Chapter Fifteen
Sureva Bhalekar
St. Mary’s Ladies Hostel
Charni Road, Bombay
July 1983
Vasudha Patil
Garware Ladies Hostel
Fergusson College, Pune
Dear Vasu,
I have done something terrible. I am so sorry. Please know that I’m doing everything to make it better. Please trust me and don’t worry. Aie found the ring.
I was so happy when she surprised me with a visit last week. Now I feel so stupid. I should have known my happiness would have a price. It was kind of your father to bring Aie with him on his business trip so she could see me. I was careful to remove the ring from around my neck as soon as she arrived and hide it in a secret pocket in my handbag. But it all turned out to be useless.
She had to stay with her second cousin, since we can’t have overnight visitors in the hostel. I went to see her every day and took her around Bombay to show her all the sights. We were having a lovely time, turning our hearts into Bombay, as the saying goes.
You say that Aie and I don’t owe your family anything, but without your father neither Aie nor I would ever have been able to see Bombay in our lives. Appa-saheb practically had to force Aie to sit in the car and come to Bombay with him. No other employer treats their servants in this manner, like family. You should know that. He was coming to the Sachivalaya for a congress session, for heaven’s sake! He had more important things on his mind. I wish you would understand my gratitude and not fill my head with nonsense just because you feel a certain way about me. Our friendship and your family’s charity toward mine are two separate issues. You have to stop conflating them.
Coming back to the ring, Aie inspected my bag when I went to the bathroom. It was the one time I got careless and forgot to take the bag with me. She kept telling me that something was different about me and that I was hiding something from her (you know how good she always was at discovering mischief we tried to hide). She kept saying that I was not acting like a girl who was studying to be a teacher. I kept trying to tell her that nothing was different, that living by myself had obviously made me more worldly. She didn’t believe me and said I should remember my place and not become too big for my shoes and ruin everything she’s worked for.
You know how angry that makes me. Her fear, her lack of faith in me. How can she not understand that this engineering degree is going to give us a life she can’t even imagine? It’s going to let her repay all her debts and live free. I can hear all the excuses you’re making on her behalf and I am not interested in them. If I weren’t afraid for you and me, I would not be speaking to her right now.
I even almost told her that I was studying engineering and not teaching. I know you think I shouldn’t lie to her. I would have told her if I weren’t one hundred percent sure that she would make me quit and go back to Yevla and force me to get married off. You know that’s no longer possible, Vasu. Not after last month.
My degree isn’t the only thing she’s suspicious about. She thinks I have something going on with some man. She thinks I have a lover. I should never have let her see me just after I spoke to you on the phone. That might be what ruined everything. After that, she kept pushing me and asking why I was looking the way I was. My own mother suspicious of my happiness. Can you believe such a thing?
Maybe you should never have sung to me at the youth festival. You were wrong. Ashatai Athavale does not have the most beautiful voice in the world. You do. I know you were supposed to have been singing for the audience, but I know you were not. It was in your eyes, which stayed on me the entire time. That was the thing that changed me, it changed my life. Maybe I should not have allowed everything that followed to happen, but are we born to turn away meaning when it finds us? Everything that happened was like light filling the sky when the sun rises, natural and inevitable.
I know we promised not to speak of this in our letters. But I cannot wait for you to call me on the phone to say this. If something goes wrong and we cannot reach each other, you have to know this. I will not be able to live this life without you, Vasu. What happened between us is the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced. Every breath I have taken since then has been more beautiful. And every breath I take in your presence is more beautiful than one where I am without you. If everything else were lost to me, every one of my senses gone, I would not trade how I feel when I’m with you to get it back. They can have everything, but they cannot have the piece of me that is you.
I am so sorry for how horrible I was to you after the first time. Of course you were braver, of course you knew better than me what this was. I was afraid. I’m always a coward at the start of anything new. You know that. I cannot bear the idea of you being hurt. If I let myself think about how much this could hurt you, I’ll never be able to stand up again and go on living.
I should never have called what happened between us the ugly names I did. Thank you for not believing me. Thank you for giving me another chance. I am forever incomplete without you and I will never again forget it. Who we are when we’re with each other cannot be anything but God’s gift. No, they cannot take that from us.
I know we cannot do this without lies. I will tell a million lies for us.
The lie I told my aie feels like the first of those million we’re going to have to tell. She obviously knew that it was your ring and that there’s another one in the set. I told her that you forgot it in my bag when I visited you and you gave it to me for safekeeping. She didn’t believe me. “Why would Vasu-baby only put one of the two rings in your bag?” she asked. “Where is the other one?” “Why is there a thread tied to it?”
But the question that hurt the most was “How could you steal from the family we owe everything to?”
She thinks I’m a thief, Vasu.
I, who have never asked her for anything. Not even new clothes on Diwali. Did you know that I let her sell the clothes your family bought me for Diwali? I never told anyone. I understood that we needed the money and I didn’t need the clothes. Your used clothes that your mother gave me were as good as any. I am in one of the world’s best engineering colleges, on a full scholarship, studying to change the world we live in (that’s what Professor Pai said to me last week). Why would I ever steal?
But I don’t care that she thinks that. What I do care about, what I’m terrified of, is the fact that I know she will not rest until she has told Appa-saheb and confessed on my behalf and begged for forgiveness. I’ve begged her not to. I’ve assured her I’m going to return the ring to you. I’ve told her I would die of shame if Appa-saheb and your aie think me a thief too. I don’t think that will stop her for too long.
I have thought and thought but I don’t know how to stop her, so I am turning to you. What should we do?
I might be a coward at the start of any change, but as you often remind me, I find my courage eventually (thank you for believing that even when I have a hard time believing it myself). I’ve been thinking about how we can be together forever without letting the world stop us and call us ugly. I do have a plan for that, but we’ll never get that far if we don’t come up with a plan to convince my aie that her suspicions are unfounded. Since our brains work in entirely different ways, I know you will find a solution where I see none.
Yours and only always yours,
Suru