TUCKED AWAY IN THE wrinkled folds of the lower Himalayas is a sleepy Indian town. On its north, it is cupped in a timid half-arc of hills running parallel to the Shiwalik’s scarred southern face. Winter mornings, when the mist presses down on the balding hills, their pale brown tops cluster together like friendly, overgrown mushrooms. But ever so often, a horde of scarps and cliff heads elbow these mists out to reveal the dazzling silver summits of the Himadri shimmering continuously beyond. Then if you listened closely, you’d hear the ruinous, faraway echo of gnarled mountain chains knotting out from the Pamir.
This town — or hill station, as these British Indian cantonments began to be called during the Raj — now wears a sniffly, deserted look for most part of the year, lying in perpetual shadow of the peaks that tower above them. But during the summer, it emerges from slumber to bask briefly in the sun’s dappled glow. That’s also when the river unfreezes. This river, by the way, is a lesser known tributary of the Ganga. Watered by an unnamed glacier at a height of more than ten thousand feet in the Himadri, it winds down in a thin but powerful stream and foams out of the mountain’s mouth in a narrow gorge. Finding its way past huge grey-green boulders and making malformed cascades every now and then, it finally gushes down to where our little town stands, lapping at its feet with a warm, insistent tongue. The mountains chastise the town while the river provokes it. All the way to the Retreat.
The Retreat is one of the town’s main attractions, a once-rambling colonial bungalow now revamped into a touristy resort with antique furniture, painted fireplaces and a fragrant, woodsy garden. But for me, the Retreat will always be much more than just that. For here, during an impulsive weekend many years ago, was where I met Rachel.
I STILL REMEMBER THE thinness of that April afternoon I had filed myself away in. ‘Room with a view, madam,’ the receptionist had said crisply over the phone when I’d made my bookings from Delhi earlier that week and I’d said yes, yes, oh yes. So here I was, briefly single once again, looking out of my window at the mountain sky and its patterned swirls of cloud while all around stood rows and rows of tall pine trees, watching, laughing, waving their pointy arms about. I was breathing in the sticky scent of pine and trying not to think too much about what lay ahead when a movement in the garden below caught my eye. An absurd swish of red, an alabaster arm, a laugh. I scrunched my eyes in concentration and was finally able to piece together a woman, standing – was she standing, or hiding, for god’s sake – behind the hedge that primly bordered the Retreat’s gardens. She wore a long flaring skirt, wine red and full-bodied, and some sort of a blowsy thing that floated on top. Her hair was bunched up untidily on top of her head, though it wasn’t until much later that I would see how it was always held up by a half-chewed pencil. She was walking very, very stealthily, as if she was tip-toeing towards a hapless victim in a childhood game of ‘I spy’ and wanted to savor a last lazy moment before the inevitable shout.
That must be the American woman called Rachel, I thought, remembering the conversation with the receptionist earlier that morning. She’s an artist, he’d said. Then, leaning across conspiratorially, he’d pointed his index finger at his forehead and traced three concentric circles. Why, does she have some mental problem, I asked in some alarm, not exactly relishing the prospect of spending my holiday with a raging lunatic. She sits on the boulders by the river and talks loudly to herself, he’d said. Looking at the woman snaking noiselessly through the hedges, I felt a shiver run up my spine even as the object of my gaze continued her curious movements. Then suddenly, without warning, she stopped, whirled around and looked up directly at me. I remember letting the curtain fall and stepping back in confusion. I’d been staring, I thought guiltily, and then shrugged. After all, anyone would have stared.
IT WASN'T UNTIL NEXT day that I saw her again, this time by the river’s bend. I’d gone for a morning walk when I spotted her sitting mournfully by the boulders, an easel propped up in front, a brush between her lips, a bright daffodil skirt billowing out in the breeze. Seeing me, she seemed to perk up and waved with enthusiasm. Unsure of what to do, I walked over to her. My eyes were immediately drawn to her half-finished canvas, already breathtakingly alive, her brushstrokes having captured to perfection the river’s lithe blue dance along the boulders while the mountains jutted out their chins and watched.
‘Er…hi, we haven’t met before,’ I began.
‘But of course we have!’ she exclaimed with obvious pleasure, her accent exotic and long-drawn just like the ones I’d heard on CNN while flicking television channels. ‘Yesterday, when you were at your window, remember?’
I lowered my eyes in embarrassment. ‘I didn’t mean to stare,’ I murmured.
‘Oh, that’s perfectly alright,’ she said, nodding her head vigorously so her shock of carrot curls danced. ‘It’s surprising the things people do when they think no one is watching. But I was watching you. Watching you watch me. That is why I was doing that hop-jump-stop sequence in the hedges. Must not disappoint her, I thought!’ And Rachel threw back her head and laughed.
Not quite knowing how to react to this fascinating half-creature, I just stood by lamely. Then I pointed to her painting. ‘It’s beautiful. You’re very talented.’ She cast a critical eye over the canvas and said nothing. Then a thought struck me. ‘So do you also start speaking to yourself whenever the receptionist passes by?’
Rachel paused her brush mid-way in the air, considering. Finally, she shrugged. ‘I really don’t remember. I might have been talking to myself. I do that sometimes, when I get lonely.’
I shook my head and smiled. ‘I will have to disbelieve much of what you say. And you know what? We haven’t yet introduced ourselves…’
LATER THAT NIGHT, I found myself sipping tea in Rachel’s room while she perched herself on the railing and smoked a cigar. (A cigar, in heaven’s name, I remember thinking, aghast. Did women even smoke cigars? In America? Anywhere?) In that little town’s unreal twilight, we talked of life, of love, of loss. She spoke of growing up in the countryside, and when she closed her eyes briefly, I could catch the last fading memory of a foolish farmhouse grinning at the rain trickling down its ears. It was all very different from the big American cities with their inch-by-inch crawl of rush-hour traffic and tall buildings that refused to talk, she said. And so, after a few years of living in an artists’ colony and teaching Art History in a small New York college while also juggling a series of random relationships — with some wonderful men, and we’re still friends, she insisted – she’d decided that it was over, and it was time to hit the road.
I didn’t ask her why she chose India. I’d seen enough of these backpacking firangis who came here for yoga and street-food and salvation, and stuck around till the money lasted. At least Rachel didn’t wear a kurta with ‘Om’ written on it. Or have matted hair and smoke a chillum. ‘So you went to Delhi to see the Red Fort, Agra to see the Taj Mahal, perhaps a couple of royal palaces in Jaipur and Udaipur, an ayurveda package by the backwaters in Kerala and now the Retreat, to cool off in the hills. Right?’
Rachel laughed and flayed her arms about. ‘I know, you guys must get a lot of us tourist types who come here to find meaning.’
‘So did you? Find meaning?’ I asked lightly.
‘Meaning is what we make of it,’ she replied, and for an instant I thought I saw the most incredible sadness in her eyes. But the moment passed, and soon I was telling her about my arranged marriage to a successful lawyer six years back and about our five-year old daughter Mita. Then Rachel looked into my eyes and asked me if I was happy.
I thought briefly, unexpectedly, of my husband, his gold-rimmed glasses glinting in the morning sun, and felt a twinge of guilt. He doesn’t understand my peculiar affinity with dawns and dusks, I wanted to say. He is meticulous and intractable, and my life with him is comfortable and quietly desperate and no different from the happy, humdrum lives of many other women I know. But my daughter is my light, and it is to her that I give my amused tales of storks and crows, pretty scoldings and a promise of hidden treasures. Mother’s follies in every generation. And in my daughter’s laughter, I find bits of my own.
‘He’s a good husband and a good father,’ I said instead. ‘And my daughter is a darling. Nowadays she is full of all the things she wants to be when she grows up. Today it’s an astronaut, tomorrow a lawyer, day after a gardener.’
‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’
I searched her face for mirth, callousness, rebuke, and saw only kindness. ‘I wanted to be a writer,’ I said, suddenly tearful. ‘But an early marriage, early motherhood, family, responsibilities…’ My voice trailed off. Silence stretched between us like a warm flush, insistent, probing. ‘Last November I ended up applying to a couple of creative writing programs in America,’ I finally blurted out. I mean, I needed to tell someone. ‘And last week I received an acceptance letter from one of them.’
‘What! You mean with a good scholarship and all?’ I nodded miserably.
‘Then you must be good, pretty damn good. So what’s the problem?’
‘I can’t go. That’s the problem,’ I said. ‘My husband is never around and the maddening monotony of housework just got to me so I ended up sending some stuff I’d written. Didn’t think I’d make it. And now I shall have to decline their offer…’
‘But why?’ In her excitement, Rachel had started shouting.
‘Don’t you see there’s really nothing else to do? My husband is very traditional that way, not at all like the new-age Indian men nowadays. Why, he looked like a hurricane had hit him when I told him I needed this weekend off on my own. This is the first time in my marriage of six years that I have travelled alone for a holiday, without him! We had the most horrible argument. But I insisted, and even then he agreed only because my mother agreed to take in Mita for two days. Two days! He would never hear of me being away for two years. My marriage would end.’ Yet even as I said the words, I knew how in many little ways it had already ended, whether or not I traveled eight thousand miles to prove it.
‘Perhaps separation is…’
‘Perhaps I’m not like you, Rachel,’ I said, my tone perhaps a little too sharp.
‘Oh, cut the crap. We’re both women. We’re the same tribe,’ she said with a quick, bird-like turn of her head and puffed furiously at her cigar.
‘It’s too big a step for me,’ I said wretchedly after a while. ‘It would have been fine if I were younger, or even single. But now, a new country, a new life, all alone? I’ve never been alone, I’ve always had someone to…to…’
‘To take care of you, and to take the blame for why your life isn’t the way you’d like it to be?’ Rachel’s voice had turned high-pitched, accusing, and I alternated between feeling resentful and wanting to cry. Then Rachel took my small brown hands in her larger white, freckled ones. ‘It may not be all that hard, you know. And you’d have your daughter.’
THE NEXT DAY WAS my last at the Retreat, and we spent the morning on the river’s shore. How funny we must have looked together, Rachel in a fuchsia pink frock and a flower tucked behind her ear, and me, short and stodgy and spectacled, red-bordered sari, hair tied neatly in a bun. In the afternoon, we trudged down the winding mountain road to the town’s little market and bought handmade wooden combs and bead necklaces, two of each. Then Rachel brought out a wrapped package. ‘A parting gift,’ she said. Smiling, I peeled away the wrapping to find her painting from the previous day, now complete. She must have stayed up the entire night to get it done in time. I lovingly traced a finger over the palpitating landscape of greens and blues and browns. ‘When I think of a title for the painting, I’ll write,’ she promised.
AT THE TIME, I couldn’t see the whirlwinds that circled just above my tidy, ordered life which till now had — as my mother had been fond of saying when she’d taught me to clean, dust and mop my room — a place for everything and everything in its place. I didn’t know that when I reached home and picked up the university’s acceptance letter again, my eyes would slant over to the ever-growing sheaf of papers on my bedside table held in place by a globe paperweight. Some short stories, an extract from an unfinished novel, even the odd poem, the earlier ones not very well-crafted (but I knew I could never bring myself to throw them away.) That drowsy afternoon, while the pigeons clucked and cooed in the low-hung eaves of my house and the answering machine bleeped out one mechanical message after another, I knew I’d have to find the strength to get away. And then the smudged, blurry outlines of the next few months, whizzing past at breakneck speed as I struggled to set myself up in America, what with my writing program and mothering-and-fathering Mita and making nightly telephone calls to my husband.
Oh, my marriage would survive after all. After the initial grim months, we’d chance upon a mellow, almost suspicious sort of harmony. My wife is different, he’d begin to say to his bewildered relatives in a voice full of wonder till he began to believe it himself. In time, he’d even boast to his friends whenever I sold one of my stories. And when we talked each night – his night, after he’d returned from work, and my early morning, before I dropped Mita off at the childcare facility and left for university — he never ceased to be amazed at all the little things I was learning to do on my own, from managing electricity bills and house rents and bank accounts to ordering furniture online from Wal-Mart and electronics from Best Buy. When I spoke excitedly of the new foods I discovered everyday, of peanut butter and pretzels and blueberries (mysteries he’d already unraveled many times over, on his frequent business trips abroad), he’d laugh, a rich burgundy laugh I had almost forgotten over the years. Those nights, trying to hear each other’s voice over the insistent crackling of the phone line, desire would stir slowly within us like it never had when we’d shared the same bed, the same life.
When at last I would find the time to look up Rachel, I’d realize that I had misplaced my diary with her contact details. At a loss, I’d look for her on one of those new-fangled social networking sites, but there were thousands of Rachels in America and I didn’t even remember her last name. Anderson? Henderson? Emerson? And she hadn’t told me the name of the college she’d taught briefly at. Then I would try to find out if she’d written to my India address. But by then my husband, promoted to Director of his law firm, would have moved to a roomy, red-brick bungalow in a boulevard lushly lined with orange-blossomed gulmohar trees. The new tenants at our old house couldn’t possibly be absolutely sure, they’d say, but they didn’t recall receiving any letter from anyone by that name. For the next few years I’d persist, and each time I’d draw a blank. Then I would remember the shadows that would often darken Rachel’s face, like the grey swell of monsoon clouds in an August sky, and that fleeting but entirely too intense pain in her eyes, and wonder unhappily about all that she’d left unsaid. What had her story been?
Sometimes I’d think that my going to the Retreat, in that forgotten little Himalayan town, was not mere chance. No, it was destiny who took me by hand and led me down the Retreat’s cobbled pathway. Then the door opened and in she danced herself, golden-hooped and daffodil-skirted. Rachel was right. Meaning is what we make of it.
BUT ON THAT LAST day at the Retreat, I was unaware of all that was yet to come. ‘We’ll meet again,’ I said confidently to Rachel as I boarded the bus for the city, with her waving frantically till she became a tiny orange pip against the fading brown gash of hills. As the bus corkscrewed its way down the winding road, I settled back against my seat to look at her painting again and marveled at the little touches I hadn’t noticed before, like how a fine spray of mist held together the river and the mountain and how a gust of wind seemed to blow through it all, howling age-old stories of endings and beginnings.
DEBOTRI DHAR is from New Delhi, India. She holds a Masters in Women's Studies, with distinction, from the University of Oxford (UK), and is currently an Excellence Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University (USA). Debotri tries to balance the rather-serious terrain of academic feminism with lively spells of creative writing, and is a published novelist and short story writer.
This town — or hill station, as these British Indian cantonments began to be called during the Raj — now wears a sniffly, deserted look for most part of the year, lying in perpetual shadow of the peaks that tower above them. But during the summer, it emerges from slumber to bask briefly in the sun’s dappled glow. That’s also when the river unfreezes. This river, by the way, is a lesser known tributary of the Ganga. Watered by an unnamed glacier at a height of more than ten thousand feet in the Himadri, it winds down in a thin but powerful stream and foams out of the mountain’s mouth in a narrow gorge. Finding its way past huge grey-green boulders and making malformed cascades every now and then, it finally gushes down to where our little town stands, lapping at its feet with a warm, insistent tongue. The mountains chastise the town while the river provokes it. All the way to the Retreat.
The Retreat is one of the town’s main attractions, a once-rambling colonial bungalow now revamped into a touristy resort with antique furniture, painted fireplaces and a fragrant, woodsy garden. But for me, the Retreat will always be much more than just that. For here, during an impulsive weekend many years ago, was where I met Rachel.
I STILL REMEMBER THE thinness of that April afternoon I had filed myself away in. ‘Room with a view, madam,’ the receptionist had said crisply over the phone when I’d made my bookings from Delhi earlier that week and I’d said yes, yes, oh yes. So here I was, briefly single once again, looking out of my window at the mountain sky and its patterned swirls of cloud while all around stood rows and rows of tall pine trees, watching, laughing, waving their pointy arms about. I was breathing in the sticky scent of pine and trying not to think too much about what lay ahead when a movement in the garden below caught my eye. An absurd swish of red, an alabaster arm, a laugh. I scrunched my eyes in concentration and was finally able to piece together a woman, standing – was she standing, or hiding, for god’s sake – behind the hedge that primly bordered the Retreat’s gardens. She wore a long flaring skirt, wine red and full-bodied, and some sort of a blowsy thing that floated on top. Her hair was bunched up untidily on top of her head, though it wasn’t until much later that I would see how it was always held up by a half-chewed pencil. She was walking very, very stealthily, as if she was tip-toeing towards a hapless victim in a childhood game of ‘I spy’ and wanted to savor a last lazy moment before the inevitable shout.
That must be the American woman called Rachel, I thought, remembering the conversation with the receptionist earlier that morning. She’s an artist, he’d said. Then, leaning across conspiratorially, he’d pointed his index finger at his forehead and traced three concentric circles. Why, does she have some mental problem, I asked in some alarm, not exactly relishing the prospect of spending my holiday with a raging lunatic. She sits on the boulders by the river and talks loudly to herself, he’d said. Looking at the woman snaking noiselessly through the hedges, I felt a shiver run up my spine even as the object of my gaze continued her curious movements. Then suddenly, without warning, she stopped, whirled around and looked up directly at me. I remember letting the curtain fall and stepping back in confusion. I’d been staring, I thought guiltily, and then shrugged. After all, anyone would have stared.
IT WASN'T UNTIL NEXT day that I saw her again, this time by the river’s bend. I’d gone for a morning walk when I spotted her sitting mournfully by the boulders, an easel propped up in front, a brush between her lips, a bright daffodil skirt billowing out in the breeze. Seeing me, she seemed to perk up and waved with enthusiasm. Unsure of what to do, I walked over to her. My eyes were immediately drawn to her half-finished canvas, already breathtakingly alive, her brushstrokes having captured to perfection the river’s lithe blue dance along the boulders while the mountains jutted out their chins and watched.
‘Er…hi, we haven’t met before,’ I began.
‘But of course we have!’ she exclaimed with obvious pleasure, her accent exotic and long-drawn just like the ones I’d heard on CNN while flicking television channels. ‘Yesterday, when you were at your window, remember?’
I lowered my eyes in embarrassment. ‘I didn’t mean to stare,’ I murmured.
‘Oh, that’s perfectly alright,’ she said, nodding her head vigorously so her shock of carrot curls danced. ‘It’s surprising the things people do when they think no one is watching. But I was watching you. Watching you watch me. That is why I was doing that hop-jump-stop sequence in the hedges. Must not disappoint her, I thought!’ And Rachel threw back her head and laughed.
Not quite knowing how to react to this fascinating half-creature, I just stood by lamely. Then I pointed to her painting. ‘It’s beautiful. You’re very talented.’ She cast a critical eye over the canvas and said nothing. Then a thought struck me. ‘So do you also start speaking to yourself whenever the receptionist passes by?’
Rachel paused her brush mid-way in the air, considering. Finally, she shrugged. ‘I really don’t remember. I might have been talking to myself. I do that sometimes, when I get lonely.’
I shook my head and smiled. ‘I will have to disbelieve much of what you say. And you know what? We haven’t yet introduced ourselves…’
LATER THAT NIGHT, I found myself sipping tea in Rachel’s room while she perched herself on the railing and smoked a cigar. (A cigar, in heaven’s name, I remember thinking, aghast. Did women even smoke cigars? In America? Anywhere?) In that little town’s unreal twilight, we talked of life, of love, of loss. She spoke of growing up in the countryside, and when she closed her eyes briefly, I could catch the last fading memory of a foolish farmhouse grinning at the rain trickling down its ears. It was all very different from the big American cities with their inch-by-inch crawl of rush-hour traffic and tall buildings that refused to talk, she said. And so, after a few years of living in an artists’ colony and teaching Art History in a small New York college while also juggling a series of random relationships — with some wonderful men, and we’re still friends, she insisted – she’d decided that it was over, and it was time to hit the road.
I didn’t ask her why she chose India. I’d seen enough of these backpacking firangis who came here for yoga and street-food and salvation, and stuck around till the money lasted. At least Rachel didn’t wear a kurta with ‘Om’ written on it. Or have matted hair and smoke a chillum. ‘So you went to Delhi to see the Red Fort, Agra to see the Taj Mahal, perhaps a couple of royal palaces in Jaipur and Udaipur, an ayurveda package by the backwaters in Kerala and now the Retreat, to cool off in the hills. Right?’
Rachel laughed and flayed her arms about. ‘I know, you guys must get a lot of us tourist types who come here to find meaning.’
‘So did you? Find meaning?’ I asked lightly.
‘Meaning is what we make of it,’ she replied, and for an instant I thought I saw the most incredible sadness in her eyes. But the moment passed, and soon I was telling her about my arranged marriage to a successful lawyer six years back and about our five-year old daughter Mita. Then Rachel looked into my eyes and asked me if I was happy.
I thought briefly, unexpectedly, of my husband, his gold-rimmed glasses glinting in the morning sun, and felt a twinge of guilt. He doesn’t understand my peculiar affinity with dawns and dusks, I wanted to say. He is meticulous and intractable, and my life with him is comfortable and quietly desperate and no different from the happy, humdrum lives of many other women I know. But my daughter is my light, and it is to her that I give my amused tales of storks and crows, pretty scoldings and a promise of hidden treasures. Mother’s follies in every generation. And in my daughter’s laughter, I find bits of my own.
‘He’s a good husband and a good father,’ I said instead. ‘And my daughter is a darling. Nowadays she is full of all the things she wants to be when she grows up. Today it’s an astronaut, tomorrow a lawyer, day after a gardener.’
‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’
I searched her face for mirth, callousness, rebuke, and saw only kindness. ‘I wanted to be a writer,’ I said, suddenly tearful. ‘But an early marriage, early motherhood, family, responsibilities…’ My voice trailed off. Silence stretched between us like a warm flush, insistent, probing. ‘Last November I ended up applying to a couple of creative writing programs in America,’ I finally blurted out. I mean, I needed to tell someone. ‘And last week I received an acceptance letter from one of them.’
‘What! You mean with a good scholarship and all?’ I nodded miserably.
‘Then you must be good, pretty damn good. So what’s the problem?’
‘I can’t go. That’s the problem,’ I said. ‘My husband is never around and the maddening monotony of housework just got to me so I ended up sending some stuff I’d written. Didn’t think I’d make it. And now I shall have to decline their offer…’
‘But why?’ In her excitement, Rachel had started shouting.
‘Don’t you see there’s really nothing else to do? My husband is very traditional that way, not at all like the new-age Indian men nowadays. Why, he looked like a hurricane had hit him when I told him I needed this weekend off on my own. This is the first time in my marriage of six years that I have travelled alone for a holiday, without him! We had the most horrible argument. But I insisted, and even then he agreed only because my mother agreed to take in Mita for two days. Two days! He would never hear of me being away for two years. My marriage would end.’ Yet even as I said the words, I knew how in many little ways it had already ended, whether or not I traveled eight thousand miles to prove it.
‘Perhaps separation is…’
‘Perhaps I’m not like you, Rachel,’ I said, my tone perhaps a little too sharp.
‘Oh, cut the crap. We’re both women. We’re the same tribe,’ she said with a quick, bird-like turn of her head and puffed furiously at her cigar.
‘It’s too big a step for me,’ I said wretchedly after a while. ‘It would have been fine if I were younger, or even single. But now, a new country, a new life, all alone? I’ve never been alone, I’ve always had someone to…to…’
‘To take care of you, and to take the blame for why your life isn’t the way you’d like it to be?’ Rachel’s voice had turned high-pitched, accusing, and I alternated between feeling resentful and wanting to cry. Then Rachel took my small brown hands in her larger white, freckled ones. ‘It may not be all that hard, you know. And you’d have your daughter.’
THE NEXT DAY WAS my last at the Retreat, and we spent the morning on the river’s shore. How funny we must have looked together, Rachel in a fuchsia pink frock and a flower tucked behind her ear, and me, short and stodgy and spectacled, red-bordered sari, hair tied neatly in a bun. In the afternoon, we trudged down the winding mountain road to the town’s little market and bought handmade wooden combs and bead necklaces, two of each. Then Rachel brought out a wrapped package. ‘A parting gift,’ she said. Smiling, I peeled away the wrapping to find her painting from the previous day, now complete. She must have stayed up the entire night to get it done in time. I lovingly traced a finger over the palpitating landscape of greens and blues and browns. ‘When I think of a title for the painting, I’ll write,’ she promised.
AT THE TIME, I couldn’t see the whirlwinds that circled just above my tidy, ordered life which till now had — as my mother had been fond of saying when she’d taught me to clean, dust and mop my room — a place for everything and everything in its place. I didn’t know that when I reached home and picked up the university’s acceptance letter again, my eyes would slant over to the ever-growing sheaf of papers on my bedside table held in place by a globe paperweight. Some short stories, an extract from an unfinished novel, even the odd poem, the earlier ones not very well-crafted (but I knew I could never bring myself to throw them away.) That drowsy afternoon, while the pigeons clucked and cooed in the low-hung eaves of my house and the answering machine bleeped out one mechanical message after another, I knew I’d have to find the strength to get away. And then the smudged, blurry outlines of the next few months, whizzing past at breakneck speed as I struggled to set myself up in America, what with my writing program and mothering-and-fathering Mita and making nightly telephone calls to my husband.
Oh, my marriage would survive after all. After the initial grim months, we’d chance upon a mellow, almost suspicious sort of harmony. My wife is different, he’d begin to say to his bewildered relatives in a voice full of wonder till he began to believe it himself. In time, he’d even boast to his friends whenever I sold one of my stories. And when we talked each night – his night, after he’d returned from work, and my early morning, before I dropped Mita off at the childcare facility and left for university — he never ceased to be amazed at all the little things I was learning to do on my own, from managing electricity bills and house rents and bank accounts to ordering furniture online from Wal-Mart and electronics from Best Buy. When I spoke excitedly of the new foods I discovered everyday, of peanut butter and pretzels and blueberries (mysteries he’d already unraveled many times over, on his frequent business trips abroad), he’d laugh, a rich burgundy laugh I had almost forgotten over the years. Those nights, trying to hear each other’s voice over the insistent crackling of the phone line, desire would stir slowly within us like it never had when we’d shared the same bed, the same life.
When at last I would find the time to look up Rachel, I’d realize that I had misplaced my diary with her contact details. At a loss, I’d look for her on one of those new-fangled social networking sites, but there were thousands of Rachels in America and I didn’t even remember her last name. Anderson? Henderson? Emerson? And she hadn’t told me the name of the college she’d taught briefly at. Then I would try to find out if she’d written to my India address. But by then my husband, promoted to Director of his law firm, would have moved to a roomy, red-brick bungalow in a boulevard lushly lined with orange-blossomed gulmohar trees. The new tenants at our old house couldn’t possibly be absolutely sure, they’d say, but they didn’t recall receiving any letter from anyone by that name. For the next few years I’d persist, and each time I’d draw a blank. Then I would remember the shadows that would often darken Rachel’s face, like the grey swell of monsoon clouds in an August sky, and that fleeting but entirely too intense pain in her eyes, and wonder unhappily about all that she’d left unsaid. What had her story been?
Sometimes I’d think that my going to the Retreat, in that forgotten little Himalayan town, was not mere chance. No, it was destiny who took me by hand and led me down the Retreat’s cobbled pathway. Then the door opened and in she danced herself, golden-hooped and daffodil-skirted. Rachel was right. Meaning is what we make of it.
BUT ON THAT LAST day at the Retreat, I was unaware of all that was yet to come. ‘We’ll meet again,’ I said confidently to Rachel as I boarded the bus for the city, with her waving frantically till she became a tiny orange pip against the fading brown gash of hills. As the bus corkscrewed its way down the winding road, I settled back against my seat to look at her painting again and marveled at the little touches I hadn’t noticed before, like how a fine spray of mist held together the river and the mountain and how a gust of wind seemed to blow through it all, howling age-old stories of endings and beginnings.
DEBOTRI DHAR is from New Delhi, India. She holds a Masters in Women's Studies, with distinction, from the University of Oxford (UK), and is currently an Excellence Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University (USA). Debotri tries to balance the rather-serious terrain of academic feminism with lively spells of creative writing, and is a published novelist and short story writer.
