Pia Padukone - Where Earth Meets Water

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 in America and had little time to help her mother concoct fairytales. These stories, however, were a little more biting. They were closer to home. Kamini wrote of a man who drank too much potion and tottered around in the background of the heroine’s house uselessly until the girl had to save him from the forest fire that would have otherwise consumed them all. Instead of an evil witch, there was a slave-driving auntie who would whip her young girl workers if they didn’t produce enough golden flax from the magic wheat that grew in their mystical fields.

“What are these, Kaminiji?” Pinki Devindra had demanded. “These are too bitter for children. I can’t print these.”

“They’re a bit more...realistic. We can’t have our children growing up without realizing the harsh truths of life.” The editor had harrumphed on the other end of the line but eventually printed them as they were, and Shanta Nayak’s True Stories of Make Believe landed on shelves the following month. At first, mothers were shocked at their brusqueness. They didn’t buy the books for their children, but True Stories of Make Believe became somewhat of a cult classic when children discovered it on their own, smuggling copies into their homes as though it were a trashy magazine with naked pictures of women. They read it under their covers and traded the same raggedy book among their friends. Soon parents had to admit that the stories were honest, though brutal, and began purchasing the book themselves.

Now—Kamini can hardly believe it—she has been living off her profits for the past thirty years. The books are still in high demand, and though she is still in her cramped East Delhi apartment, her books feed, clothe and keep her warm at night. She feeds Mr. Devindra—now Pinki to her—a short story from time to time, whenever she can no longer keep his ceaseless nagging for new work at bay. Savita married a man she met in college. They live in a state called Ohio—a place that Kamini thinks sounds constantly surprised to hear its own name. And though she misses her daughter, Kamini finally lives alone: with her routine, with her stories, with her ritual.

Which is why she is annoyed by Pinki’s phone call this morning. He has been hounding her for a few reasons: to purchase a computer, to learn how to use it and to write a third book. He is in his early seventies now but with skin stretched as tight as a young man’s and dark gray eyes that sparkle when he coaxes Kamini to write. He visits her from time to time, sometimes to drop off a packet of fan letters, other times a children’s magazine he thinks she will enjoy. But today he is calling to alert her that a package is on its way to her house by special courier.