany is a corporate cog trying to dabble in words. She is also a mother, wife, daughter, and friend, wading through life, trying to crystallize the essence of it. Smita is based out of Bangalore, India. This will be her first published story.