Dearest Kalki's father,
How desperately I want to write to you today... so much I want to say... how can I even explain!
What a pity I couldn't be one of those who touched the moon's surface while there was still time!
Today my head feels so strange and buzzing! Fifty-two years of accumulated memories are swirling up, wanting to surface all at once!
But I won't write it all today, you understand! Only a scrap of paper in this notebook, after all!
When we married, I was a thirteen-year-old girl and you were twenty-one. What did you see in a poor, skinny, dark little thing like me that made you choose her—I still don't know!
One night, while caressing me, you said: skinny or dark, at that age your body had a special glow—that's what caught my eye! I loved hearing that so much. That shiver I'll never forget.
Your income was just a small cattle farm! And with that you had to support your enormous household—your parents, four siblings, grandmother, and aunt!
On our wedding night itself you said, "You must hold every person in this household close to your heart. Mine is a family of great hardship, but there's no shortage of love and affection." From then on I understood why there was such tenderness in your eyes!
Days passed, nights passed, and within the year it seemed I leaped from girlhood straight into womanhood! I began toiling with my body and soul on the farm and in the household! One by one your parents, siblings left us, and one by one our children came into the world... looking at the pattern of coming and going, it all seemed somehow circular! I couldn't study, but somehow my arithmetic became sharp!
Watching this pattern of arrivals and departures, it felt like someone was moving chess pieces on a board!
Kalki, Sabu, Habu, Ranga, and finally Abu came to fill our household! Day by day you grew even more tender and devoted! My heart would fill just watching you.
So much happiness that I feared to keep it on the ground lest ants carry it away, feared to put it on the shelf lest cats knock it down... and this became my mortal condition! The children grew up one after another while poverty seemed to crawl into our household on all fours!
Working day and night like a donkey at the oil mill, your body too began to break down—every day I watched you waste away bit by bit before my eyes!
None of the children could get beyond elementary school. I don't blame them either; we had neither money nor talent. God sends some people into the world only to drown in sighs! The world has no need of them, and they have nothing to give the world. They are born only to eat and survive from day to day.
God has placed us too in that very group!
I could never fulfill any of the children's wishes or whims. They each began living their own way. Not even the last trace of the "good" in love remained in this household. Little Kalki was somewhat affectionate with her parents. Habu would fuss a bit, but didn't get too close.
How the days passed before my eyes—even my practiced hand couldn't keep count.
The boys married and started families.
Little bubbles of our blood came back to life in Habu's, Sabu's, and Ranga's children! The more I tried to get close to them, the more Habu, Sabu, and our Ranga pulled away! I saw that strange circular game beginning again!
We married off little Kalki—the girl spent her whole life just preparing tobacco and betel! Then one evening at dusk, you said: I haven't seen you chew betel in so many days, Raju... prepare some betel and chew it! I love watching you do that!
That ghost-haunted evening, seeing your eyes, my heart lurched!
Everything around you was growing so dense, so dark... such hideous crickets chirping all around!
Then it seemed ten million years passed... slowly, quietly. You became sweat and evaporated from my life—that very dusk!
Want to hear something funny? Two days after the night you bid me farewell, I mortgaged the remaining forty-three days, wrapped a white cloth around myself, took the milk cans, and went house to house selling milk!
Habu couldn't find time—he'd gone out with the van; Sabu takes his afternoon nap, you know; Ranga was at her in-laws—the girl felt like seeing her mother! And Kalki! Her husband wouldn't let her come—said she mustn't visit a house of death! For two days twenty-five pounds of milk spoiled and went to waste, because you weren't there to sell it! Such laziness in work—really!
Forty-five days of mourning—the stomach won't endure that.
So I mortgaged forty-three days and went out to sell... went out to survive!
Family bonds today are flimsy rope that can't even tie a single step to the graveyard!
Enough of that old pickle—what's the point of stirring it all up! You just go sit by the embankment on that white ground, I'm coming too.
Yours truly, Me—your Raju!