“Thanks, andi,” the Neighbour held out a large envelope. “My mother was so happy to see the photograph. We were able to get a digital copy made and printed it out for her, you see? And she is planning to get it framed. He meant a lot to her, you know.”
She took the envelope, smiling, and opened her front door, wondering whether her daughter was home. No, the house was empty. Of course, there was a rehearsal this evening. She remembered Amulya calling out as she left in the morning, “May not be home for dinner, amma, will call you…” She put her handbag away, changed into cotton and washed her face. As she drew on the large bindi, she remembered her phone was still in her handbag. Opening the cupboard, she pulled out her phone, and couldn’t resist pulling out the envelope too; after all, she had a few hours to herself now.
She sat comfortably in the large wooden chair in the living room, and pulled the photographs out of their envelope. Old, ’sepia’, Amulya called them. There he was, the face she barely remembered, but once had known so well. Like the back of my hand, he used to say of a familiar thing; and how well do you really know the back of your hand? she would tease… She’d put most of the photographs away, though the one in Amu’s room still hung there. And two weeks ago, an old lady who came to visit her daughter paid a call, looked around the house, and recognised that one.
“You knew him?”, the old lady had asked, obviously surprised. She’d sat down, the Neighbour’s mother, and told the story of her daughter’s birth. It wasn’t very dramatic: no cars, no driving rain, no lightning, no thunder, but in a small town where going to a doctor itself was rare, she had gone to a young male doctor for delivery, because he was The Best. As it turned out, they’d needed a doctor – the baby had ‘turned’, and forceps were needed, and she had believed ever since that the doctor had saved her life, and her baby’s. The baby daughter she’d always wanted, the lakshmi devi who would change her family’s fortune. And so for thirty years she had been worshipping the doctor, mentioning him in her prayers, and wishing she could find him and thank him herself, now that modesty and shame were things she could put aside.
She’d asked, that old lady had, for more pictures, and had looked them over longingly. And when she had left, the Neighbour had asked to borrow them, to make copies. So today she was looking over the photographs again, wondering which of the many patients that old lady had been.
For there had been many of them, many people who came to the big burly man whose hastavaasi was famous for all that he was young for a doctor. There had been many of them, the people for whom she, at sixteen, had begun to make coffee and tiffin and send over to the nursing home. She’d started doing that the week after she’d arrived in the house, realising that he never ate at home. He left early and got home late, and drank himself to sleep. The only way to make sure he ate was to send food over to the nursing home, enough that he could offer it to whoever he was with at the time. Coffee, and tiffin. Idli, dosa, pesarattu, upma. She’d learnt to make them all.
She remembered how she’d cursed the day he died. She’d cursed him, all the curses that had built up in her without her even realising it. Cursed him for being a drunkard, and for making her hide it. For spending all he had on drink, and being too proud to give up the old Morris Minor, the house, or even the servants, when they couldn’t afford to keep them any more. For not providing for her, for Amu. For leaving her stranded and helpless.
And yet, as she looked at that old photograph, her eyes filled with tears. The tears she’d held in while the old lady told her story. They hadn’t been the tears of frustration, of anger, that she’d wrung out of herself the day he died. She had to save face, after all. She’d made an effort for those tears, she’d made them come. She’d fought relief, she’d held out against numbness, and made her eyes weep.
But these, these were tears of pride, of affection, almost of love, surely of loss.
