Between the Lines

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<h1 class="left">At 23, my mother was married as the result of a 6.5cmx5cm matrimonial advertisement placed in the Sunday newspaper. Fresh out of graduate school and two months into her first job, my grandfather worried about the family’s honour if his eldest daughter were to remain unwed any longer. His brand-new camera was put to use. My mother stood before the hibiscus tree in the front yard of their house in Trivandrum, Kerala, wearing a bright pink kurta and a brighter pink lipstick. She posed for the camera and pressed a prayer to her tongue, there could be no better time for divine intervention. Her father believed her to be unreasonably picky; he thought she possessed no qualities that merited her high standards. To him, it was a task to be dealt with quickly. My mother clung to some vague notion of the man of her dreams.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">The arranged marriage market set up its stalls in the living room soon enough and merchants, marketers, men, and their mothers poured in to examine the goods. They sat around the cane and glass table, bit into deep-fried banana fritters and took great gulps of tea from rose-patterned china displaced from the prized top kitchen shelf for the occasion. Then, the trade began. My son has an MBA, can your daughter cook for him? Will she always wear her hair long, or does she plan on cutting it? Is there a semblance of hope in her we can eventually kill? My mother, on the other hand, had merely two criteria for a match: he should speak good English and let her, unlike her father, wear jeans whenever she wanted. Mostly, she needed to be loved. Deeply, wholly, unabashedly. She’d read enough Mills & Boon to familiarise herself with the feeling and pleaded at enough temples for a handsome husband who’d show her the kind of love that left one reeling.</h1>

<h1 class="left">After an excruciating month of demurely greeting strangers in her best saris, a groom was chosen, a date was set, and my mother was soon to be married. She was young, beautiful, and only too delighted to flash her engagement ring in the faces of friends (good enough), foes (even better!) and family (best!). The long list of admirers who routinely thronged the gates of her house deserted their esteemed spot, dejected, heartbroken. She had trashed their shot at true romance for a skinny, wonky-mustached, braggart-Bombay-boy. They wished her the worst. There was only one person left to inform of the news; a certain Mr. MCA, a pen pal she had been exchanging letters with for three years. The contents of the letters oscillated from kin-like concern to brazen flirtation, from sombre to suggestive, from courtship to friendship; the very hallmark of a 20th-century long-distance, high-commitment, casual situationship. She’d chop up fresh stories dished out at the marriage market and cook them in a flavourful ink-broth. Then she’d stamp, seal and post the letter with happenings of the day, hot off the press.</h1>

<h1 class="left">He found her smart and funny and attractive and endearing. She thought he was kind and well-read and ever so slightly, a mama’s boy. She liked him, I’m sure of it. She liked the attention delivered weekly in a stark white envelope more, she’s sure of it.</h1>

<h1 class="left">My mother never signed off the letters with her real name, Chitra. Chitra had a 6 PM curfew, swore to never have a ‘love marriage’ outside of her community and to never bring shame to her family. She’d always employ the pseudonym Nikita because Nikita was audacious.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Nikita knew about sun signs and rising signs and compatibility tests cut out from women’s magazines.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Nikita knew to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ears and drive a man crazy.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Nikita devoured novels, stitched the clothes she couldn’t buy, and wrote furiously.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Nikita knew all the lyrics to ABBA’s 1976 pop single ‘Dancing Queen.’</h1>

<h1 class="centre">She could dance, she could jive, she was indeed having the time of her life.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">My mother often tells me she would’ve liked to name me Nikita if my father had approved of it.</h1>

<h1 class="right">At 23, I downloaded a dating app for the first time after the brutal end of a relationship I had believed would ultimately result in us buying a house together by the Arabian Sea. This was bound to happen, I’m glad it did, I am only young, I reconciled. Next, I gave in and tumbled willingly down the rabbit hole I’d dug for myself: the thrilling risk of the right swipe, the lingering ego boost of the left. I was terrified of a fate like my mother’s; a meek settlement turned into an unhappy marriage. I hated the idea that anything in my life could be ‘arranged’ and compartmentalised into have-to-dos. I resolved to be nothing like my mom. How could she have abandoned the agency of her life with such ease? She surely had no integrity. Why would she not stand up to her father, or leave mine? She surely was a coward. Why was her spare time so willingly surrendered to the care of others? She had dug a grave of domesticity and the dirt could never fully be scraped from under her fingernails.</h1>

<h1 class="right">I, on the other hand, wanted a series of giddy-headed first dates and the failed talking stage that invariably accompanied it. I wanted to lean across the table at a noisy dive bar and carelessly brush my finger against their hand, nonchalant and witty, to remind myself I still had it. I wanted someone to tell me that my nose piercing and brand-new-bob were sexy. I wanted to kiss and kiss so vehemently on the street that the Moral Police would have to pull us apart with great strength to fulfil some godly duty. I was fun girl. I was rebellious girl. I was the carefully constructed alias ‘M’ on those dating apps, not Meghna. For privacy, I told myself. And mystery.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">After an excruciating month of dryly declining lucrative offers for a ‘good time’ from eligible/erratic suitors on the apps, I became increasingly impatient for the kind of intimacy my mother wrote about wanting. She’d hoped for a husband, and I was content to find out in other, less life-altering ways. In the absence of admirers crowding the door of our apartment in a gated/gentrified Mumbai building, I resorted to the only other trick in my mom’s book; a pen pal. The key was to develop a long-term, reciprocative, low-stakes relationship with pen pals on the internet. A textationship, if you will. Dating-app-induced delirium for lonely, lonely gals, if you must.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">One summer afternoon when my father wasn't at home, I rediscovered Nikita. My mother and I unearthed a suitcase splitting at the seams, stuffed with letters and diaries and other odd instances of life writing she had preserved. As we seated ourselves on the bedroom floor and read, I watched my mother giggle. I watched her blush knowingly, as an eyebrow shot up in amusement. She sheepishly shoves a scandalous sheet under a tangled mound of ageing bones; the skeletal remains, and only evidence, of a time once lived.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">For most of my adult life, I hadn’t even known my mother.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">“I met him once, on the last day of college. He was a junior who tried to flirt with me. I was in my final year trying to complete my degree. Then I graduated and moved away.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“And you both kept in touch, why? He seems slightly arrogant in these letters, no?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Have you met a man who isn’t? He was fun to write to and he wrote me these long letters, addressing everything I brought up. Feels nice to know that someone cares enough to read about your day.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I hate telling a man about my day. I hate texting in general.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Good, then you don’t even have to care to ask about his.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“It feels nice to be alone. I’ll be happier if I never have to keep in touch with anyone, ever.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Yeah sure, sorry.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Will you at least call your mother?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I can call you if you ever stop calling me. Do something better with your life than wasting your time worrying about your children.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Call people now and then. People like to feel remembered. There’s not much to life than the people in it.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Yeah sure, sorry.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">I am not my mother.</h1>

<h1 class="left">I am not my mother, I concluded.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">A week later, I put on a bloody apron and prepared to disembowel the dirty suitcase again, alone. Polyester skin was split open and from its messy innards, I pulled out paper-guts the length of both intestines laid one after the other. I placed the letters and limbs I exhumed on my study table for a postmortem of my mother’s past. If Nikita had died suddenly under suspicious circumstances, there must be some way to know why. My almost name-sake had faded into obscurity but there must be some signs.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I cracked open the spine of a leather-bound journal and saw shame seated cross-legged on each vertebrae.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I poked with a pen at rotting flesh and saw words unsaid tear clean offthe chest— sexy! sex appeal! sex!</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I plucked a piece of brain out; it had aced an English test.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I snipped a capillary with surgical precision and sieved loneliness from lust.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I wrung a heart out and shook its insides, only to find it had bled dry in all lifetimes.</h1>

<h1 class="right">I rang my mother at work that day.</h1>

<h1 class="right">“What happened to Nikita, ma? Why did you come up with your pen name, and why did you abandon her?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“I wanted to remain anonymous to the men I wrote to. My dad would not have liked me doing this. The letters were all posted to my college address, never my home.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Men? You mean there was more than one? More than Mr. MCA?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Three, yes. I stopped writing to some others along the way because they were terribly boring.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“You never responded to their letters? You ghosted people over India Post!”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“What about the other men then, the decent ones?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Only one of them is worth remembering. He was ten years older than me, his name was Gopi, and he had a glorious vocabulary. My best friend and I found his address in a magazine. There used to be a little column called Pen Friends and people would send in their addresses, mostly men. I reached out to him as Nikita Nair and we wrote back and forth until I liked him enough to reveal my real name.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“And then? Nikita was suddenly no more?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“He got upset that I lied to him for so long. He felt cheated. He’d sent me a photograph of himself and he asked me to send it back when we ended our correspondence. He was very handsome, he looked like this actor, Biswajit Chatterjee.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Sure. But what happened after that?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“We lost touch. I killed the pen name Nikita. I got married. Gopi called me on the landline one day, out of the blue, after my wedding. Your father heard him and got very angry. I never spoke to him again.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“If he wasn’t 10 years older than me, I probably would’ve married him.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Do you still think about him?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Every time I cross the Thalassery Railway Station.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Do you think Nikita would hope for another chance to make things right?”</h1>

<h1 class="right">“Ammu, it’s the middle of a work day, I don’t have time for this call. Do something better with your life than wasting time worrying about your mother.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">I am my mother. I am my mother, I reconciled.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">round 1:</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Nikita, Why is it that you always side-step the rules of letter writing? Agreed that writing my name makes you feel uneasy but a letter is a letter, do follow the rules.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Mother and I are adept in literary micro-mutinies that piss men off.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">round 2:</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Nikita to Pen Pal B: in a way, you guys are lucky enough. Safe from marriage until quite some age. So you people can wait for your Ms. Rights. For us, it’s today or tomorrow. I mean, the impending knot of matrimony. Each day the pressure of finding a suitable groom is mounting at home. More so when you have all your cousins and friends settled down too.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Mother is malleable and marriage-minded. I am making out and moving on.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">round 3:</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Nikita to Pen Pal A: Well about other things in life, New Year's Eve was a total drab. But a week earlier than that, we did have our company Christmas parties at The Oberoi. That’s one thing about Maersk, the Parties are too generous, lively & memorable. Well you can imagine the attires of the Bombay chicks, can’t you? So what if they were in micro minis and off-shoulders, I never ran out of guys asking for a dance!</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Mother and I had teenage bullies, so mother and I grew to be two-drink-cocky. Mother and I go to parties and think they all want me.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">round 4:</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Pen Pal A to Nikita: You sound so fatalistic when you say, “It is very unlikely we would have a chance to meet in the future… ” Why?? There are ‘n’ number of chances. If it’s a railway station meet next time you pass by, it could be.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Mother wraps herself in cautionary tales, winds them round and round her throat, and chokes. Mother ties fear to her ankles and takes footsteps that fracture her toes. I am bold and brave and battlestar and brawn and brat and bombshell and bizarre and bars and bath and bed and beyond.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">round 5:</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Pen Pal B to Nikita: I had brought 151 shade card to hand it over to you. Especially since you believe there are only three colours- red, blue and green. Now that we haven’t met and it's inscribed- Nikita Nair on it, what do I do?</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Nikita hid her name to write and flirt so her father never found out. </h1>

<h1 class="centre">M’s father had a 52-year-old friend who sent him screenshots of M’s dating app profile and told him to be careful of his desperate, daddy-seeking daughter before shit goes down.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">round 6:</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">Pen Pal A to Nikita: Now about my friends knowing about you. My friends receive letters from their girlfriends a lot, for example, there are many which have sexy contents in it. My friend Abraham met a girl on the return journey to hostel from Kottayam in the train. They started corresponding. She is terrifically sexy in her letters and her letters were shown to us. So each time we get letters from girls they become curious to know who it is. Though they can read your letter, they haven’t tried and I didn’t allow it. But they tell some of the contents if it is something special. But they know the longest letters come from you and I write long letters to you alone.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">In my mother’s cupboard, there was a cream cotton bag stuffed with lace lingerie. At 14, I rummaged through the bag and stole a black bra embroidered with red rose-buds. At 14 I thought, why does she have so many, I’m sure they never fuck. She knows what I did and will never bring it up. We’re too ashamed.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Mother and I want to be loved and shown off and occasionally called sexy.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I don’t wish to play anymore.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">My mother calls me from across the world. It is my 26th birthday, October the 1st.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">“What’s the progress on that piece you were writing about me?"</h1>

<h1 class="left">“It’s going, I think. I’m slightly stuck right now.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Can I read it? Maybe I can help you.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I’m going to read it anyway, someday. Have you met any cute guys in New York?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I don’t know, maybe I did.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I’m not asking you to get married. I just want to know if he’s cute.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Ok but if I do want to get married, I will. Reasons like he’s not from the ‘same community’ and people will judge me, will not stop me.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Silence. She doesn’t get it.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">“Do you think you love him?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I can never make up my mind.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">“I showed someone a picture of us and she said we look like the same person.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“We do look very alike, we always hear that.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I had you at 26, you’re 26 today! Do so much better with your life. Don’t be a coward like me.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Don’t say that. Don’t say that. It kills me.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">“But you’re so brave, mumma. You’re moving out of the house finally, you’re going to live by yourself, you’re going to love again, I swear.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Call me later when you get free?”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I will, if you don’t call me already.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">She never gets it, she always does.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Credits:</h1>

<h1 class="left">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>

<h1 class="left">Words by: Meghna Yesudas</h1>

<h1 class="left">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>

<h1 class="left">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>

<h1 class="left">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>

<h1 class="left">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>

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<h1 class="full">At 23, my mother was married as the result of a 6.5cmx5cm matrimonial advertisement placed in the Sunday newspaper. Fresh out of graduate school and two months into her first job, my grandfather worried about the family’s honour if his eldest daughter were to remain unwed any longer. His brand-new camera was put to use. My mother stood before the hibiscus tree in the front yard of their house in Trivandrum, Kerala, wearing a bright pink kurta and a brighter pink lipstick. She posed for the camera and pressed a prayer to her tongue, there could be no better time for divine intervention. Her father believed her to be unreasonably picky; he thought she possessed no qualities that merited her high standards. To him, it was a task to be dealt with quickly. My mother clung to some vague notion of the man of her dreams.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">The arranged marriage market set up its stalls in the living room soon enough and merchants, marketers, men, and their mothers poured in to examine the goods. They sat around the cane and glass table, bit into deep-fried banana fritters and took great gulps of tea from rose-patterned china displaced from the prized top kitchen shelf for the occasion. Then, the trade began. My son has an MBA, can your daughter cook for him? Will she always wear her hair long, or does she plan on cutting it? Is there a semblance of hope in her we can eventually kill? My mother, on the other hand, had merely two criteria for a match: he should speak good English and let her, unlike her father, wear jeans whenever she wanted. Mostly, she needed to be loved. Deeply, wholly, unabashedly. She’d read enough Mills & Boon to familiarise herself with the feeling and pleaded at enough temples for a handsome husband who’d show her the kind of love that left one reeling.</h1>

<h1 class="full">After an excruciating month of demurely greeting strangers in her best saris, a groom was chosen, a date was set, and my mother was soon to be married. She was young, beautiful, and only too delighted to flash her engagement ring in the faces of friends (good enough), foes (even better!) and family (best!). The long list of admirers who routinely thronged the gates of her house deserted their esteemed spot, dejected, heartbroken. She had trashed their shot at true romance for a skinny, wonky-mustached, braggart-Bombay-boy. They wished her the worst. There was only one person left to inform of the news; a certain Mr. MCA, a pen pal she had been exchanging letters with for three years. The contents of the letters oscillated from kin-like concern to brazen flirtation, from sombre to suggestive, from courtship to friendship; the very hallmark of a 20th-century long-distance, high-commitment, casual situationship. She’d chop up fresh stories dished out at the marriage market and cook them in a flavourful ink-broth. Then she’d stamp, seal and post the letter with happenings of the day, hot off the press.</h1>

<h1 class="full">He found her smart and funny and attractive and endearing. She thought he was kind and well-read and ever so slightly, a mama’s boy. She liked him, I’m sure of it. She liked the attention delivered weekly in a stark white envelope more, she’s sure of it.</h1>

<h1 class="full">My mother never signed off the letters with her real name, Chitra. Chitra had a 6 PM curfew, swore to never have a ‘love marriage’ outside of her community and to never bring shame to her family. She’d always employ the pseudonym Nikita because Nikita was audacious.</h1>

<h1 class="full">Nikita knew about sun signs and rising signs and compatibility tests cut out from women’s magazines.</h1>

<h1 class="full">Nikita knew to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ears and drive a man crazy.</h1>

<h1 class="full">Nikita devoured novels, stitched the clothes she couldn’t buy, and wrote furiously.</h1>

<h1 class="full">Nikita knew all the lyrics to ABBA’s 1976 pop single ‘Dancing Queen.’</h1>

<h1 class="full">She could dance, she could jive, she was indeed having the time of her life.</h1>

<h1 class="full">My mother often tells me she would’ve liked to name me Nikita if my father had approved of it.</h1>

<h1 class="full">At 23, I downloaded a dating app for the first time after the brutal end of a relationship I had believed would ultimately result in us buying a house together by the Arabian Sea. This was bound to happen, I’m glad it did, I am only young, I reconciled. Next, I gave in and tumbled willingly down the rabbit hole I’d dug for myself: the thrilling risk of the right swipe, the lingering ego boost of the left. I was terrified of a fate like my mother’s; a meek settlement turned into an unhappy marriage. I hated the idea that anything in my life could be ‘arranged’ and compartmentalised into have-to-dos. I resolved to be nothing like my mom. How could she have abandoned the agency of her life with such ease? She surely had no integrity. Why would she not stand up to her father, or leave mine? She surely was a coward. Why was her spare time so willingly surrendered to the care of others? She had dug a grave of domesticity and the dirt could never fully be scraped from under her fingernails.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I, on the other hand, wanted a series of giddy-headed first dates and the failed talking stage that invariably accompanied it. I wanted to lean across the table at a noisy dive bar and carelessly brush my finger against their hand, nonchalant and witty, to remind myself I still had it. I wanted someone to tell me that my nose piercing and brand-new-bob were sexy. I wanted to kiss and kiss so vehemently on the street that the Moral Police would have to pull us apart with great strength to fulfil some godly duty. I was fun girl. I was rebellious girl. I was the carefully constructed alias ‘M’ on those dating apps, not Meghna. For privacy, I told myself. And mystery.</h1>

<h1 class="full">After an excruciating month of dryly declining lucrative offers for a ‘good time’ from eligible/erratic suitors on the apps, I became increasingly impatient for the kind of intimacy my mother wrote about wanting. She’d hoped for a husband, and I was content to find out in other, less life-altering ways. In the absence of admirers crowding the door of our apartment in a gated/gentrified Mumbai building, I resorted to the only other trick in my mom’s book; a pen pal. The key was to develop a long-term, reciprocative, low-stakes relationship with pen pals on the internet. A textationship, if you will. Dating-app-induced delirium for lonely, lonely gals, if you must.</h1>

<h1 class="full">One summer afternoon when my father wasn't at home, I rediscovered Nikita. My mother and I unearthed a suitcase splitting at the seams, stuffed with letters and diaries and other odd instances of life writing she had preserved. As we seated ourselves on the bedroom floor and read, I watched my mother giggle. I watched her blush knowingly, as an eyebrow shot up in amusement. She sheepishly shoves a scandalous sheet under a tangled mound of ageing bones; the skeletal remains, and only evidence, of a time once lived.</h1>

<h1 class="full">For most of my adult life, I hadn’t even known my mother.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">“I met him once, on the last day of college. He was a junior who tried to flirt with me. I was in my final year trying to complete my degree. Then I graduated and moved away.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“And you both kept in touch, why? He seems slightly arrogant in these letters, no?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Have you met a man who isn’t? He was fun to write to and he wrote me these long letters, addressing everything I brought up. Feels nice to know that someone cares enough to read about your day.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I hate telling a man about my day. I hate texting in general.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Good, then you don’t even have to care to ask about his.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“It feels nice to be alone. I’ll be happier if I never have to keep in touch with anyone, ever.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Yeah sure, sorry.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Will you at least call your mother?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I can call you if you ever stop calling me. Do something better with your life than wasting your time worrying about your children.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Call people now and then. People like to feel remembered. There’s not much to life than the people in it.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Yeah sure, sorry.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">I am not my mother.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I am not my mother, I concluded.</h1>

<h1 class="full">A week later, I put on a bloody apron and prepared to disembowel the dirty suitcase again, alone. Polyester skin was split open and from its messy innards, I pulled out paper-guts the length of both intestines laid one after the other. I placed the letters and limbs I exhumed on my study table for a postmortem of my mother’s past. If Nikita had died suddenly under suspicious circumstances, there must be some way to know why. My almost name-sake had faded into obscurity but there must be some signs.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I cracked open the spine of a leather-bound journal and saw shame seated cross-legged on each vertebrae.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I poked with a pen at rotting flesh and saw words unsaid tear clean offthe chest— sexy! sex appeal! sex!</h1>

<h1 class="full">I plucked a piece of brain out; it had aced an English test.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I snipped a capillary with surgical precision and sieved loneliness from lust.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I wrung a heart out and shook its insides, only to find it had bled dry in all lifetimes.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I rang my mother at work that day.</h1>

<h1 class="full">“What happened to Nikita, ma? Why did you come up with your pen name, and why did you abandon her?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I wanted to remain anonymous to the men I wrote to. My dad would not have liked me doing this. The letters were all posted to my college address, never my home.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Men? You mean there was more than one? More than Mr. MCA?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Three, yes. I stopped writing to some others along the way because they were terribly boring.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“You never responded to their letters? You ghosted people over India Post!”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“What about the other men then, the decent ones?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Only one of them is worth remembering. He was ten years older than me, his name was Gopi, and he had a glorious vocabulary. My best friend and I found his address in a magazine. There used to be a little column called Pen Friends and people would send in their addresses, mostly men. I reached out to him as Nikita Nair and we wrote back and forth until I liked him enough to reveal my real name.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“And then? Nikita was suddenly no more?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“He got upset that I lied to him for so long. He felt cheated. He’d sent me a photograph of himself and he asked me to send it back when we ended our correspondence. He was very handsome, he looked like this actor, Biswajit Chatterjee.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Sure. But what happened after that?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“We lost touch. I killed the pen name Nikita. I got married. Gopi called me on the landline one day, out of the blue, after my wedding. Your father heard him and got very angry. I never spoke to him again.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“If he wasn’t 10 years older than me, I probably would’ve married him.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Do you still think about him?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Every time I cross the Thalassery Railway Station.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Do you think Nikita would hope for another chance to make things right?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Ammu, it’s the middle of a work day, I don’t have time for this call. Do something better with your life than wasting time worrying about your mother.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">I am my mother. I am my mother, I reconciled.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">round 1:</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Nikita, Why is it that you always side-step the rules of letter writing? Agreed that writing my name makes you feel uneasy but a letter is a letter, do follow the rules.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Mother and I are adept in literary micro-mutinies that piss men off.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">round 2:</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Nikita to Pen Pal B: in a way, you guys are lucky enough. Safe from marriage until quite some age. So you people can wait for your Ms. Rights. For us, it’s today or tomorrow. I mean, the impending knot of matrimony. Each day the pressure of finding a suitable groom is mounting at home. More so when you have all your cousins and friends settled down too.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Mother is malleable and marriage-minded. I am making out and moving on.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">round 3:</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Nikita to Pen Pal A: Well about other things in life, New Year's Eve was a total drab. But a week earlier than that, we did have our company Christmas parties at The Oberoi. That’s one thing about Maersk, the Parties are too generous, lively & memorable. Well you can imagine the attires of the Bombay chicks, can’t you? So what if they were in micro minis and off-shoulders, I never ran out of guys asking for a dance!</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Mother and I had teenage bullies, so mother and I grew to be two-drink-cocky. Mother and I go to parties and think they all want me.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">round 4:</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Pen Pal A to Nikita: You sound so fatalistic when you say, “It is very unlikely we would have a chance to meet in the future… ” Why?? There are ‘n’ number of chances. If it’s a railway station meet next time you pass by, it could be.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Mother wraps herself in cautionary tales, winds them round and round her throat, and chokes. Mother ties fear to her ankles and takes footsteps that fracture her toes. I am bold and brave and battlestar and brawn and brat and bombshell and bizarre and bars and bath and bed and beyond.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">round 5:</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Pen Pal B to Nikita: I had brought 151 shade card to hand it over to you. Especially since you believe there are only three colours- red, blue and green. Now that we haven’t met and it's inscribed- Nikita Nair on it, what do I do?</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Nikita hid her name to write and flirt so her father never found out. </h1>

<h1 class="full">M’s father had a 52-year-old friend who sent him screenshots of M’s dating app profile and told him to be careful of his desperate, daddy-seeking daughter before shit goes down.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">round 6:</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Pen Pal A to Nikita: Now about my friends knowing about you. My friends receive letters from their girlfriends a lot, for example, there are many which have sexy contents in it. My friend Abraham met a girl on the return journey to hostel from Kottayam in the train. They started corresponding. She is terrifically sexy in her letters and her letters were shown to us. So each time we get letters from girls they become curious to know who it is. Though they can read your letter, they haven’t tried and I didn’t allow it. But they tell some of the contents if it is something special. But they know the longest letters come from you and I write long letters to you alone.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">In my mother’s cupboard, there was a cream cotton bag stuffed with lace lingerie. At 14, I rummaged through the bag and stole a black bra embroidered with red rose-buds. At 14 I thought, why does she have so many, I’m sure they never fuck. She knows what I did and will never bring it up. We’re too ashamed.</h1>

<h1 class="full">Mother and I want to be loved and shown off and occasionally called sexy.</h1>

<h1 class="full">I don’t wish to play anymore.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">My mother calls me from across the world. It is my 26th birthday, October the 1st.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">“What’s the progress on that piece you were writing about me?"</h1>

<h1 class="full">“It’s going, I think. I’m slightly stuck right now.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Can I read it? Maybe I can help you.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I’m going to read it anyway, someday. Have you met any cute guys in New York?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I don’t know, maybe I did.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I’m not asking you to get married. I just want to know if he’s cute.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Ok but if I do want to get married, I will. Reasons like he’s not from the ‘same community’ and people will judge me, will not stop me.”</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Silence. She doesn’t get it.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">“Do you think you love him?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I can never make up my mind.”</h1>

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<h1 class="full">“I showed someone a picture of us and she said we look like the same person.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“We do look very alike, we always hear that.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I had you at 26, you’re 26 today! Do so much better with your life. Don’t be a coward like me.”</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Don’t say that. Don’t say that. It kills me.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">“But you’re so brave, mumma. You’re moving out of the house finally, you’re going to live by yourself, you’re going to love again, I swear.”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“Call me later when you get free?”</h1>

<h1 class="full">“I will, if you don’t call me already.”</h1>

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<h1 class="full">She never gets it, she always does.</h1>

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<h1 class="full">Credits:</h1>

<h1 class="full">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>

<h1 class="full">Words by: Meghna Yesudas</h1>

<h1 class="full">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>

<h1 class="full">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>

<h1 class="full">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>

<h1 class="full">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>

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Before textationships, there were pen pals. A daughter discovers her mother’s letters to strangers from before an inevitable arranged marriage, examining the quiet defiance of desire across generations