Chapter Twelve
Vasudha Patil
Garware Ladies Hostel
Fergusson College, Pune, India
April 1983
Sureva Bhalekar
St. Mary’s Ladies Hostel
Charni Road, Bombay
Dear Suru,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to reply. While I’ve been writing to you in my head every day, I couldn’t put pen to paper because I broke my spectacles soon after I received your last letter and they had to make me new ones. Why does it take a whole month to make new spectacles? It was the most frustrating thing I’ve ever experienced to have read your letter and to not be able to respond. Isn’t it funny that you’re the scholar but I’m the one who can’t see without glasses? I did start to write to you by feel, but then I couldn’t read it back and I didn’t want to worry you by writing gibberish. I have my new spectacles now and you shall not be spared my letters anymore.
Your letter was so beautiful, Suru, I never want to wait weeks before responding to your words again. (I’ve ordered an extra pair of spectacles, just in case this happens again.)
Please don’t stick to the subtopics. Even though I love your subtopics—they cheer me up immensely—I love you meandering off even more. It feels like being with you, like we’re lying by the river talking, the way we did all the years of our lives until we left our home.
How can you keep saying my family took you in and gave you charity? Your aie has worked every minute of every day for the past twenty years. No one gave her or you anything. She earned it. If anything my family is in your aie’s debt for raising me and my brother and feeding us and taking care of Aie every time she got sick. Which both of us know was pretty much all the time. Remember how we overheard Appa telling my aie once that if it wasn’t for your aie keeping our household going, he would have had to find another wife.
I know we had laughed and imagined all the women Appa might ask to come run his household. Your impression of him proposing to other women had almost made me die from laughing. “My children need herding. My house needs managing. My cook needs directing. My self needs tending ...” That fake mustache you made with the end of your braid held above your lip was hilarious. Remember how it kept getting in your nose and making you sneeze?
But now when I think about what Appa said, it makes me sad. How must Aie have felt? I suspect she was just glad that your aie had made sure it didn’t come to that. So you see, my family owes yours far more than yours owes ours. Money is easy to repay. A life and a million acts of nurturing and kindness aren’t.
Please don’t ever say I don’t keep my promises. That caused me to cry. You had to know that. Actually, no you didn’t, I’m sorry I said that. You thought you were scolding me as you always do, for my own good. But you know keeping my word is important to me. All we have is our loyalty and character. Isn’t that what your aie taught us? We won’t take jewels and land to our grave, but our souls will carry the choices we made and how we lived to the next life.
You were wrong in your accusation. I never promised not to send you things. You asked me to not send you things, but I never agreed. If I didn’t send you things I would be buried under the weight of all I have. If I didn’t have you to share things with I would be too alone to comprehend. I’d become locked up inside my aloneness. A mountain would grow around me and trees upon that and no one would ever find me buried under how distant I feel from all of humanity because you aren’t here to connect me with it.
Please don’t take that away from me.
Oh, and help me out with a very important question. Where did you put the blanket? I know you found a solution. You always do. Did you lay it out beneath your mattress? I can imagine you doing that. Rolling it out where it would not take up space while still taking care of it. I am sorry that I inconvenienced you by sending it. I do wish I thought more before I acted. Do you think I’ve never had to think about the consequences of my actions because you’ve always done that for the both of us?
In any case I am sorry. I am now fully aware of how hot Bombay is. I made the mistake of asking our hostel warden about the temperatures in Bombay and she has not stopped complaining about her years there when she only remembers swimming in sweat every day of the year. She came to Pune when she married her husband twenty years ago and she talks about the Pune weather like it is Kashmir. In truth the weather has turned quite hot here too after the few months of cold.
I will not be offended if you bring the blanket with you when you come to Pune in two months for the youth festival. I am so eager to see you, my excitement doesn’t feel like it can fit inside my heart. There is so much I want to show you and tell you. I called Ashatai Athavale immediately upon receiving your letter. She might have the most beautiful voice you’ve ever heard. I’ve been singing with her every day. I know you will be felled by her voice. We’ve been preparing a thumri for the youth festival. It’s in raag megh malhaar, so it will be perfect to celebrate the start of the monsoon. But you won’t believe what happened the other day. I was practicing and the strains of music that match the rhythm of the rain so perfectly filled me up so tightly that I started to cry. And when I looked out of my window, it was drizzling. An entirely unseasonal shower that sprinkled the city and was gone in a breath. It was so beautiful. I wish you’d been here to see it. That was my first thought. I sing to you, Suru, when you are not here. Do you hear me?
Stop shaking your head. I am too silly by half. I do know that. You are not wrong when you call me the most self-aware yet most fanciful girl. One would think those two things would cancel each other out. Are you truly silly if you know you’re silly? It would take some smartness to know silliness, and how can a smart person be silly? Maybe you could devise an experiment in your lab to figure me out? Slice up my brain like one of your rats.
I suspect you’re the only person on earth who has a prayer of a chance of doing it, of determining why my brain won’t let me be all the things I’m supposed to be. Please don’t be afraid for me, I don’t show what is inside me to anyone but you. You get to be the keeper of my true self. You once told me that they cannot hurt what they do not know.
But please never again say that you do not feel like we are equal. You understand much, my dear Suru, but you do not understand the meaning of equality if you can see a difference between us. Why do you think humans need to use all these scales to gauge our worth when we all drop onto the earth from a birth canal in exactly the same state and return to dirt that crumbles beneath our feet and feeds the roots of plants in exactly the same way too? How can something as transient as money define our equality? Our opportunities, yes. Our possessions definitely, but certainly not how equal we are in any sense that is human. How can there be equality and inequality between things that are one and the same?
I’ve done it again. Come to the end of the page when I have so much more to say. But you are Suru and you know the rest without me having to say more. Writing this last part above all else gives me the greatest joy: I will see you soon, my friend.
Yours lovingly,
Your Silly Vasu