Dear Surangi,
Considering I have always called you by that name I have no hesitation in addressing you thus. All is well here and everyone has conveyed their best wishes to you. And yes, Vidya Tai has asked me to remind you that you promised to write to her too, separately.
It was heartening to read about your experiences on board the SS Ranchi. Gaju was very excited when I read out your description of the vessel. He declared that he wants to travel the seven seas when he grows up, whether as a passenger or as a seafarer, he does not know yet.
I must confess that I was worried about how you may cope with your circumstances. When we were to marry Aai convinced me that I had to become, for your sake, the mother you had just lost and the sibling you never had. My eleven year old self accepted the challenge to take care of you and even today you remain my priority. I am so glad to hear that you are managing well. I hope you continue to nurture both the body as well as the mind, enriching the latter with the myriad experiences that lie ahead.
My duties at the hospital take up most of my time, but I have also waited each day to see if there was any mail from you. And finally when I did get your letter it was frustrating to have to wait all day to be able to read it without anything else needing my attention.
My dear girl, you have always been the more romantic of us, and your love sickness is quite characteristic of that quality. When I left our village to come to Bombay, hoping to become a doctor, I gave up the chance to see you blossom from a school girl in your pigtails into a self-aware and confident young woman. Maybe it was better that I missed the metamorphosis. The new Surangi that I am writing to knows very well what she wants in life and has no inhibitions about expressing her desires. Had you been around me all the time I would have been too distracted to have made it to medical school! Does that make me sound conceited? Perhaps it does.
I wish I could describe my own ardor with intensity but it would probably come across as insincere. I can only say that I have unfolded and reread your letter over a dozen times. Each time I do so our childhood years run through my memories like a bolt of pure satin unfolding itself.
The first time I set my eyes on you I could hardly believe I was marrying the little girl who looked like she had been bundled into her first ever saree. Both of us avoided looking at each other meticulously, merely following instructions given by the elders. You continued to ignore me even when I made a sincere attempt to bond, and my ego was so bruised I yelled at you in the cart on our way back, your tears causing your kohl to smudge.
I am sure you hated me for being so controlling, always breathing down your neck, forcing you to do your math when you wanted to play with your dolls instead. By the way, your sandalwood doll, the one you forgot about when father bought you new toys, still lies in the bottom of my trunk, wrapped in your old brocade blouse. The fragrance still lingers, compensating for your absence and filling my senses with affection for you.
I remember almost everything. Once you stuffed your nose inside a Damascus rose and got stung by a bee. You made such a ruckus when I tried removing the sting that I had to pin you down to stop you from moving. We applied honey on your nose to dull the pain and you tried to stick out your tongue to see if you could reach it.
In another instance, you cried for days when the stray dog we had befriended lost all the puppies of her first litter to sickness. You were convinced that you were somehow responsible for them. And you tried to feed the dog garden cress seeds hoping to prevent any further pregnancies. When the dog followed her natural reproductive urge to mate with other strays you branded her characterless and lectured her on her faltering morals, only forgiving her after she bore healthy puppies. Waman and I found it rather amusing, but you were a kid, how could you have known that animals do not mimic human sexual mores and that garden cress seeds are useless as a canine contraceptive!
You were nine when you made lunch without any help. I still remember, you cooked lentils and rice and an eggplant potato stew. For dessert you sliced a banana into sweetened milk. Everything was perfectly done and Kaku and Aai got you a silver key chain to validate your effort. I still remember how you ran all over the house with the keychain tucked into your skirt, the sound of the tinkling tiny bells marking your happiness on being declared an able cook.
I was worried that if you enjoyed keeping house too much you would neglect your books, so I was sometimes mean, not giving you credit when you excelled at something in the kitchen. When I failed to acknowledge you by asking for seconds the hurt in your eyes would haunt me for days. I would try to make up by picking the sweetest tamarind pods and Cape gooseberries which you gathered in your long skirts, taking them home to mother before you ate any.
You face lit up like an electrified moon whenever you received a personal gift, you even kept a written record marking the date, the name of the giver and what they gave you. When Vidya Tai gave you a bar of scented soap you were in so in awe of it that you refused to unwrap it and kept it among your best clothes so they could smell nice. And you always saved money to buy presents for others. When you ordered a pair of earrings for Chandri she burst into tears because she had never owned any, because a tola of gold was worth about twenty rupees.
I could enlist hundreds of memories, some happy and some not so pleasant. If I arranged them in order I could compile the story of our wedded life. Maybe some day we should actually put this plan into action, so that our future generations will understand the way we lived.
You were honest enough to pour out your deepest secrets. I think I owe you a reciprocal. I may not be good with words but the intimate moments we spend together, especially that night we stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel, are branded in the memory command centre of my brain. How my mind battled with my heart to restrain myself from tearing off our clothes and consummate our relationship! You were so uninhibited because of the champagne in your belly that it took every iota of my willpower to not take advantage of the situation.
I was not just fighting an ethical battle with myself. A few incidents that I have been witness to recently have urged me to decipher the depth of relationships. Does intimacy really need the sanctity of a marital bond? During my internship in the municipal hospital I saw a number of cases of termination of unwanted pregnancies. There pregnancies resulted from either promiscuous liaisons or were the natural consequence of helpless young girls being forced to sell their bodies by their pimps, who were often their own brothers, fathers or husbands. Whether or not the couplings happened by consent the women chose to reject their unborn.
I was afraid of the possibility. Had our night together resulted in conception your chance of spending a year abroad would have been compromised. The currently available means of contraception are still quite rudimentary and you would never agree to terminate a pregnancy. Our best option then was to wait for the right moment.
Life without you is made bearable because of Dinkar's presence. We meet up whenever we can. If Rohini is busy the two of us take long morning or evening walks along Chowpatty. You know how adventurous Dinu can be, last weekend we packed a small bag each and took a train to Lonavala before trekking our way to Rajmachi fort.
We went along with an enthusiastic group of young trekkers. The lush greenery and the waterfalls offered exhilarating views. Dinu pointed out any bird that he spotted and there was another fellow who was a botanist, he showed us what herbs and flowers the local shrubbery was made up of.
The trekkers stopped by a poor farmer's thatched hut for the midday meal. The farmer's wife supplements the family's income by serving hot meals to hungry hikers. Lunch was millet flatbread and zunka, served with fried cluster beans and green chutney. We washed it down with fresh buttermilk.
What was meant to be an innocuous trek turned out to be a meeting of political activists- some of them more radical than the others. The radical elements were mainly from Pune, Dinu's hometown. Surprisingly they were not as bothered about evicting the British from India as much as they were about the emerging idea of the Two-nation theory, which suggests that Hindus and Muslims should live in separate nations divided along religious lines.
The radicals blame the British for using their divide and rule policy as a basis for sowing communal discord. The young men we met are afraid that the Congress is not doing enough to dissuade the aspirations of the Muslim League elite who want their own turf to rise to power.
It was quite late in the day when we descended and took the train back to our respective cities. Although the trek was refreshing the political uncertainty of the future is a bit unsettling. We got home late Sunday evening and went right to bed.
Anyway, chief fodder for the city's gossip columns is the concurrent scandal of the breathtakingly beautiful Bengali origin actress Devika Rani having a clandestine relationship with her Muslim co-actor Najam ul Hassan. The irony is that the film's producer is the lady's own husband, also a Bengali and founder of the recently opened Bombay Talkies. If his wife chooses to elope the producer husband not only stands to lose his wife but the fate of his film in which investors have pumped in a lot of money also becomes uncertain.
The reason I narrated this is because I am unsure about what goes wrong with relationships. Both Rai and Devi are emancipated products of the Bengali Renaissance. Unlike us, they married for love, after working together in England and in Germany. Rai is believed to have deserted a German woman with whom he had a daughter because he fell hook, line and sinker for the ethereal Rani. Some may argue that Rai has reaped what he has sowed- betrayal! But I wonder what is the mystery that keeps some marriages stable despite the absence of an overt veneer of romance when some of the most evident whirlwind relationships seem to have run off their course in just a few years! I would like to know your thoughts in this matter.
If avidity is missing from my letter blame it on my medical education. I can write a legible prescription for my patients but I am hopeless when it comes to writing hot-blooded poetry. But you already know that, I don't have to spell it out.
I know this letter will reach you weeks after you have reached your destination. I expect that you will write back more often, as you promised to post a letter from each port of call during your journey. Eagerly waiting for the postman to deliver me that happiness!
Yours always,
Madhav