Where Earth Meets Water. Pia Padukone

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      Kamini

      Kamini has never considered herself religious. Her nieces and lady cousins all behave as though their community spiritual leader were a cult master and they follow him about the country glassy-eyed and full of praise. She has to give the man credit, though; he is learned not only in the heavenly scriptures but is well-read, inhaling everything from Popular Mechanics to New York Times bestsellers. He recently led a lecture on “How the Ethics of The Da Vinci Code Apply to Our Everyday Lives as Hindus.” It also doesn’t hurt that he is ruggedly handsome, with his scruffy beard and soft eyes. But Kamini has never bought it.

      It’s not that Kamini is an atheist or even agnostic. She accepts and she believes. Just not the way the rest of the community might prefer. When those buildings were struck at the very point of New York City where the two rivers come together, she lit candles and prayed. When the terrorists attacked all the fancy Bombay hotels where the tourists, the business elite and their mistresses stayed, she did the same. With the tsunami, with her daughter’s first pregnancy—and then her second and then third, all bearing the nascent fruit of long, lean girls with thick glossy black hair. When Sachin Tendulkar played the test match in South Africa. And she prayed the night before the United States announced that they had voted in that president they called “Dub-ya” for the second time.

      It isn’t religion. It is ritual. Just as writing has become her religion now in addition to her ritual. Her whole life, she’s always felt as though she is on the brink of something. Nothing has felt settled or fulfilled. There has always been a longing, a waiting, desiring. Nothing has felt as though she were fully in the moment, because she has learned that there is nothing she can get comfortable with. Nothing, that is, until she began to write.

      Somehow, amid all distractions of raising her daughter in a single-parent household, she’d managed to discover a talent. One that would establish some sort of living for herself and her daughter once it was clear that it would be the two of them from here on out. From the time her daughter, Savita, was born, Kamini had a full stock of stories. She’d heard hundreds over the years, from her aunts and uncles, cousins and family friends. She unearthed the round-robin story hours from her year with her cousins in the small house, where they’d lain in circles passing morsels and beginnings of a story from person to person until a fable was born. She used the foundations of these tales as the source of new ones and changed details so they were unrecognizable from those tales she told with her cousins. The stories served as a source of quiet time for herself and Savita before the door barged open invariably at some witching hour of the morning and Kamini’s husband reentered their lives.

      At some point, she began writing them down—those she’d created in her youth and those she spun at Savita’s bedside behests, and at some point, she sent one harmlessly to a children’s magazine. And they sent her back a check. So she sent another. And then suddenly, out of the woodwork, there it was: a living. It wasn’t enough to keep herself and Savita in riches but it afforded their basics and allowed them a meal or two out each month.

      It was a strange living, one that she couldn’t admit to her family or friends, because during this time in their lives, in India it was considered uncouth for a woman—an abandoned woman especially—to go out and look for work. Never mind the strange dichotomy in this; if she didn’t earn a living, she and her daughter would starve because no one was offering handouts. Somehow she was just expected to go on with their lives as if her husband, Dev, was still there, bringing in his handsome salary as head of a security unit in Breach Candy. So she wrote. She devised stories of all shapes and forms, testing them out on Savita before she dared to seal the envelope and send them in to the editor. Savita would—true to character—challenge her on several endings.

      “Mama, why would the troll so easily give up his control of the land? What does he have to gain from it?”

      “Mama, sometimes you write these girls as if they are so stupid. No one would make such empty-headed decisions. Why would Princess Ajanta choose a man with brute strength over a man who can outwit anyone in the kingdom? It just doesn’t make sense.” At this one, Kamini had bristled. When had she ever made a decision in her life? she’d argued. Everything had been decided for her. From the clothes she wore to the schools she attended to the home she lived in to the man she married.

      “Maybe I am stupid,” Kamini had spat back for the first time, “so you’ll have to help me guide these girls.”

      Together they submitted hundreds of stories to children’s magazines and housewives’ digests, until eventually a magazine editor decided to publish an anthology of her short stories.

      Kamini had been jolted into a harsh reality. “You can’t print my name on the cover,” she’d begged over the phone. “It has to be an alias.”

      The editor had sighed heavily. “These are your stories, are they not? Come, now, aren’t you proud of your work? You’ve put years into this collection. Stand behind it. You never know what doors it will open for you.”

      “As long as I am getting a paycheck, that’s all that matters to me. Please understand, Mr. Devindra.”

      And so her collection had been published, with a pale blue hard cover with gold lettering: Tales of Girls and Animals by Shanta Nayak. It was most difficult for Kamini, publishing a book on her own and—save Savita—not being able to tell anyone about it. The book became her friends’ and family’s go-to bedtime bible and she would watch as some of her younger nieces and nephews would tote it about, dog-eared and stained, everywhere they went, hugging it to their chests as they sat meekly on sofas during family visits.

      “This Shanta Nayak has really done a number on us all. Now on those long train rides to see my in-laws, the kids just sit and read quietly without chewing my tongue and driving me to pieces. God bless her, truly,” Kamini’s second cousin said.

      “She must be from our community itself,” her sister responded. “Nayak is a Konkani name.”

      “I hadn’t even thought of it,” the first second cousin said. “She should do a story hour with all the children. They’d love it.” For a moment Kamini’s blood ran cold. She’d be found out. Luckily, the editor wrote back to her cousins that Shanta Nayak was too busy for public appearances, that she was already hard at work on the sequel. And that was how Kamini was coerced into writing a second book. This time with new stories from the crevices of her mind and without the support of Savita, who was enrolled in college СКАЧАТЬ