Letters from Darjeeling – Part 2: Forty Years Late

They walked the old path up the hill on Sunday, the way they had at seventeen and twenty-one. Kamala went slowly, one hand on Sunil's arm, stopping now and then to catch her breath and pretend it was for the view.

"My knees are not what they were," she said.

"Mine are worse," Sunil said. "I've been taking them to a doctor in Siliguri for two years. He says they are an old man's knees."

"You are an old man."

"Only on paper."

She laughed, a warm, rough sound, and they stopped by the bend where the path opened out onto a view of the whole valley. The tea gardens rolled away below them in neat green rows. Far to the north, the snow peaks were pale and clear above the cloud.

They sat on a low wall, and for a while neither of them spoke.

"Tell me about your wife," Kamala said at last.

"Meera," said Sunil. "She was kind. She laughed at my bad jokes even when they weren't jokes. She died four years ago. It was quick, at least. She didn't suffer very long."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I. I still set out two cups some mornings." He turned the cane in his hands. "And your husband?"

"Raghu. He was a schoolteacher. Patient. He used to bring me tea in bed every morning and read me the newspaper aloud, even the boring parts about the budget." Kamala smiled a little. "I loved him, Sunil. Not the way I loved you, perhaps. But he was not second-best. He was his own kind of good."

"I didn't think you'd say that."

"Why not?"

"Because I spent forty years thinking you had been unhappy," Sunil said. "I thought that was the only way I could forgive myself for leaving."

She was silent for a long moment. Then she reached over and laid her hand on his.

"You didn't leave me," Kamala said. "You went to Kolkata because you had a future, and I was too frightened to come with you. I was the one who stopped writing. You were waiting for a letter that I never had the courage to send."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I thought you'd forgotten me," she said simply. "And I thought I should let you go."

Sunil looked at their joined hands. His were spotted and thin, hers were lined and warm. They looked, he thought, like two old things that had been kept carefully in the same drawer.

"I never forgot you," he said.

"I know that now," Kamala said. "I didn't, then."

They walked back down the hill as the afternoon light softened. At the tea shop gate, she stopped and turned to him, her face serious.

"I'm not a girl any more," she said. "I know what I want. Do you?"

"Yes," said Sunil. "I want to come to dinner on Tuesday, meet your brother, and walk you home every Friday afterwards. And if you'd like it, I want to hold your hand in the cinema like a fool."

"You've been practising that."

"For forty years," he said, and she laughed, and kissed him, quick and sure and a little shy, right there at the gate where the whole village could see.

"Tuesday," Kamala said, when she could speak. "Bring the good wine. And don't be late."