Teresa

ABOUT THE STORY Nisha Susan’s story revolves around a pair of relationships that have as their point of overlap a dead woman: the eponymous Teresa, mysterious and mercurial. The narrator is the second wife of Teresa’s husband, Ajay. But we find that she seems somehow more fascinated by the spectre of the woman whom she has replaced than the flesh-and-blood man she has married. Her narration, with its continuous piecing together of Teresa-inflected situations and details, its search for the private world of a beautiful woman whom many people assumed they knew well, demonstrates how the dead can often be more powerful than the living. Susan has an acute ear for the bright banalities of the jet-setting class of rootless cosmopolitans to which the narrator is suddenly exposed, as also a sense of its social gradations and licensed irregularities—Teresa, for example, was “someone who wrote the news and someone who was the news”. Her protagonist is peculiarly subdued but subversive, accepting the many compromises and defeats of her life—one of them being that she is always second to Teresa—while achieving an awareness of self and world much sharper than those who complacently patronise her. The narrator’s forbidden knowledge cannot be shared with anyone in her world; perhaps its burdens can be partially cast off when written up.

Teresa

Ought to blow up my computer

but instead…

I google you.

Neil Gaiman

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT of Teresa again.

My dreams are realistic. When I’m worried about money, I dream about money. When I need to pee, I dream of going to the bathroom. Teresa. Who will tell me why I dream of Teresa?

I’ve only seen her alive for a few minutes. Never told anyone that I have.

Across the street I saw her, beautiful Teresa. I recognised her from Ajay’s parents’ photo frames. I stepped off the dirty beach at Juhu Chowpatty, with wet and sandy feet, and saw her.

I’ve slouched my five feet eight inches all my life but there was Teresa—nearly six feet tall and coming out of that pasta place, striding like a movie star. Three men were following her in formation like extras, all their heads turned towards her. They were laughing as she pretended to hitch up her plain black sari. She lifted her clouds of curls into a twist. She twirled a big, imaginary moustache like a child in an Annual Day folk dance. They laughed and I stared.

At work the day after I saw Teresa, I was unhappy. Nothing seemed right. All week I was listless. The next week my boyfriend, the only one I’ve ever had, broke up with me. He didn’t make eye contact much but when he did, he seemed angry. He seemed angrier when he realised I wasn’t going to ask for any explanation. I already knew how lonely I was going to be.

“I am tired,” I typed into Google. The first link led to an empty, white web page. My heart slowed down as I glimpsed the single line of text on the page. At the very bottom, tiny letters asked, “Tired? Tell us why”. That was all.

A few days later, Teresa drowned in a swimming pool. It was in all the papers and in all the blogs of many people who had never written about death before and were struggling to find eloquent words for it. For her. Teresa had a very popular design blog that a friend in America took over in her memory. Hundreds of people sent art, writing and memories to the blog, tributes to their friend Teresa.

FOUR YEARS LATER, I met Ajay. I was 29, working in a bank’s IT department and beginning to find lunch conversations physically painful when they inevitably turned to my 24-year-old colleagues’ wedding plans.

Though Ajay and I had both lived in Bombay for years, we met in Kerala. He was visiting his son Vinu. His parents had been taking care of the kid since Teresa died. I was visiting my parents’ best friends, who lived next door to Ajay’s family. They were the closest things to parents that I had. After a lifetime in the Gulf they had moved to Ranni and I visited them as often as I could without getting on their nerves.

Ranni was somehow both jungle-green and cement grey and I hated it. But it had become my fake hometown since my parents had died. I had gone to boarding school in Kottayam when I was six, seeing my parents for a couple of months every year in the summer when they came home from Qatar. When I was 15 my parents came home without warning and hung themselves in their Cochin flat. They didn’t leave a note. My parents’ friends took turns to be my local guardians, to help me finish school and get into engineering college in Bombay. Years later, it occurred to me that perhaps my father and mother had had AIDS. I had heard about other families in Kerala who had been deported from the Gulf because of it. And then I understood the hints from the people in Ranni who had thought it important to let me know. Just in case I hadn’t wondered why my parents had left me behind.

Ajay’s parents lived next door. Next door meant up the slope in our hilly neighbourhood. Ajay’s father had been a jet-setting minor diplomat in his day but they had decided to come back to Ranni when they retired. I had heard a lot about Ajay and Teresa from them but had never met either. Everyone still talked about Teresa in Ranni. They talked about how fair she was, her figure, how “bold” she was, how “simple” she was. When I was in Ranni I tried to hide behind electric poles and trees. Teresa had driven around on a scooter, never tried to speak a word of Malayalam, hung out with the rubber tappers and left each time with gifts of new saris and old furniture. Ajay was the youngest editor-in-chief any Bombay newspaper had ever had but Teresa had obviously been the more glamorous one to folks in Ranni. Except to perhaps Vinu. But that was because she had died when he was barely a year old and he did not remember his mother.

All Vinu knew were his placid grandparents from whom he had learnt his elaborate, old-fashioned Malayalam. And he knew his father who appeared in Ranni once a month from Bombay. Was Ajay glamorous to Vinu? I never thought so. At five, Vinu preferred people like me—who were dazzled by the unspooling of his small-boy thoughts in his old-man language.

That summer I watched him playing in the deep, rocky, rain-drenched lane beside the house with a child his age. After half an hour the other child began crying in irritation. Vinu never understood why but we who were watching were sympathetic to his playmate. Vinu was incapable of saying, “Put the ball down.” He would say, “Kindly deposit the toy”. He tried to distract other children from his hopeless lack of athleticism and his long, flailing skinny limbs with his flights of verbosity. “I told my grandmother I don’t want to bathe under a raincloud anymore,” he said to me. He meant he didn’t like the shower, I think. I didn’t ask. Vinu liked me because, like his grandparents, I did not interrupt his long conversations. In any case, I wasn’t much of a talker. An exception in Ranni where everyone was full of long, wild, gossipy anecdotes.

For the first time, Ajay and I were both in Ranni at the same time. From the kitchen door where I sat drinking tea one afternoon, I saw Vinu walking down the slope, loosey-goosey, hanging on to his father’s hand. I remember feeling surprised at how small and wiry Ajay was. At how handsome his face was. Women loved him, I knew this instinctively.

That fortnight, I saw the hard, middle-aged women in the neighbourhood squeeze his arm, pat his head and feed him. Around him I saw them sinking into dreamy silences. Later, I learnt that things were no different in Bombay. I am sure women loved him before Teresa died, but now there was the added lustre of his tragedy.

I’d have liked Ajay just for not asking me stupid questions. It was disorienting to have someone from Bombay appearing in Ranni. It was as if a time-traveller had arrived from the future. I could see everyone around us suddenly pretending to be blasé—about my height, my silence, my unmarried status—to match Ajay’s cool standards. They were unnaturally tactful about the little friendship that developed between Ajay and me that holiday. But after all, he was the small widower with a five-year-old liability. And I was the orphan giant.

After my break, when I was back in Bombay, Ajay called and asked me to lunch. Not at whichever was the most fashionable new café, a choice I understood soon, when I understood Ajay’s attraction to me. We met at his beautiful Bandra apartment, the interiors of which I had seen in more than one magazine when Teresa was alive. Ajay chatted. About his occasional TV appearances, I think, and the impossible acrobatics of trying to sound intelligent on TV. About Vinu. About his continued astonishment that his parents wanted to live in Ranni. The Bihari cook looked grim. I looked around.

In one corner of the living room, crooked on the ceiling, was a burnished replica of a big beehive made of hundreds and hundreds of tiny bells from dancers’ anklets. I stared at it through the afternoon. A few months later, when we were married, I continued to discover strange and beautiful things around the house. When I opened the drawers of the bed with the extra sheets and pillows I found the smooth, wooden insides covered in Japanese cartoons of a pink-haired boy having sex with a tigress with long eyelashes.

It was difficult to learn to bathe in the house. The shower cubicle with its walls covered with fragments of mirrors made me bigger, smaller, curved me, untangled me.

Ajay and I had sex for the first time a few days after we were married. We were on holiday in Arunachal Pradesh. I felt like I was a puzzled eye in the ceiling watching as this man and woman contorted themselves into strange positions. Why was his mouth here, her leg there? I had felt the same eye-in-the-sky feelings with my boyfriend the few times we’d had sex, so it didn’t surprise me. I learnt fairly quickly what Ajay liked. That part of our lives was taken care of.

Other things were simultaneously more easy and more difficult. Ajay’s parents were wonderful. They insisted Vinu finish the school year with them. Ajay’s mother told me secretly they wanted us—the newlyweds—to have some time alone before becoming parents together. “It’s not like Ajay is so familiar with looking after Vinu either. So the burden will be on you. And that’s unfair.”

Ajay’s Bihari cook Mansoor decided to stop being grim. Instead he told me, wiping what I could see were fake tears, that he missed Teresa bhabhi so much. She used to drink with him in the kitchen on Sunday evenings when Ajay bhaiya was not there. I never doubted that Teresa would have drunk with her cook but the idea that she had ever stayed at home on a Sunday evening I found hard to believe.

I had read about Ajay and Teresa’s life in the papers but now I could see it for myself.

Within two days of returning from our mini-honeymoon, Ajay’s social life was in full swing.  Whenever he was done with work, whatever time it was, he would come home to shower and change for the night. The phone would beep with messages every few seconds. By the time he came out of the shower, plans would have been radically changed. Where the original plan involved meeting one friend in town for a drink, now the evening would begin in town for a drink and then another in Phoenix Mills, then another for a last drink in Bandra and then to pop in at someone’s party round the corner from Zenzi. Old Zenzi. No, new Zenzi. Nahi, yaar, old Zenzi.

Ajay drank well. Like he did everything else. He’d go from pub to pub, seem absolutely sober till 5 am, ferry us all some place for breakfast and fall asleep in the cab holding my hand on the way home. He’d wake up a few hours later, bathe and be ready to work.

I was free to join any or all of these. It terrified me, the choices and the people. The first few times I was exclaimed over and hugged and smiled at and spoken to sweetly—I thought I would survive. But a few months after we married, Subbu arrived.

We were sitting in a bar in town around midnight. Ajay was having some argument about Kashmir with three other women when Subbu entered. Small and chubby with the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen. She was an artist and had been away in Germany for six months. She had missed our wedding. She had known Ajay since Valley School, and when she arrived it was as if the social jigsaw puzzle was complete. I heard the click.

From then on all conversations around me seemed to go like this.

– I can’t believe you don’t remember Jackie Brown.

– I’m sorry, man. I was smashed when I watched it.

– You were not smashed. You hated it and you just don’t want to say you hate a Tarantino movie.

– Shut up, Django.

– I’m telling you his brother drowned in the school lake when we were about 13. How can you not remember? His brother drowned five days after he joined school.

– You guys have to stop making fun of her writing. She’ll win the Booker and we’ll all be up shit creek. All those people who made fun of Mary Roy’s crazy daughter who hung about Kottayam with her laptop must feel so good about themselves now. Watch out, Django.

– What is this django-django you keep blathering?

– Subbu! You don’t remember when I caught Mansoor watching that porn film? Django Shanti? I bet he was fantasising about you.

– Stop making fun of the subaltern, ya.

I’d never heard the word ‘subaltern’ before I met Ajay. In a few months, I realised there were many, many ways in which it could be used. The first time I ever said something about servants, the whole group fell into shocked silence. Subbu told me carefully that nobody used the word ‘servants’ anymore. They were ‘domestic help’. Varun, a fellow Malayali, whose favourite hobby was making jokes about Malayalis, said, making a face like an aunty, “Or as they say in Kottayam, ‘sahayi’.” And the group roared with laughter.

Ajay and Teresa’s friends never stopped talking. They could not stop talking. They all spoke four, five languages, Malayalam, French, German, Spanish. At one point three of them hired an Urdu tutor together so they could read poetry. But they were astonished when they found that I could speak Marathi. “But I’ve lived in Bombay ten years. Don’t any of you speak Marathi?” I asked mildly. After a three-second silence, someone made a joke about Raj Thackeray. Subbu reminded the others of the night Teresa had gone around stealing the Marathi signboards of pubs. That was the end of my brief superiority. Most of the time I was googling things they were talking about under the table on my phone so I didn’t look like a blank-faced idiot.

Subbu had this thing. She would catch me on Gtalk and complain that she never got to hang out with me alone. She’d fix a date and place to meet after an elaborate negotiation and sign off saying how excited she was. Then on the assigned day she would send me a message saying she was terribly unwell or had a work crisis. And on to the next time she saw me online, when she’d complain about how I was too busy to see her.

Early on, soon after she was back in the country we did meet once. She took me to a very cool Pali Hill café, where there seemed to be famous people at every table. Through lunch she texted or chatted with friends at neighbouring tables. I watched her as if she was a very strange movie with subtitles, only occasionally able to focus on what she was saying to me. After a while I realised that more than anything else, she reminded me of people back home in Ranni.

– It must be strange for you. I told Ajay that we should talk less about school when you’re around.

– Maybe you can persuade Ajay to write his book, finally. You know long-form narrative journalism is the future. How long is he going to do this shit work for a bunch of Marwaris?

– My parents would have loved you. You are the kind of girl they must have dreamt of having before I was born. A bank job with gratuity. Do you have gratuity? Or maybe I mean PPF.

After Subbu’s arrival I spent less and less time with the group and no one really asked why. It wasn’t cool for married couples in Ajay’s circle to spend all their time together anyway. It was assumed that I had other things to do. I didn’t, really. I’d become bored with my job. I mentioned to Ajay one day, some months after we got married, that people were getting laid off. Ajay told me to quit, we didn’t need the money. It’s true. We didn’t need the money. I never told Ajay and Teresa’s friends I had quit my job. I noticed that Ajay had glossed over it too. His Valley School friends and Pallikudam friends and Oxford friends would never understand why I didn’t have something going on, some project.

I wished I was the heroine in a makeover movie where I’d find a stylist and seduce my husband back. In my case, my clothes were fine. For the first time I was dressing as I wanted, buying the clothes I wanted. I was not sure I wanted to seduce my husband into anything. I looked out of our windows at the sea and was terrified I’d wake up one morning and lose all this comfort, where no one asked me any questions. Even Mansoor the liar could be put off politely.

I’m sure lots of people thought Ajay was marrying me to get a mother for Vinu but I knew Ajay was the one who needed me. Ajay had found a girl who looked on the outside like one of his people but would understand what he really wanted. So I stayed up late when he was out, ensured he ate on time, kept in touch with his parents and rationed his cigarettes a little bit. When he bought a Harley and kept it secret from his friends, I took my cue. When he told other people about it I smiled and enjoyed their teasing. When he sold the Harley after never managing to put it on main stand without Mansoor’s help, I kept that secret as well. In return he never expected me to be anyone else.

TERESA HAD GROWN UP in Brussels. This is the first thing I found out when I googled her years ago, before she died. School in Brussels, a few years in the US and art school in Berlin before moving to Bombay. I saw a picture of her on her German school’s website. Already in school you could see how tall she was going to be, as tall as her Belgian classmates, someday to be a stunning Amazon Malayali in Bombay. Teresa had been brought up by her diplomat aunt after her parents died in a car crash somewhere in America.

Teresa had written for a few newspapers abroad, pieces about art and theatre. By the time she married Ajay she had become a strange combination: someone who wrote the news and someone who was the news. You know the girls in short dresses you saw everyday in the Times of India, toasting the camera and laughing. Teresa was the girl some of them wanted to be. She was charismatic, brilliant and funny. She was everywhere and everyone knew her. All this I already knew by googling her over the years—long before I married Ajay or even met him.

I was the careful, polite second wife who asked Mansoor to dust the dead first wife’s pictures while avoiding his greedy eyes. Some of my former colleagues who visited exclaimed about how so many of Teresa’s photos were still all over the apartment and her name was still on the front door, but they hushed quickly after seeing my expression. That was in the first few months. Soon after, they faded out of my life along with my bank job, formal salwars and bank job formal pants.

All this was before I opened Teresa’s laptop. I had seen it several times, an old white Mac. On it Teresa had painted a shimmering brown girl, naked except for her gold nose stud. The Mac had been put away along with some of her sketchbooks on a shelf in her study, a room she’d converted out of the balcony. The study was full of steamy plants that Mansoor looked after as if they were children. One day, I waited for Mansoor to be out of the flat to fish the Mac off the shelf. I had no problem figuring the silly password Teresa had given it. At the bank I’d constantly be amazed at how clever people thought they were being with their security. They might as well have left the key to their house under a flower pot.

I logged in, and a week later I dreamt of Teresa for the first time.

THERE WAS A GIRL in boarding school who, during the holidays, used to tell me everything about her life, every last detail. She used to call me every evening at my parents’ friends house to whine and complain and joke and bitch about everyone at school. She would stop calling the day before school reopened. In school she never talked to me. I never asked. I just had to wait until the next holidays. When I read Teresa’s secret blog I heard the words in that girl’s heated little voice.

Teresa’s secret blog was not as old as the art blog which everyone knew about and which by now was like a dargah for Teresa. This secret blog was on a carefully neutral template and had a silly name—Girl With A One Crack Mind. It didn’t link to anything or anyone the public Teresa could be identified with. But she updated the secret blog avidly. Waiting for me to arrive years later.

Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great

hollow half-tree trunk, which for generations

has been a trough, renewing in itself

an inch or two of rain, I satisfy

my thirst: taking the water’s pristine coolness

into my whole body through my wrists.

Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;

but this unhurried gesture of restraint

fills my whole consciousness with shining water.

Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied

to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,

lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.

This was the poem Ajay had sent Teresa which excited her enough to sleep with him. It took me a while to understand the poem but there were lots of online poetry tutorials that explained it clearly. Teresa, of course, wouldn’t have needed any explanations. She’d been excited that Ajay knew the Rilke poem, knew it in the original German.

The day Teresa slept with Ajay for the first time, she broke off her relationship with another man. In the early morning she slept with Ajay. In the late evening she slept with the other man and said goodbye to him. “What a pity since I had finally trained him,” she wrote. This, I imagined, she could have said on her public blog as well and her fans would have found it “just like Teresa”.

In her columns for the papers and her public website, Teresa frequently implied that she was invincible, unbothered by anything. On the secret, and frequently tedious, blog she was irritated by everybody. She used some fairly obvious nicknames for all her friends. Several descriptions of short fat-fat Sub who was driving her crazy with her stupidity. Over the years Teresa had bitched about almost all the people who claimed to be her bestest friends, her oldest friends. I had amused myself earlier by watching the memorial video Subbu had made after Teresa’s death. After finding Teresa’s blog I watched it again and amused myself more. I realised that even her every-night-at-Zenzi friends, and many others, had hedged on the video by saying they didn’t know her well. As if they had just discovered that. But Teresa had known them all well.

I imagined Teresa sitting with the laptop on her dining table typing up her blog posts, smiling sunnily across at Ajay working on his column or on the phone with his staff. He would not know she was describing his energetic but, to her, predictable tendencies in bed for her secret audience. That she took pleasure in sitting near him while typing about her newest lover.

One post fascinated me. I went to it over and over again. It was just a bunch of words. A list.

Orphans

Hunger hunger

Hate hate

Age

The one I beat

Twitchy Twitchy

This list called to me for some reason. As much as her detailed descriptions of cheating on Ajay. She wrote about men she wanted to sleep with, men she wanted to cut, men she wanted to bleed for. For a woman everyone said was impulsive, someone always described as being on her own trip, she had planned a lot.

I cloned her hard drive on to mine and started digging around at leisure. Frequent links, online handles, favourite blogs, what she bought on eBay. Over the next few weeks I would get to know all of them. But I loved the schoolgirl confidences of One Crack Mind girl the best. Did that woman at the parlour really make Teresa orgasm with a touch when she was getting a bikini wax? Did Teresa subtly create a rift between a married couple she met in Ranni because she was bored one holiday? I wasn’t always sure what was true and what was Teresa’s imagination.

She was sometimes attracted to some of the silent men who worked in and around the neighbourhood—the cleaners, the drivers, the couriers. “What a tiresome cliché,” she wrote. “But they are quiet. How grateful I am that they are quiet. How grateful that they have the hots for me without understanding a single word I say.”

One evening when I clicked through Teresa’s list of favourite links I found a pondy photocomic that made my eyes water from all its variations of sexual positions. In bed that night I irritated Ajay with my fits of giggles.

After Vinu was born she wrote a few times in her public blog about being a mother. She raised what even I could see were the fashionable intellectual debates about motherhood. But it was on the secret blog where she wrote about the baby leaving her exhausted and angry. I couldn’t stop smiling when I saw those posts, knowing Teresa would never publicly admit to being defeated by anything as small and banal as a baby.

She wrote about swimming often and how much she loved it. Of the sun beating down on her red eyelids when she was floating on her back. I wondered often how an expert swimmer had drowned in the afternoon in the pool, but who was I, Nancy Drew?

One evening, Ajay invited the gang home for dinner. Mansoor was in top form, telling Bihari jokes, making kababs and racing out, buying tender coconuts and filling them with vodka and sugar. Everyone was, very quickly, drunk.

Subbu had brought Ajay a pile of books from Mexico. She was exuberant in a way I now imagined she probably could never have been while Teresa was around. While vivaciously exclaiming over one of the books, she said, “It’s a very lush novel, obsessed with aesthetics and allegories. A grand passion. Like yours and Teresa’s. She’d have loved…”, and began to weep quietly. Everyone ran across the living room to comfort her but not before I saw her eyes glancing fish-like to see how I was taking it.

I went into the bedroom and came back with one of my white handkerchiefs and gave it to her. I brought her water and sat beside her saying nothing, knowing that my simple proximity was giving her an allergy attack. Her fake grief was turning into nervous agitation. And just when I thought she was close to cracking, I got up. I went to the balcony and looked out at the sea. Ajay came quietly to see if I was okay. I was laughing inside but he didn’t know that. I was sure Teresa would have laughed at Stupid Sub’s elaborate pretensions too.

The next time Ajay invited everyone over, Subbu insisted she didn’t want to hang out in anyone’s house. She wanted to go out. Back we were at Zenzi. Subbu was carefully polite with me, but when no one was looking I saw her mouth droop in irritation, dissatisfaction. I went to the loo, looked in the mirror while washing my hands and I saw Teresa standing behind me in a short yellow dress, her curls glossy and her lips smirking red.

For a while I tried to stop digging into Teresa’s online life, worrying I was going crazy. But it was just for a few days. The moment Mansoor would leave the flat after lunch I’d tuck into bed with Teresa, reading everything she had to say. Years of Facebook updates. Drafts for her articles. To-do lists. Her accounts. Birthday reminders. The graphic novel she kept starting and stopping. Her heroine Tara’s breasts changed in size in each draft but she remained unbeatable in her ability to seduce men and women.

When I stumbled on her secret Flickr account even I, Teresa’s last and bestest friend, was amazed. She’d spent a lot of time photographing herself from the neck down. There were lots of pictures she’d taken in the house and in other places I didn’t recognise. They were strange angles, so I imagined they were taken on her digital camera or phone. I imagined her propping her camera up or holding the phone out with her long, lean arms. She had photographed everything. Birthmarks and veins. Dark damp bits. Pale parts unexposed to the sun. The one link on her blog about these photos that I found after some searching was a single line entry: “So that I remember that I was all this.” I saw the sweat she had carefully photographed on her own clavicle and the crease of her thighs, and felt dizzy. The tips of my fingers tingled and my bare legs felt liquid. I switched off the AC, opened the windows and curtains. I lay naked in bed letting the sunlight touch me.

Vinu’s arrival in the house changed almost everything. Walking around with Vinu changed the neighbourhood for me. Strangers smiled at us. Some friends, a lot of Ajay’s friends, stayed away. It was not a coincidence that Vinu’s first venture when graduating from genteel Malayalam into pert English was—“I don’t like children.”

Ajay walked carefully around him to begin with. But as he discovered his son—as much in love with words as he was, as precocious as he and Teresa had been—Ajay began to stay at home more. The house was crowded with new visitors, overnight guests. In December that year we had guests from abroad every week. They were Teresa’s friends who all wanted to meet Vinu. Ajay spoke only in Malayalam to Vinu, teasing me that I was going to give Vinu a wretched, lisping Non-Resident Malayali accent. It was true that Ajay’s alternative school upbringing had given him more Malayalam than my old-fashioned boarding schools. One of Ajay’s Valley School friends said something about sending Vinu there, and I told him to shut up. Vinu was going to grow up at home with us. My status as full-time mother was now public.

I rarely had time for Teresa now, but I waited desperately to be alone with her laptop. After a while without her friendship, it became difficult for me to be my efficient self with Ajay in bed. That is when I began to dream of her every night.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD I used to cry imagining my parents dead. When I was 15 and they hung themselves, I never cried. As an adult my tears always take me by surprise. Odd things make me cry. Young families eating in restaurants: I see the tired shoving of food into their mouths and I feel like weeping. Of course, after marrying Ajay I’ve rarely been in a restaurant where anyone looked tired.

One day I saw Ajay sitting on our balcony bent double in the dark, and I suddenly understood what he would be like as an old man. Shrunken and skinny. I’m sure young people will think of him as that cynical, funny journalist uncle who had once been so successful. But they’d never know how he danced. They would never be shocked by his dense chest hair, so unexpected on someone so smooth-skinned, which showed on the rare occasion when his second button was open. They would never know his small body had never affected his success with women everywhere he went. All the young people in Ajay’s future would know is that small, birdlike old person’s body.

For the first time in our life together I reached over and hugged him. Squeezed him hard. Imagined hugging the old man he would become. I could feel tears but the question that popped out of my mouth surprised me more than the tears.

“Do you miss her?”

Ajay stayed silent.

I said, “I’m sure you felt like Rilke with Teresa.” I could almost hear him stop breathing in shock so I don’t know why I went on.  “I would have wanted to rest my hand lightly on her shoulder too.”

Last night I dreamt of Teresa again.