“Meeting Sue”

Image Courtesy: Tamara Harhai, Unsplash

She settled down in one of the cafes she adored in one of the tree-laden lanes of Kolkata. Things seemed to slow down deliberately here, especially in late winter afternoons. Her favourite Darjeeling to warm her hands, she waited for Sue, she ought to be here in a short while. She usually liked reaching early and waiting for people; it gave her time to think, recall, ruminate, smile, assess and well, frankly, reach out to lost time. Time behaved differently with her. It existed merely in moments, there were aspects of her life of which she had no recollection at all, others were gentle brushstrokes, it was as if she lived to forget.

She had met Sue in her early twenties, as an English tutor, not that she needed one. But she supposed it was the parents who felt more assured in having their wards tutored, their brains fashioned in a particular direction. She had never had a tutor herself, but she was glad for the opportunity. It was money, yes, but also a way to evade solitude, to get away from her parents’ house, to see other homes, to feel assured that warmth was not a concept she had made up in her mind.

Sue was a bashful girl, painfully shy and she felt something indescribable on meeting her. As they explored Macbeth together, Sue put to words things that had worried her most of her life. All she had ever wanted in life was to get away from her parents’ house and to have a daughter. Each of her decisions, realizations, epiphanies, was punctuated with the thought “when I have a daughter” or “I would never let my daughter go through this”. It was always a daughter, and always this thought that motivated her to do things, to look ahead instead of looking back in inept misery. Sue changed all that. In the two years they were together, Sue gave her the sheer joy of seeing her own innermost being articulated in tiny atoms in someone else, and while she would play the older sister to Sue, she suspected that she was doing that more to herself than the person sitting opposite her in all those elaborate lessons.

Is that what parenting was? Is that why a woman wanted to be a mother? To see a part of you outside of yourself, a living reminder to sustain vicariously on? She suddenly saw through the shallowness of her need to have a daughter. She felt love for this girl, right here, unpretentious, consuming love, something that wasn’t beholden to a future premise. She knew she wouldn’t be making any decisions for this girl; she was, after all, just a bystander in her life. She knew she wouldn’t be there in Sue’s life for a very long time either. But that somehow freed her to love Sue with all her being. She didn’t want to stay forever, she wanted to be a keepsake that Sue carried, a tiny flame inside of her. She also didn’t want to be a mother any longer and this hadn’t changed in all these years. While many of her colleagues deemed her selfish to deny her gender role, she felt it was the most unselfish thing to do. She wanted to be there, listen and hold little hands when needed, to see bright eyes pronounce their fear and tremulous joy, to light tiny embers of hope, where there were none.

Sue waved across the street. Age had not touched her, had it touched her own being, she wondered. She felt the same as she always had. She was meeting Sue for a proper conversation after more than a decade. The last time they had met briefly, her parents were in a hurry to take her away. This time for three hours, Sue would be present, time would slow down, the world reduced to friendly cups of coffee, her heart reminded to love, fearlessly, yet again.

She saw the vehicles pass by nonchalantly for some time before deciding to walk. The day was slowly changing colours and it was her favourite time to walk. The past hours had suffused her with a lightness of being and her mind was going through the words, the gestures, the smiles and the bittersweet twinkle in Sue’s eyes when she told her she was leaving for longer this time. She had bagged a postdoctoral position in Toronto and it would at least be another two years before she could think of coming back to Kolkata. She was inordinately happy for Sue, and was already imagining her in warm coats amidst heaps of snow. Smiling to herself, her eyes wandered off to one of the shops to her right.

It was a nondescript shop that sold mirrors, framed photographs and paintings. She was particularly drawn to a wall of mirrors which played with the fading light of the day and the dust particles that seemed to float like gold dust all around her. She drew near and saw her being reflected in the mirrors, one aspect on each of them. She touched her face, saw herself doing the same and her mind began clutching at the warmth of the meeting she had just had. As she looked at her face, she recalled Sue’s face when she was younger. She smiled, saw herself smiling and peered closer. How did she look back then? She smiled again, touched her face where the eyes made small crinkles. How did she look back then? She ran through all the moments she was in that bright blue room with Sue; she recalled the curtains, the smell of freshly brewed tea and omelettes, but nothing of herself. Her mind desperate, she opened the gallery of her phone to check photographs, before remembering that it was a pristine time, without the tyranny of smart phones. She looked at herself again, this time to the utter puzzlement of the shop owner, had she looked like this always? Why hadn’t she ever taken a picture with this girl? Why didn’t she take one today?

She had looked at herself in the mirror, every day, several times. But she had never perceived any change in herself. She was the same person, in many ways and in many ways not. But it was always the same pair of eyes staring back at her, reassuring eyes, calm eyes, sad eyes, her beloved eyes. But right at this moment, she wanted to know how she had looked back then, when she was with Sue, if only to know what Sue meant when she said,

It’s so good to finally see your face…

Monograph Magazine, Vol 5, Feb.2022