Letters from Darjeeling – Part 1: The Letter

The envelope had no stamp. It had been pushed under the door of Sunil's small house on the hill above the tea gardens, and it was addressed in a handwriting he had not seen in forty years, and would have known in the dark.

Sunil-da, it said.

He sat down on the step and opened it with fingers that would not quite keep still.

The paper smelled of cardamom and old cupboards. The ink was blue and careful, the letters slanting the way they always had when she was nervous.

I know you will be surprised. I am not dead, and I am not angry, and I did not forget. I came back to Darjeeling last spring to look after my brother. I have been walking past your gate every morning for three months and not knocking. I am tired of not knocking. Will you come to the tea shop on Friday at four? I will be the one with the grey shawl, pretending not to look for you.

Kamala.

He read it three times. The mist moved slowly across the valley below. A dog barked somewhere, and a kettle whistled in a neighbour's kitchen, and Sunil found he could not hear either sound properly.

Forty years.

They had been seventeen and twenty-one, on the verge of everything. He had been about to leave for a job in Kolkata. She had been about to marry a man her father chose. They had written letters all that last summer, sitting on opposite sides of the hill, and then one day she had stopped answering. He had waited a month. Then he had gone to Kolkata and built a quiet life of books, a kind wife who died too young, and a daughter who now lived in Singapore and called on Sundays.

He had never stopped thinking about the grey shawl.

On Friday he put on his good shirt. He stood in front of the mirror, a tall, thin man with white hair and a lined face, and tried to decide whether he looked foolish. Then he laughed at himself, quietly, and went out into the cold bright morning.

The tea shop was old and crowded, with steam on the windows and a radio murmuring in the corner. He saw her at once, at a table by the back wall. She was smaller than he remembered, and her hair was completely silver, pinned up in a loose knot. She wore a grey shawl around her shoulders. She was not looking at the door. She was looking at her cup, very carefully, the way a person does when they are trying not to hope.

He stood in the doorway, and his heart did something it had not done in years.

"You're late," said Kamala, without raising her eyes.

"I'm sixty-four," Sunil said. "I'm allowed to be late."

She looked up then. Her face crumpled, and then smoothed, and then she was smiling, a shy, startled smile that took him straight back to a hillside full of wildflowers.

"Sit down, Sunil," she said. "Before I forget how to be polite."

He sat. Their hands met on the table, quite by accident, and neither of them moved away.

"Tell me everything," said Kamala. "And I'll tell you why I never came back."

"I thought you had married," Sunil said quietly.

"I did," she said. "For thirty years. He was a good man. He was not you."

Outside, the mist lifted off the hills, and the sun broke through for the first time that week.