The cupboard smelled of her. Cotton, camphor, something with no name that was entirely hers.
Kavya sat on the floor in front of it and did not move for a long time.
Two weeks since the funeral. The relatives had thinned away. The casseroles had stopped coming.
Kavya had come to sort her mother’s things because someone had to.
She started with the sarees. Folded them the way her mother had taught her — never across the pleats, always lengthwise. Her hands moved but her mind drifted, doing the strange arithmetic of grief. How much of this house was actually her mother. How much would remain once her things were gone.
At the bottom of the cupboard, beneath a folded shawl, her hand found something slim and hard.
A book.
Cover worn soft with handling. Spine long surrendered.
She opened it.
The pages fell immediately to the middle — the way pages fall when a book has been opened at the same place too many times. The margins were alive with her mother’s pencilled handwriting. Phrases underlined. Brackets around stanzas. Words — written, partially erased, still visible.
An envelope slid out.
Unsealed. Unaddressed.
Three pages inside. Her mother’s handwriting.
Vishwanath.
Vishwanath…Who?
She should have put it back.
She read it anyway.
I saw you at Prema’s son’s wedding last week. Just four minutes. After forty years. I came home and couldn’t sleep.
So I’m writing this at two in the morning with your poetry book open on my lap — your book, though after forty years I suppose it’s become mine. I’m going to say things I’ve never said to anyone because I’m sixty-years-old, tired of carrying the weight of them for so long.
Remember that summer? Prema’s house. You — my cousin’s charming neighbour — were reading on their veranda the first afternoon. When I asked what the book was, instead of just showing me the cover you read me a poem out loud. I’d never had anyone read me a poem before. I didn’t know that was something that happened between people.
The evenings after that. You argued with my opinions and expected me to argue back. Not to win — just because the argument itself was worthwhile. I still remember when I said, women were educated only to make better conversation at their husband’s dinner table and you put your book down, looked at me and said — do you actually believe that or has someone convinced you to. I didn’t sleep that night. Because something had been asked of me that I didn’t know how to answer and I wanted to find the answer before morning.
Remember the afternoon it rained? We sat on the veranda for three hours talking about nothing of consequence. And I realised somewhere in the middle of it how completely at ease I was with you.
Remember the last evening before I left? Our walk back from the Brihadeeswara temple in the dark. You didn’t fill the silence and neither did I.
You gave me a book that night. Mark whatever speaks to you, you said. I started filling the margins slowly, over that summer and then over the years after, watching my own handwriting change across the pages. Becoming something.
I was already engaged to Mohan when I understood what I felt. You never knew. I never told you. I came home, said yes, packed this book at the bottom of my trunk. That’s the choice I made. With open eyes. I chose a life that was certain over a feeling that’d no guarantee.
I don’t regret life. Mohan is a good man. Faithful. Present. Kind.
But there is a loneliness I’ve spent years trying to name — the loneliness of being consistently, quietly unseen. He loved me the way you love something you’re certain of. Without curiosity. Without hunger.
That summer you made me feel like someone worth being curious about. I’ve carried that feeling for forty years now in the quiet corner of my heart.
There’s one more thing.
Kavya has your stillness. That particular way of going quiet when she’s thinking — head slightly down, somewhere behind her own eyes. I noticed it when she was three years old and have never told anyone. I’ve looked at my daughter all her life and seen something of that summer in her face. I’ve loved her for herself and also, privately, for that.
Don’t know if that makes me a good mother or a complicated one.
Perhaps there’s no difference.
The poem on page 34 still makes me catch my breath. Every time. Forty years and every time.
-Sulochana
Kavya sat without moving.
Kavya has your stillness.
She’d been told all her life that she’d her mother’s eyes. Her stubbornness. Her way of carrying things without complaint.
She’d not known she also carried something her mother had never named to anyone.
She turned to page 34.
Read the poem her mother had returned to for forty years.
Then, folded the letter, slid it back between the pages and closed the book.
Her father appeared in the doorway. Knocked twice. He’d taken to knocking before entering this room. Their bedroom. Every time. The way he’d for forty years. As if she might still be inside, needing a moment.
Her eyes filled looking at him. This good man. Who’d loved her mother steadily, faithfully, completely.
Kavya put the book in her bag.
“Coming,” she said.
Behind her the cupboard stood open, still exhaling its quiet scent into the empty room.
Cotton. Camphor.
Something underneath that’d no name.
That would begin to fade now.
