Page 104 of Made in Mumbai

“This was fun.” he lay down beside her and closed his eyes, formal shirt and all. They had an hour before MM woke up again.

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The end of second month drew to a close, and MM kept turning more and more pretty, if that was even possible. She also kept becoming more and more human as she slept regularly. And Maya was softer. Mellower. She was still the goofy girl that made every day fun, but when it was MM, there was this inner core that shone from within her, a mother’s core.

Gautam had seen many forms of Maya, at 19 and then again at 34. The transformations he saw in the last two months took his breath away. She was fun and mature, kind and smart. But now she was… tender.

“G, hold her,” she transferred her wet and squirming in her towel out of the bathroom and into his waiting arms. Like the perfect relay partner, Gautam accepted the bundle, smelling perfectly of baby soap and shampoo, and lay her down on the bed, drying her and playing peek-a-boo. She liked her baths, but she liked this game of theirs even more.

The doorbell rang. He didn’t care. He held one hand on her tummy and got her nappy fixed, then reached for the onesie Maya had laid out. MM had the cutest clothes. Some had been gifted by Maya’s friends and office colleagues, some she had bought. The biggest bunch of those he had been ordering online from wherever he could. His search engines were also beginning to only throw the cutest baby girl things at him. What could he say? He was their easiest, most willing victim.

The bell rang again.

“Go, I am all wet,” Maya nudged him, her T-shirt dripping from MM’s bath. She took his position buttoning up their girl and he rushed to get the door.

“Gautam Kumar?” The courier guy passed him an envelope with his name. Gautam signed and let him go, checking the package. The envelope was crisp, with his name and address on it. The return address was Kumar bhai’s. He stilled. A beat passed. Then he tore open the envelope, only to reveal a smaller, shabbier envelope inside with his name scrawled in Hindi. The handwriting was loose and loopy.

He brought the letter close to his nose. Sniffed. Alcohol, mud, damp, dirty things. He wanted to stuff the letter in the dustbin. But something stalled his hand. This was it. The last of her words. He wasn’t sentimental about it, but what would she have said? What would a dying woman say to her only son who she had sold, then thrown out of the house when he returned, then refused food. Gautam believed he had gotten over those days, those pains, so he sliced open the dirty letter to illegible scrawls on a piece of paper. It was written in different inks, as if she would write something each day and fold it away.

The letter was short, the words a mix of Hindi and Pahari scripts, the sentences jumbled. His Pahari was rusty after all these years, so it took him a while to get a hang of reading it. Gautam couldn’t make out what she wanted to say in the first read, so he went again, and again, and again, until her messages began to make sense. And each one, each pointer was aimed to wound.

No family can have you

Your life was wasted and you wasted mine

How can you not come and see your old dying mother?

You will go through my pain

Live and die alone there like me

There’s still no food here for you if you come

You should come

Our god has written our fates alone

“Where did he go… where did he go…?” Maya’s baby voice sounded from far away, as if from the end of some tunnel. Gautam turned, feeling his ears begin to roar. She was walking dramatically towards him, MM seated in her arms, facing him. “There he is!”

He blinked, the roar suddenly busted to make way for the two of them. Maya began to rant about something not fitting MM and that he was useless in clearing her old stuff.

“You can’t hoard onto everything, G! Just look at the amount of stuff she has already outgrown… I told you we should only keep one keepsake and give the rest away and you said you will choose the one you want but whathaveyou been doing? It’s all the…”

“It’s not my job!” He cut her off. She stopped. Gautam turned away from her and began to stride to his bedroom.

“Gautam?”

“It’s not my job, I said,” he stalled, turning over his shoulder. “Keep whatever you want, throw whatever you want. I am useless anyway, no?”

She opened her mouth, then closed. “That’s not how I meant it. I just meant…”

“What? What did you mean?”

“That… is everything ok?” She eyed the envelopes in his hand. “What are those?”

“None of your business.”

“You need sleep. Go to sleep, I will take care of everything here.”

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