Chapter 10: Anushka / Patra (Letters)

# Chapter 10: Anushka / Patra (Letters)

On the seventh day, Shalini brought out the letters.

Not the letter from Sunita, that was history, distant and sacred, kept in the wooden box like a relic. These were different. These were Shalini's own letters, written from Muscat over twelve years, never sent, stacked in a cotton bag that she'd kept in the steel trunk at the foot of her bed.

There were forty-three of them. Anushka counted. Each one addressed to Baby Naik-Mhatre, c/o Shishu Gruha, Girgaon, Mumbai. An address that was wrong by twenty-six years and several jurisdictions, because of course the baby had been adopted within months and the shishu gruha would never have forwarded mail even if it could. Shalini knew this. She'd written the letters anyway.

They sat on the verandah with the letters spread between them on the cane table. A mosaic of blue inland letter forms and thin airmail envelopes, each one creased and handled and then folded shut again

, the paper carrying the oils of Shalini's fingers, the ink carrying the emotions of a woman writing to a child she would never hold. Forty-three letters. One for every year? No, the count was wrong for that. Shalini had written them irregularly, sometimes three in a month during the early years in Muscat when the loneliness was sharpest, sometimes none for six months during the periods when she convinced herself that letting go was the kindest thing, that the baby was better off not knowing, that silence was a form of love.

Anushka picked up the first letter. Paper was tissue-thin, the blue aerogramme paper that India Post sold for international correspondence, the kind that folded into its own envelope, the writing surface barely larger than a postcard. Shalini's young handwriting pressed hard into the paper, the ballpoint pen leaving grooves that Anushka's fingertips traced like Braille. She could feel the pressure of the sentences, the physical force of words written by a hand that was trying to hold onto something by writing about it.

Morning light caught the ink. Blue, faded to grey in places, the chemistry of ballpoint dye interacting with decades of oxygen and humidity. Blue ink on blue paper. Words swimming in their own colour, barely visible, requiring Anushka to hold the letter at an angle, to tilt it toward the window, to squint, the way you squint at something distant that you desperately need to see clearly.

, as if opened and reread many times. The morning was overcast. The air smelled of rain that hadn't yet arrived, that hanging moisture that makes everything feel closer and more intimate.

"I wrote the first one three days after landing in Muscat," Shalini said. She picked up the oldest envelope. Thinner than the rest, its edges browning. "The flight was Air India. Mumbai to Muscat. I sat in a middle seat between a man who slept the entire time and a woman who was going to work as a nurse at a hospital there. The nurse was from Kerala. She asked me why I was going. I said 'work.' She asked if I was leaving family behind. I said no."

She opened the letter. The handwriting was younger than the Shalini who sat before Anushka. Larger, more uneven, the pen pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the paper that Anushka could feel when she ran her fingertip across them.

"Read it," Shalini said. "If you want."

Anushka took the letter. It was in Hindi, with occasional Konkani words where Hindi didn't have the right shape for what Shalini needed to say.

My dear baby,

It is three days since I left you. I am in Muscat now. It is hot here, hotter than Bombay, hotter than Goa in May. The family I work for has a big house with white walls and cold floors. They have two children, a boy and a girl. The girl is three years old. When I hold her, my arms remember you. My body has not forgotten the weight of you, even though my mind is trying to.

I want you to know that I did not leave because I did not love you. I left because I loved you more than I loved myself, and that is a dangerous kind of love, the kind that makes you do impossible things and then live with them forever.

I don't know your name. The sisters at the shishu gruha said they would let the new family choose. I hope they chose something beautiful. I hope your name sounds like music when someone calls you for dinner.

I will write again. I know you won't read these. I am writing them for myself, so that somewhere in the world there is a record that you existed, that I held you, that the three weeks we had were real.

Your mother,* *Shalini

Anushka set the letter down on the table. Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs, feeling the cotton of her salwar against her palms, anchoring herself through the contact.

"You wrote forty-three of these."

"One every three or four months. More at the beginning. Less as the years went on. The last one is from 2010, just before I came back to Goa."

"Why did you stop?"

"Because I ran out of things to say that weren't the same thing repeated in different words. Every letter is a variation of: I'm sorry. I love you. I hope you're safe. After forty-three attempts, I had to accept that there was no new way to say it."

Anushka picked up another letter at random. The seventeenth, from 2003. The handwriting had settled by then, smaller and more controlled. The Hindi was smoother. The letter described Shalini's daily routine in Muscat: waking at five, cooking breakfast for the family, taking the children to school, cleaning the house, cooking again, sleeping in a small room at the back of the ground floor with a window that faced a concrete wall. And then, at the end:

Today the girl, Fatima, her name is Fatima, brought me a drawing she made at school. It was a house with a garden and a sun and two figures, one big and one small. She said: "This is me and you, Shalini aunty." I put the drawing on the wall of my room. And then I sat on the bed and I cried, because a child I am not related to drew me into her world and I couldn't do the same for you.

Anushka read five more letters. Then ten. Then she lost count. They charted twelve years of a woman's life in exile — the small promotions (from cook to housekeeper), the friendships with other Indian workers (a woman named Jyoti from Udupi who worked next door, a man named Hussain who drove the family's car and smuggled Bollywood DVDs from the souk), the illnesses (a bout of malaria in 2005, a fractured wrist from a fall in 2007), and woven through all of it, like a thread running through fabric, the constant awareness of a child somewhere in Mumbai growing up without her.

Some letters were angry. The twelfth one, from 2001, contained a paragraph that was almost violent in its self-recrimination:

I wake up every morning and the first thing I think is: she is three years old now. Or four. Or five. She is learning to walk, or talk, or read. She is doing these things without me and I cannot even picture them because I don't know what she looks like. I have done this to myself. No one else. Not Deepak, not his mother, not the factory, not the chawl, not the city. Me. I made the decision. I walked through that door. And every morning I walk through it again because memory is a door that never closes.

Some letters were tender. The twenty-ninth, from 2006:

Happy birthday, my baby. You are eight today. I bought a small cake from a bakery near the souk — vanilla, because I don't know what flavour you like, and vanilla is safe, and I have been choosing safe things for eight years because the one time I chose brave I lost everything. I lit a candle and blew it out for you. My wish: that whoever is raising you knows that bedtime stories are not optional, that the right lullaby can fix almost anything, and that if you cry at night, the correct response is not "stop crying" but "I'm here."

Anushka reached the last letter. Number forty-three. January 2010. The handwriting was the Shalini she knew now — precise, spare, unhurried.

I am going home. Back to Goa. Aai has died and Tai has asked me to come. The house in Benaulim is empty and someone needs to live in it.

I have been away for twelve years. Twelve years of other people's houses, other people's children, other people's kitchens. I am tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

This is my last letter to you. Not because I have stopped thinking of you — I will never stop thinking of you — but because I need to learn to think of you without writing it down. The letters were a crutch. A way of pretending I was still talking to you, still connected. But I wasn't. I was talking to paper. And paper doesn't hear.

If you ever find me — and I don't know how you would, but the world is strange and stubborn and occasionally kind — know this: I kept every letter. I kept every birthday. I kept a space in my life shaped exactly like you, and nothing has ever filled it, and nothing ever will, because some spaces are meant to stay empty. They are monuments. They are proof that something was there.

I love you. That has not changed. That will not change.

Your mother,* *Shalini

Anushka set the last letter down on the pile with the others. She sat very still. The overcast sky had darkened further, and the first drops of rain, heavy, warm, Goan rain that fell like it meant business, began to hit the courtyard's laterite surface, sending up small puffs of red dust.

She looked at Shalini, who was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, her back straight, her face turned toward the garden where the rain was now falling in earnest, the mango tree's leaves bowing under the weight.

"The space," Anushka said. Her voice was rough. "The one shaped like me."

"Yes."

"Is it still empty?"

Shalini turned to look at her. The rain was louder now, drumming on the verandah's tile roof, streaming from the eaves in curtains of water. The sound was immense, surrounding, the kind of sound that erased everything else and left only itself.

"No," Shalini said. "It's sitting on my verandah reading my letters."

Anushka reached across the table, across the scattered letters, and took Shalini's hand. Shalini's fingers closed around hers. Tight, convulsive, the grip of someone who had been holding on to nothing for twenty-six years and had finally found something to hold.

They sat on the verandah and watched the rain fall on Benaulim, and neither of them spoke, because the rain said everything there was to say — that the dry season ends, that the earth drinks, that what was cracked becomes whole, not by being repaired but by being filled.