Dear Pratish,

Do you know why, even after years of not having spoken to you, I think of you first when I think of friends? Because my mother loved you.  Because when you came into my house, my mother’s eyes lit up with your smile. Because she called you her daughter. Because she kissed you on your head and held your hand and insisted you eat her meals. Because she trusted you to love me and care for me unconditionally. Because for you my mother was not a Madhesi, an Indian, an outsider, or a woman with an accent. She was simply aunty, a woman you openly loved and who loved you with so much tenderness that I am glad it was you who was with her when she was unwell and dying.  

I think of it often, the fact that you were there when Ma was dying. You once described a day to me when the two of you were sitting on the verandah and she was looking straight ahead and she said to you that she could sense a beginning of death within her. When I imagine that moment to which I have no access save the one you provide me, my stomach clenches, but I am calmed by the fact that it was you she was disclosing her fears to. I am calmed by the knowledge that your sense of loss at the moment must have been genuine, that you must have felt the world would be sadder without her. In my absence, and even in my presence really, you were a daughter to her, and for this I am grateful.

Love is rarely the sudden and magical emotion we tend to describe it as.  After all, most of us love with caution.  Over and again, we fall in love with a person of the correct gender, the legitimate age, the convenient caste, the right nationality, the appropriate disposition.  There is nothing accidental about a love that is so measured.  The unplanned, the unintended, the unforeseen love is indeed magical and astonishing.  You know, don’t you, that your presence in our house was a little magical, a little astonishing? My mother had lived in the neighbourhood for nearly 25 years before you first stepped into our house.  In those twenty five years Ma had only made acquaintances, conversed with people who first noticed her as different, as an outsider, before they noticed her as a person.  For years I watched Ma struggle to make friends.  There were times I was angry with her for having been an Indian for the first sixteen years of her life.  I forgot, most easily, that for thirty years of her life she had been a Nepali, a Kathmandu-ite.  You see, there were moments when I too saw her as an outsider.  I myself had mingled so easily with the Kathmandu crowd that I grew upset with her accented Nepali, her limited friendships, her secluded life.  I resented her difference.  How extraordinary was it then to watch the two of you together—so completely oblivious of differences.

How is it, Pratish, that we notice differences so quickly and fail to see the similarities? You and I, we have known each other almost all our lives.  You have shaped my thoughts.  You have helped me see beyond the boundaries of communities and constitutions.  Indeed, riots and violence and resentments between the Madhesis and the Pahadis have always felt like events and occurrences that happened to others.  They felt like fiction.  Had they been real, would these conflicts not have come between us?  But they are real, I suppose.  To so many, the differences between the two communities are more substantial than the similarities that hold them together.  

The months of silence that sometimes pass between the two of us mean nothing because we have eaten and walked and sung together and in having done so, we have become similar.  You have tasted my mother’s spicy food and I have tasted your mother’s, my aunty’s, unrivalled cauliflower.  In having loved each other’s mothers we have loved the thing that make all mothers similar, irrespective of backgrounds and communities.  

Backgrounds and communities remind me of the first Chhath pooja I celebrated in Kathmandu.  It was as late as the year 2013.  I had come home for Tihar and was delighted by this small transition in the city. I had never seen Chhath in the capital before. In fact, because Ma hated the idea of leaving our house during Tihar, I had only participated in two Chhath poojas in my entire life.  So, I scarcely knew what Chhat was all about.  But then, one fine year, Chhath came to Kathmandu and I was amazed by the way the city welcomed the festival.  The evening took my breath away.  So many lamps afloat on the lake, and the giddying smell of incense in the air.  Of course, having crossed borders, the festival changed.  In Kathmandu Chhath was not a strictly Madhesi festival, the way it was in Janakpur.  There were groups of Pahadi worshippers lining Rani Pokhari and the atmosphere was of celebration and community.  It did not seem to matter that the festival was taking on new customs, incorporating new ways. What mattered was that there was a festival and all were welcome.  The way I was, always, to your house for every festival.  Coming from a family that is horribly teetotal, I was surprised, initially, by the wine I was served during Dashain, then year after year, sitting cross-legged with the retinue of your uncles, aunts and cousins, receiving the offering, I began to look forward to the snacks only aunty can come up with, the bitter-sweet wash of wine, the open and uninhibited manner in which I was a part of your dining table, your bedroom, your staircase, your family, your gods, you.     

I miss you, Pratish, especially now when so much is amiss in our country.  If the land had a voice, I wonder which story she would tell.  Sometimes I worry that distance, politics, the fact that we are not engaged in similar activities, helplessness— of various sorts — will eventually pull us apart.  I worry that our lives are too sharply divided — there seems to be a pre and a post to life now, well, to my life in any case, and I suspect it might be the case with many of us.  But again, I realise too that if we have continued to love, perhaps the divide is either not as sharp as I imagine it, or not as important.

Yours,

Miti

(This letter is in response to a Voices printed on Jan 9, 2015)