The last wish

In the heart of the country where I come from, the earth is dry and loose, grainy and dusty, but always firm beneath your feet. I am not prepared for how easily the ground here yields. It makes me smile. As my feet sink in, I understand why, just as we leave the tar road behind, Mausi takes her slippers off and keeps them in her hands. It must be easier to walk barefoot here.

“What is this called?” I ask her as I stop and get my shoes off too.

“What, my child?” she says.

“This thing we are walking on.”

“Sand?” She smiles. “It’s called sand.”

I knew that, I think, but it’s different when you experience it.

“I didn’t realise this is your first time on a beach,” she adds.

I nod as we walk towards the water. I don’t see it yet, though. It’s dark right now. I can only tell it’s there from the sound of the waves coming from the black mass in front of us and because there is a change in the air. It feels unfettered, moving in big blocks in all directions. When I got off the train at night and came out of the station, Mumbai had seemed as crowded and chaotic as my small hometown, just with more sweat on the breath. But now, as I step into the empty openness of the windy beach at dawn, I feel freer than I have ever felt before.

I clutch the bag over my shoulder a little tighter and say, “It’s actually my first time away from home.”

“Oh.” I can tell she is at a loss for words and hesitant to say what she does. “This must be hard for a girl your age. Your mother must have meant a lot to you.”

What can I say to that? So I walk beside her in silence.

She is not my real Mausi and we had never met until today. In fact, she never saw my mother after she moved back home and got married all those years ago. But they were as close as sisters when my mother lived here. From whatever Mausi told me during our rickshaw ride, and from the scraps I picked up here and there growing up, I think I can piece together my mother’s life before me.

She came to Mumbai as a young woman with the help of a relative. It was the first time so many daily serials were being made, and a lot of people from our heartland who wanted to be in films managed to get work in television. She was one of them. She was a side character mostly, but did well enough to be able to live here for two years. Then she stopped getting roles and had to move back home as she ran out of money. All this was some 16 years ago. She was married soon after and, within a year of marriage, I was born.

“I have got something to show you,” Mausi says. We walk slowly on the beach, parallel to the water. She retrieves an old photo from her purse and hands it to me. “Look at it,” she says. “It’s the first thing I noticed about you when we met at the station. You and your mother have the same smile!”

Something about that sounds wrong, no one has ever said that to me before, and I look at the photo in my hands. It’s dark and I can’t make out much. Mausi notices that and gets her phone out to shine some light on it. It is an old photo of her and my mother, both young and strikingly beautiful, sitting on the beach and smiling, popsicles in their hands. That is when I see why what she said had sounded odd. I have never seen my mother smile.

“She used to really like coming here to the beach,” Mausi says. “There is a place nearby called Madh Island where a lot of our shoots used to take place. And every day after work, she would insist on coming here, sit for some time, look at the sea and have a popsicle before going home. When it became clear that she would have to leave Mumbai, it broke her heart because she said she found your small landlocked hometown stifling. Just sitting and staring at the sea here made her happy.”

It is bothering me that in all these years I never noticed my mother didn’t smile. I had assumed that was just who she was, that she wasn’t the kind of person who smiled much. But I never thought she was unhappy. If she were, she would have been irritable, she would have scolded and beaten me like the mothers of my friends did. Now I wonder, though, if she was unhappy all that time, if it wasn’t simply cancer that killed her.

The sky is becoming lighter now. I can see faint streaks of pearly pink above me. Just then, the sea in front of me, which all along I was aware of only as a black mass and through the sound of the waves, comes into its blue glory. It is wider and stretches more endlessly than anything I was prepared for, and in a way I find soothing.

“I think it’s time,” Mausi says. “I’ll leave you alone. You should be on your own.” Saying so, she turns around, walks back and sits at a distance from me.

And I turn around to face the sea. In the first light of day, I see birds gliding through the sky, at times being carried more by the strength of the wind than their own wings. There is no one else on the beach at this early hour. And the water. I can’t get over how much of it there is and for how long. “Till the end of the world” is the only way I can think about it.

I don’t have much time now. My father didn’t want us staying here longer than was absolutely necessary, so he booked our return on the first train of the day. I think he was afraid Mumbai would do to me what it did to my mother all those years ago. It almost made him not respect her last wish. But I had cried for days and told him I would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t do the one thing she wanted me to. So he had given in grudgingly and arranged our travel to Mumbai, but refused to step out of the station himself, asking Mausi to accompany me instead.

As I look at the sea, I think of my mother in the photo that Mausi showed me. I think of her sitting here and wonder what must have gone through her mind then. Did she know then she would soon get married and have a child, that for as long as she lived she would never come back to see the sight she loved so much, that she would be reunited with the sea only in death?

I take the bag off my shoulder and place it on the sand. I open it, take the earthen pot out and, with it in my hands, I start walking into the water.

I think of the last night I spent with my mother before she died. The photo Mausi showed me has taught me that there is so much I do not know — will never know — about my mother. All I can do is wonder. So I wonder if she knew that night would be her last. Was that why she had asked my father to leave her alone with me? I wonder if she wanted me to come here simply to fulfil her last wish or to understand the person she used to be. Or did she want me to see for myself the free world beyond our small town — realise the life that, for her, had remained out of reach?

There are many things I do not know. Like I do not know, once I am back on that train, if I will ever come back to this city. But that does not matter. Before I leave, I will sit on the sand and stare at the sea like my mother had once, and have a popsicle. And that is good enough.

For now, I only let this endless sea wash over me. The wind tossing my hair and ringing in my ears, I overturn the pot to empty it of my mother’s ashes, in the hope that in these free waters she finally finds liberation.

Siddhesh Inamdar ’s novel The Story of a Long-Distance Marriage will be published by HarperCollins later this year

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