The Letter

My dearest Bochka,

By the time you read this, I will be gone. I only wish it had happened sooner. Had I been able, I would have ended this life – this wretched, miserable, tortured life – a long time ago, but I lacked the courage. I cannot even say that I soldiered on for you and your brother; that would be a lie. I know I have been a terrible mother to the two of you, a truth that has tormented me these last few months, the pain of it worse than the cancer that has been devouring my insides.

Perhaps this is my punishment for the life I have lived.

The Ashram doctor says I have a month or two at best and that I should say my goodbyes. He tells me there is not much more the medical staff can do other than ease the pain and I should consider going back home and spending the last days with my loved ones. I decline politely saying I would prefer to be alone in my last moments.

My garb of spirituality may even make it believable.

But then Doctor Tyagi is a wise man; I’m sure he notices I have no visitors except Ronen Da, who only comes by once a month to help with the practicalities.

In place of my last goodbyes I write this letter, more on days when I feel stronger – because there are good ones and bad – less when it feels like a hundred metal talons are scraping my guts, when all I can do is summon a nurse who sees the pain in my eyes and wordlessly adds something to the drip. It dulls the searing ache but fogs my mind.

I hate those days.

You see, painful as it is to write what I am about to, I do look forward to it. I feel a certain connection; almost back in the moment when you were sitting next to me on the verandah of our house in Maharani Bagh, suddenly turning to ask, ‘Ma, why don’t we go on holidays any longer?’ A question so innocent yet loaded that there could have been no answer. It had swamped me with such a storm of emotion – sadness, regret, guilt – that all I could do was look away.

I dreamt just the other day that you were sitting by my bed, stroking my face, saying, ‘It’s okay, Ma. I still love you.’ I woke up so happy, only to feel crushed soon after. I don’t even deserve the happiness of dreams. It must be difficult for you to believe this but I love you so dearly, my Bochku.

I have asked Ronen Da to hand you this letter personally when no one is around, and to insist that you read it when you are alone at home, up in the hills of Mukhteshwar. I hope my instructions have been followed.

What I am about to tell you will explain many things that transpired in your life from the time you were about six years old. Growing up, you must have struggled often to understand why things turned out the way they did. Why everything fell apart. It’s not that I never considered telling you but faltered every time, fearing the damage it could cause. But now I feel it can also offer some hope of closure.

Ever since I was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, I thought about writing a final letter to you. You must be wondering why, what is the point of it? Is it a maudlin farewell from a dying and remorseful parent? A last appeal for forgiveness, for the emotional neglect I subjected you and Chhotku to when you needed me most?

It may be all of these but more than anything, it is a confession.

If my death had been sudden or accidental, I would have taken my secret to the grave. It is perhaps in the fitness of things that I was not allowed to shirk the responsibility of that decision. I have had many months of suffering to burn through while contemplating whether I should leave you the huge burden of this truth as my last bequest.

It seems that in death, as in life, all I have for you is misery.

My hands tremble as I write this. It is a secret that ripped our family apart – one that I have carried with in me for twenty-four long years.

Chhotku is not your father’s son.

There, it is out now – Chhotku was born of an extramarital affair. It didn’t last very long, perhaps a few weeks, ending the day I discovered I was pregnant. Your father had to know but no one else, to the best of my knowledge, has ever known. It wrecked our marriage, destroyed your father. Our lives were never to be the same again.

All your innocent questions – ‘Ma, why don’t we go on holidays any longer?’; ‘Why don’t Baba and you talk anymore?’ – do you now see? Everything had changed. All the anchors in our lives had been thrown away. One mistake, sometimes that is all it takes and nothing can be fixed again. Nothing.

I have no words to console you with, probably the reason I have never, in my lifetime, been brave enough to tell you any of this. I am a coward. I have to hide behind the screen of a letter sent from the depths of my private hell, secure in the knowledge that I will not have to look you in the eye again. I fear what I may see there will feel like a thousand deaths.

It is not only your father I betrayed. You and Chhotku have every right to ask why I distanced myself from you. You were only twelve and Chhotku six; little boys. You needed me the most then, and I failed you. Guilt and remorse had turned me into a being I couldn’t recognize – devoid of any kindness or love. Even my sense of duty deserted me. I was in such a state that I feared my mere presence would harm you. You and Chhotku had to be sent away, I feared I might contaminate you; I had to run away. Then the years passed by and I could never muster the courage to bring you close to me again. I told myself you had learnt to cope and were better off on your own.

When I discovered my illness, I instructed the caregivers at the Ashram to not let you know. Towards the end, Ronen Da tried his best to persuade me but I refused. I wasn’t sure how I would react on seeing the two of you after so many years. How long has it been now since Chhotku came by – six years? He may have tired of our meetings, so few words were spoken. His resentment towards me was far stronger than yours, I could feel it. He is angrier. He always carried that accusing manner about him, as if it was only a thin veneer of civility and respect that stopped him from blurting out those damning questions. Then he did away with the charade. A customary call after the Pujas, that was all. I don’t blame him.

You haven’t visited me in quite a while either. Perhaps you sensed too, after your last visit, that I wished to be left alone. Yet you always remembered to send me a card on my birthday. And books. I am ever grateful to you for remembering my fondness for reading. The books you sent sustained me. The last lot was the three novels of Marilynne Robinson. I read them over and over and wept every time I did.

I have thought a lot about whether I should be writing to Chhotku as well. After all, these truths pertain to him more directly. Something stops me from doing that. Maybe it is fear. In my head, he is still little Chhotku, less mature than you, volatile. I don’t know whether you will choose to let him know. It is a big decision. He has a family as well.

There, I burden you again with these impossible decisions.

I feel spent now. I wish I could say unburdened, relieved; but I don’t. All these years, I have wallowed in remorse but it still won’t let go. It’s like I cannot take a breath without feeling it. Time has dulled the edge of grief but cannot wash away the regret I feel – now with a greater intensity, as I approach the end of my days.

Today I sit here, Bochka, trying to imagine what you would be feeling as you read this. Disgust? Hatred? Sorrow for your father? Anger at the unfairness of it all?

At times, I ask myself – I was so young – can I not be forgiven one lapse, however grievous? But whom shall I ask forgiveness of? The man I hurt the most is long gone. I ask you, my son, not to think the worst of me. I leave this world with no hope of salvation but if you can, try and forgive me. Not for my sake, but for yours.

With all my love,

Ma.

Five pages of unlined paper folded neatly, written in his mother’s immaculate, elliptical hand. Not a single word scratched out, just a slight downward slant to the lines on the page. The college teacher till the very end.

But there was a sixth page, clearly a postscript.

Ronojoy took one look at it, and turned away, unable to accept the truth of it. Just three lines, but these hurt the most; lines that even he couldn’t bring it in his heart to accept.

Ronojoy sat on the balcony of their family hill home in Mukteshwar, the folded letter in his hand. A cup of tea stood by the side of his wooden reclining chair. Cold, untouched. He seemed calm, his hands steady. There were no tears. The only odd thing was that he could not feel his legs. There was a complete lack of sensation, stomach downwards. His face felt contorted, lips and jaw protruding slightly. He corrected that. Unable to move, he sat and stared ahead.

Outside, in front of him, the evening ritual of a clear autumn day in the Himalayas was playing out. Dusk was arriving. The tips of the towering snow peaks of Nanda Devi and Trishul had turned pink from the last rays of the setting sun. It was the most beautiful moment of the day, but held for only a few minutes. The pink faded into a deathly shade of grey as soon as the rays deserted the peaks. A moment of incredible beauty turned funereal. Ronojoy hated the transformation, it heralded the onset of an evening disquiet he had been battling for years, but today he couldn’t rise from his chair to go inside and switch on the house lights.

Images flashed in front of his eyes. Of Ma when she was much younger. Sujoy and him sitting on the grounds in front of their boarding school. Baba, with the two of them, walking up the steps of the hill house. Ma sitting huddled with them at the bottom of a staircase. Baba sitting on the edge of their bed in the attic. Just random images, in no particular order.

It had been a long day.

At dawn, Ma’s body had been cremated at the riverside funeral ghat in Haridwar. Her fellow Ashramites had brought it down from Rishikesh before sunrise. Ma’s last wish had been to have her ashes scattered in the Ganges. Neither Sujoy nor he was remotely religious but had decided to go ahead with it. After the cremation, they carried the ashes to the Astha Pravah ghat nearby and cast them in the river.

When the priests had been paid off, Ronen Uncle had taken Ronojoy aside and handed him the letter, saying that he had no knowledge of its contents but that he had been made to promise that Ronojoy would only read it at home, alone. Ronojoy had stared at the envelope in surprise. His name was inscribed on top, in Ma’s handwriting. He couldn’t even recall when he had last seen something written in his mother’s hand.

The group broke up after the immersion; Sujoy had turned back for Delhi immediately with Ronen Uncle. Ronojoy drove across to the other side of the state before starting the climb to Mukteshwar. It had taken some effort to keep himself from opening the envelope along the way.

Now, as he sat with the evening sky darkening around him, Ronojoy considered his mother’s question: ‘What must you be feeling as you read this?’ She was right in one respect; so many things were already becoming clearer to him. Baba, Dida, boarding school, Ashram – everything. How was it that the mere possibility had never crossed his mind? Should it not have been obvious? Or did the mind work in such an insidious way to protect one, blocking out the most monstrous of possibilities that explained events in one’s lives? Fleeting memories of an uneasy exchange with his father, in this very house, floated up in his head.

He didn’t feel any of the emotions Ma had anticipated: disgust, hatred, anger. Only an overwhelming sadness, though he couldn’t tell for whom. It was akin to regret; the way one feels when something good goes to waste. But he wasn’t thinking clearly, there was just too much noise. His whole life, as he knew or remembered it, had been turned on its head.

He felt disoriented.

Ronojoy remembered his last visit to the Ashram. It was two years ago, on Ma’s birthday. Or was it three…could so much time have passed so quickly? It was three. This seemed to him a part of growing older – events that appeared fairly recent in memory had actually happened much earlier. A reminder that our days were rushing by at a far greater speed than we imagined.

It was an annual routine, to visit his mother on her birthday with a few books. Ronojoy could no longer say he looked forward to these visits, as he once had. More habit, and duty. Didn’t most relationships finally disintegrate into that? The pattern of the visit was the same; Ma would receive him with a smile, ask after Sujoy and Dida. She would look at the books – the only time her face betrayed anything close to happiness – and thank him profusely. Then there was nothing else to talk about. A few predictable inquiries about her health, interspersed with long silences. It wasn’t as if his mother wasn’t happy to see him, just that sometimes gaps between people widened too much for casual conversation to sustain. Ronojoy would generally put it down to awkwardness but in that last visit it seemed to him that his presence made his mother more melancholic. She also said something that sounded like a discouragement for future visits: ‘You come up all this way to see me, just for these few moments. Is it necessary?’

He hadn’t replied, yet it was true. Ronojoy barely spent an hour at the Ashram before heading back on the long eight-hour drive to Delhi. The following year, he hadn’t made the trip; the books were mailed and he had called her on the phone instead. Ma hadn’t sounded disappointed.

It was getting chilly outside; night was descending in the hills. In the distance, the lights of Almora were slowly beginning to come on. Soon, they would begin to look like a swarm of distant fireflies. Ronojoy felt a heaviness. Dusk had never been his favourite time of day. The dimming of the light always seemed to lower his spirits. Today’s, of course, was a very different dusk. He wondered if he would have felt more agitated had he read Ma’s letter sitting in Delhi.

Was it possible that the scale of one’s sorrow, or even joy, was somewhat contained in surroundings of vastness? He had always felt that way. Whenever there was a dip in his life in the city, which wasn’t that infrequent, the mountains were his refuge. Here, as he sat surrounded by towering peaks and an endless expanse of forest, his troubles seemed smaller. He felt like a tinier speck of the cosmos, diminished in stature and significance. Life itself seemed so transient. Everything felt bearable. Solitude lent a wholly different perspective.

Slowly, with some effort, he took his phone out of his trouser pocket. He stared at it for what seemed like a long time before dialling a number.

‘Hello, Ronen Uncle? Have you reached?’

‘Yes, Rono, you know how fast Sujoy drives. I managed to escape the rush hour. Am home, showered and settled with a cup of tea. A bit tired but that is just old age, I suppose. Have you reached Mukteshwar?’

‘Yes, I am home too. Listen, Ronen Uncle, I wanted to talk to you about a few things. May I come by and have a chat? Only if it won’t distress you to talk about Ma.’

‘Of course, Rono. You can come anytime. When were you thinking?’

‘Would tomorrow evening be fine?’

‘Tomorrow? But you are up in the mountains. Is everything all right, Rono? Is it the letter?’

‘Everything is okay. It’s just that there is hardly anyone else I can talk to about Ma’s time at the Ashram. I will start early from here then and come straight to your place. I should hope to be there by six in the evening, on the outside. Is that okay?’

‘Of course, but you sound upset, Rono. You will drive all this way…it’s a tough drive…’

‘I am fine, Ronen Uncle. Please don’t worry. I will see you tomorrow. Goodnight.’

Ronojoy stood up and walked back into the house. It was dark inside. For some reason, he didn’t switch on the lights. In the faint moonlight that drifted in through the glass panes, he could see the silhouette of a cottage piano against the wall. Lifting the lid, he tapped a couple of keys. Not surprisingly, they were not tuned. Ronojoy had a vivid recollection of music in this house, but it had been years since Ma was last here to play it. No one other than her knew how to. He walked away and sat down heavily on the bed.

The night jar had begun its incessant call, it would carry on deep into the night. This was an intrinsic part of Ronojoy’s evenings in the hills, one he normally looked forward to. In a way, it reassured him – everything was as he remembered it to be. Today, the call held a plaintive note, or so he imagined.

Why did Ma feel he would find it surprising to know that she had loved him dearly? Because she had left them and gone away? Ronojoy understood her apprehension, but could never doubt how deeply his mother had loved him. He had been the apple of her eye. No demonstration was necessary, their mutual love was like osmosis. All the growing up years he remembered in their household, through good times and bad, there was no one she had loved more. He wondered if this had been apparent to Sujoy as well. It must have been, children rarely missed such things.

What saddened Ronojoy was that his mother had underestimated the innate human capacity to forgive a loved one. Wasn’t this, essentially, what made us humane –
to see how fallible we all were and to make allowances for it, for each other?