The Midnight Rose

For Leonora

Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.

Rabindranath Tagore,
Stray Birds

I
am a hundred years old today. Not only have I managed to survive a century, but I’ve also seen in a new millennium.

As the dawn breaks and the sun begins to rise over Mount Kanchenjunga beyond my window, I lie on my pillows and smile to myself at the utter ridiculousness of the thought. If I were a piece of furniture, an elegant chair for example, I would be labeled an antique. I would be polished, restored and proudly put on show as a thing of beauty. Sadly, that isn’t the case with my human frame, which has not mellowed like a fine piece of mahogany over its lifetime. Instead, my body has deteriorated into a sagging hessian sack containing a collection of bones.

Any “beauty” in me that might be deemed valuable lies hidden deep inside. It is the wisdom of one hundred years lived on this earth, and a heart that has beaten a steady accompaniment to every conceivable human emotion and behavior.

One hundred years ago, to this very day, my parents, in the manner of all Indians, consulted an astrologer to tell them about the future of their newborn baby girl. I believe I still have the soothsayer’s predictions for my life among the few possessions of my mother that I’ve kept. I remember them saying that I was to be long-lived, but in 1900, I realize, my parents assumed this meant that, with the gods’ blessing, I would survive into my fifties.

I hear a gentle tap on my door. It is Keva, my faithful maid, armed with a tray of English Breakfast tea and a small jug of cold milk. Tea taken the English way is a habit I’ve never managed to break, even though I’ve lived in India—not to mention Darjeeling—for the past seventy-eight years.

I don’t answer Keva’s knock, preferring on this special morning to be alone with my thoughts awhile longer. Undoubtedly Keva will
wish to talk through the events of the day, will be eager to get me up, washed and dressed before my family begin to arrive.

As the sun begins to burn off the clouds covering the snowcapped mountains, I search the blue sky for the answer I’ve pleaded with the heavens to give me every morning of the past seventy-eight years.

Today, please
, I beg the gods, for I have known in each hour that has ticked by since I last saw my child that he still breathes somewhere on this planet. If he had died, I would have known the moment it happened, as I have for all those in my life whom I’ve loved, when they have passed over.

Tears fill my eyes and I turn my head to the nightstand by my bed to study the one photograph I have of him, a cherubic two-year-old sitting smiling on my knee. It was given to me by my friend Indira, along with his death certificate a few weeks after I’d been informed of my son’s death.

A lifetime ago, I think. The truth is, my son is now an old man too. He will celebrate his eighty-first birthday in October of this year. But even with
my
powers of imagination, it’s impossible for me to see him as such.

I turn my head determinedly away from my son’s image, knowing that today I deserve to enjoy the celebration my family has planned for me. But somehow, on all these occasions, when I see my other child and her children, and her children’s children, the absence of my son only feeds the pain in my heart, reminding me he has always been missing.

Of course, they believe, and always have, that my son died seventy-eight years ago.

“Maaji, see, you even have his death certificate! Leave him to his rest,” my daughter, Muna, would say with a sigh. “Enjoy the family you have living.”

After all these years, I understand Muna becomes frustrated with me. And she is of course right to. She wants to be enough, just her alone. But a lost child is something that can never be replaced in a mother’s heart.

And for today, my daughter will have her way. I will sit in my chair and enjoy watching the dynasty I have spawned. I won’t bore them with my stories of India’s history. When they arrive in their fast Western jeeps, with their children playing on their battery-operated gadgets, I will not remind them how Indira and I climbed the steep hills
around Darjeeling on horseback, that electricity and running water in any home were once rare, or of my voracious reading of any tattered book I could get my hands on. The young are irritated by stories of the past; they wish to live only in the present, just as I did when I was their age.

I can imagine that most of my family are not looking forward to flying halfway across India to visit their great-grandmother on her hundredth birthday, but perhaps I’m being hard on them. I’ve thought a great deal in the past few years about why the young seem to be uncomfortable when they’re with the old; they could learn so many things they need to know from us. And I’ve decided that their discomfort stems from the fact that in our fragile physical presence, they become aware of what the future holds for them. They can only see, in their full glow of strength and beauty, how eventually they will be diminished one day too. They cannot understand what they will gain.

How can they begin to see inside us? Understand how their souls will grow, their impetuousness be tamed and their selfish thoughts dimmed by the experiences of so many years?

But I accept that this is nature, in all its glorious complexity. I have ceased to question it.

When Keva knocks at the door for a second time, I admit her. As she talks at me in fast Hindi, I sip my tea and run over the names of my four grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. At a hundred years old, one wants to at least prove that one’s mind is still in full working order. The four grandchildren my daughter gave me have each gone on to become successful and loving parents themselves. They flourished in the new world that independence from the British brought to India, and their children have taken the mantle even further. At least six of them, from what I recall, have started their own businesses or are in a professional trade. Selfishly, I wish that one of my extended offspring had taken an interest in medicine, had followed after me, but I realize that I can’t have everything.

As Keva helps me into the bathroom to wash me, I consider that my family have had a mixture of luck, brains and family connections on their side. And that my beloved India has probably another century to go before the millions who still starve on her streets gain some modicum of their basic human needs. I have done my best to help over the years, but I realize my efforts are a mere ripple in the ocean against a roaring tide of poverty and deprivation.

Sitting patiently while Keva dresses me in my new sari—a birthday present from Muna, my daughter—I decide I won’t think these maudlin thoughts today. I’ve attempted where I can to improve those lives that have brushed against mine, and I must be content with that.

“You look beautiful, Madam Chavan.”

As I look at my reflection in the mirror, I know that she is lying, but I love her for it. My fingers reach for the pearls that have sat around my neck for nearly eighty years. In my will, I have left them to Muna.

“Your daughter arrives at eleven o’clock, and the rest of the family will be here an hour later. Where shall I put you until they come?”

I smile at her, feeling much like a mahogany chair. “You may put me in the window. I want to look at my mountains,” I say. She helps me up, steers me gently to the armchair and sits me down.

“Can I bring you anything else, madam?”

“No. You go now to the kitchen and make sure that cook of ours has the lunch menu under control.”

“Yes, madam.” She moves my bell from the nightstand to the table at my side and quietly leaves the room.

I turn my face into the sunlight, which is starting to stream through the big picture windows of my hilltop bungalow. As I bask in it like a cat, I remember the friends who have already passed over and won’t be joining me today for my celebration. Indira, my most beloved friend, died over fifteen years ago. I confess that was one of the few moments in my life when I have broken down and wept uncontrollably. Even my devoted daughter could not match the love and friendship Indira showed me. Self-absorbed and flighty until the moment she died, Indira was there when I needed her most.

I look across to the writing bureau which sits in the alcove opposite me and can’t help but think about what is concealed inside its locked drawer. It is a letter, and it runs over three hundred pages. It is written to my beloved son and tells the story of my life from the beginning. As the years passed, I began to worry that I would forget the details, that they would become blurred and grainy in my mind, like the reel of a silent black-and-white film. If, as I believe to this day, my son is alive and if he were ever returned to me, I wanted to be able to present him with the story of his mother and her enduring love for her lost child. And the reasons why she had had to leave him behind . . .

I began to write it when I was in middle age, believing then that
I might be taken at any time. There it has sat for nearly fifty years, untouched and unread, because he never came to find me, and I still haven’t found him.

Not even my daughter knows the story of my life before she arrived on the planet. Sometimes I feel guilty for never revealing the truth to her. But I believe it is enough that she has known my love when her brother was denied it.

I glance at the bureau, viewing in my mind’s eye the yellowing pile of paper inside it. And I ask the gods to guide me. When I die, as surely I must soon, I would be horrified for it to fall into the wrong hands. I ponder for a few seconds on whether I should light a fire and ask Keva to place the papers onto it. But no, I shake my head instinctively. I can never bring myself to do that, just in case I do find him. There is still hope. After all, I’ve lived to a hundred; I may live to a hundred and ten.

But whom to entrust it to, in the meantime, just in case . . . ?

I mentally scan my family members, taking them in generations. At each name, I listen for guidance. And it’s on the name of one of my great-grandsons that I pause.

Ari Malik, the eldest child of my eldest grandson, Vivek. I chuckle slightly as the shiver runs up my spine—the signal I’ve had from those above who understand so much more than I ever can. Ari, the only member of my extended family to be blessed with blue eyes. Other than my beloved lost child.

I concentrate hard to bring to mind his details; with eleven great-grandchildren, I think, comforting myself, a person half my age would struggle to remember. And besides, they are spread out all over India these days, and I rarely see them.