The Thing We Never Became
By
Prachi Gurjar
PART IV
LETTERS NEVER SENT
CHAPTER 20
DEAR PAPA
It was Dr. Bose who suggested the letters, though she had not called them that exactly. She had asked, near the end of a session in early August, whether there were things Anaya had never said to the people closest to her, things that sat unspoken in her chest the way water sits behind a dam, present and pressing but never released.
"There are some things," Anaya had admitted. "Things I don't think I could ever actually say out loud. To Papa especially. We don't talk like that. We never have."
"You don't have to say them out loud," Dr. Bose had said. "Sometimes it helps simply to write them down. Not to send. Just to know, for yourself, that the words exist somewhere outside your own head."
Anaya had thought about this for days afterward, the suggestion sitting quietly alongside everything else she had been turning over that summer, the diary, the sketchbook, the small descriptions she had started writing again. One evening, with the house quiet and her parents already asleep, she took out a fresh notebook, separate from the blue diary, and began to write, addressing it the way she might have addressed an actual letter, though she knew, even as she began, that this one would never be sent.
Dear Papa,
I don't know how to start this except to just start it, so here it is.
I have been angry at you, sometimes, this summer, in a way I never let myself feel before. Not loudly angry. The quiet kind. The kind that sits underneath normal conversations about dinner and weather and pipe fittings while a different conversation is happening somewhere inside me that I never say out loud.
I think I have been angry that you let me become this person. The one who studied for three years for an exam I am not sure I ever fully chose. I know that sounds unfair, because I also know you never once forced me into anything. You never sat me down and said, Anaya, you will become an IAS officer or you will disappoint this entire family. You never said that. But you also never said, are you sure this is what you want, not in those exact words, not until it was already too late, not until after the result had already come and gone.
I keep thinking about the story you told me, about your own father, about engineering college, about leaving after one year and the two years he did not speak to you properly afterward. I think about how brave that must have been, at whatever young age you were, to walk away from the thing your own father wanted for you. And then I think, why didn't you ever tell me that story before. Why did I have to fail an exam first, before you decided I was ready to hear that you once disappointed your own father on purpose, and survived it, and built an entire good life on the other side of that disappointment.
I am not writing this to blame you, Papa. I want to say that clearly, even though I am writing it to a piece of paper you will never read. I don't think this is really about blame. I think it is about all the things that sat unsaid in our house for so many years, the same kind of unsaid that made you keep an empty chair at our table without anyone discussing why, the same kind of unsaid that let me believe, for three years, that wanting something for myself and wanting something to make you proud were the exact same wanting, with no space between them at all.
I remember the chai stall conversation, the night you asked me whether I wanted the exam for myself. I remember how much that one question cost you to ask, I could see it in your face, the particular effort of a man who is not used to asking his daughter what she actually wants, because for so many years, wanting the same thing the family wanted had simply been assumed, comfortable, easy for everyone, including you.
I think you love me very much, Papa. I have never once doubted that. But I think love, in our house, got tangled up early with achievement, so tightly that nobody could tell anymore where one ended and the other began. I don't know if that is your fault, or your father's fault before you, or some larger thing that moves through families like weather, the same current I have been thinking about, the one that asked your mother to give up her studies for a dowry, the one that asked your own father's approval to be earned through marks and rank rather than simply given, freely, the way I think children deserve to have it given.
I want to ask you something, even though I cannot actually ask it, not the way I am asking it here. Would you have loved me the same amount if I had failed this exam at sixteen instead of twenty three. If I had never tried at all. If I had told you, at fourteen, that I wanted to write books instead of clear competitive exams, would your face have done the same thing it did when Mrs. Kapoor told you I had topped my section. Would your shoulders have straightened the same way.
I think the answer is yes. I think, underneath everything, underneath the pride and the chair and the careful avoided questions, you would have loved me exactly the same. I think I am only now learning to believe that, slowly, the way you learn to trust a bridge by walking across it, one careful step at a time, rather than simply being told it will hold your weight.
Thank you for the question at dinner. The one about wanting things for myself. I know it cost you something to ask it, and I think, even though I cannot say this out loud yet, that it was the single kindest thing anyone has done for me this entire summer.
I am trying to find out who I am without the exam attached to me. I think you are trying too, in your own way, finding out who you are as my father without that future attached to me either. I think we are both, in our own quiet ways, walking across the same unfamiliar bridge, and I am glad, even though I have never said it properly, that I am not walking it completely alone.
Your daughter, Anaya
She read the letter back twice after finishing it, her own handwriting slightly uneven by the end, the way handwriting always seemed to grow when emotion pressed too closely behind the pen. She did not show it to her father. She had known, even before beginning, that she would not, that the letter existed for a different purpose entirely than being read by its intended recipient.
But folding it carefully and placing it inside the same drawer that held the blue diary, she felt something in her chest loosen that had been knotted there for a very long time, the particular relief of finally saying a true thing, even if the only ears it ever reached were her own.
CHAPTER 21
DEAR MAA
She wrote the second letter three days later, on a Sunday afternoon when her mother had gone to a neighbor's house for a few hours, the house unusually quiet around her, the kind of quiet that made certain thoughts easier to follow all the way through without interruption.
She had thought, beginning this one, that it might come more easily than the letter to her father, since she and her mother talked more openly already, since the tea table conversations and the veranda afternoons shelling peas had already covered so much ground that summer. But sitting with the notebook open in front of her, she found that this letter resisted her in its own particular way, different from the resistance the first one had offered.
Dear Maa,
This one is harder to write than the letter to Papa, and I think I finally understand why, sitting here trying to begin it. With Papa, the unsaid things were mostly about expectation, about achievement, about a current that moved through generations of men who measured love through pride in a daughter's marks. That kind of unsaid is almost easy to write about, because it has a clear shape, a clear villain even, if I wanted to be unfair about it, which I don't.
With you, Maa, the unsaid things are about love that was always there, completely, without condition, but that I did not always know how to recognize, because it rarely came wrapped in the words I thought love was supposed to sound like.
I don't remember you saying I love you very often when I was growing up. I don't think that is a complaint, exactly. I think it is simply true, the way some true things are neither good nor bad on their own, just true. You did not say it the way they say it in the English films I used to watch, the dramatic declarations, the embraces held a beat too long for the camera. You said it instead by sending tea up two flights of stairs at exactly the right temperature for three years straight. You said it by sitting on the edge of my bed the day the result came, not talking, just resting your hand near my foot. You said it by telling me, on a kitchen afternoon I will probably remember for the rest of my life, that things left unsaid grow bigger in the dark, and by knowing exactly which silence in our house needed breaking, and breaking it for me, because I did not yet have the strength to break it myself.
I used to think, when I was younger, comparing our house to my friends' houses, that we were somehow less affectionate than other families. Ritu's mother used to hug her at the school gate every single day, loudly, in front of everyone, completely unselfconscious. You never did that. You waited at home instead, and I never once, until very recently, understood that waiting at home, with tea already made, with a particular cooking smell already filling the house, was its own complete language of love, just one that does not announce itself the way hugging at school gates announces itself.
I want to tell you something I have never told you properly. I know you wanted to study fine arts. You told me once, almost as an aside, years ago, and I filed it away the way children file away their parents' old dreams, politely, distantly, without really understanding the weight of what I had just been told. I understand it now, Maa. I understand what it must have cost you, choosing this life instead, choosing Papa's hardware shop and this small Shimla house and two children who needed tea sent up flights of stairs at exactly the right temperature, over whatever that other life might have looked like, the one with paintbrushes and canvases and a different kind of waiting.
I don't think you regret it, not the way I sometimes worried you might. I think you found your own painting, in your own way, just with a different set of materials. You painted this family. You painted this house, every meal, every careful silence broken at exactly the right moment, every hand resting on a foot or a shoulder or a cheek when words would not have been enough.
I am sorry for the years I thought your quiet meant something smaller than it actually was. I am sorry for measuring you, even briefly, against Ritu's mother's loud hugs at the school gate, as though love only counted when it announced itself.
I think I understand now why you told me to be the woman in our family who finally lets her own wanting stay out in the open. I think you have spent your whole life being the woman who quietly folded her own wanting away, gracefully, without bitterness, and built something beautiful out of the folding anyway. I think you want, for me, a version of that grace that does not require quite so much folding. I want that too, Maa. I am trying. Some days I manage it better than others.
Thank you for the tea. All of it, every single cup, sent up two flights of stairs for three years, exactly the temperature I needed, exactly when I needed it, without you ever once making me ask.
Your daughter, Anaya
She set the pen down when she finished and sat for a long moment in the quiet house, listening to the particular silence of a Sunday afternoon, the distant sound of someone's radio playing two houses down, the low hum of insects in the garden outside.
When her mother returned an hour later, carrying a small bag of vegetables from the neighbor's kitchen garden, Anaya did something she had not done in longer than she could properly remember. She got up from her chair, crossed the kitchen, and hugged her mother tightly, without any particular occasion prompting it, simply because the letter had left something open in her chest that wanted, urgently, to be closed with an actual physical gesture rather than words alone.
Her mother, startled for a moment, set down the vegetable bag and hugged her back, holding on a beat longer than either of them probably expected.
"What was that for," her mother asked, when they finally separated, a small pleased confusion in her voice.
"Nothing," Anaya said. "Everything. I just wanted to say thank you, and I didn't know how to say it with words today."
Her mother looked at her for a long moment, something soft and slightly puzzled passing across her face, and then she simply nodded, the way she nodded at most things she did not fully understand but trusted anyway, and picked the vegetable bag back up, carrying it toward the kitchen counter as though nothing unusual had happened at all, though Anaya suspected, watching her mother's back move through the doorway, that something quietly significant had indeed just happened between them, even without either of them needing to name it out loud.
CHAPTER 22
DEAR FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD ME
The third letter came to her almost by accident, on an evening when she had taken the blue diary out again, simply to reread the old entries, the fog covered self portrait sketch, the abandoned poem about October mist, the single sentence that had started all of this. One day I will write a book.
She found herself, reading that sentence again, wanting suddenly and urgently to answer it, the way you might want to answer a letter that had been sitting unopened in a drawer for years, finally ready, finally able, to give the sender some kind of reply.
Dear Fourteen-Year-Old Me,
I am sorry it has taken me nine years to write back to you.
You wrote, in this same diary, that you wanted to be a writer, and that you had not told anyone because Papa would say writers don't make money and Maa would worry you were not being serious about studies. I want you to know, first, that you were right to worry about how that confession would land. You understood, even at fourteen, something true about the particular weather of our house, the way certain dreams needed careful handling, certain wantings needed to be tested privately before they could survive being said out loud to anyone else.
But I also want to tell you what happened after you stopped writing in this diary, because I think you deserve to know, even this late, even from a version of yourself nine years older and considerably more tired.
You did become serious about studies. You became, if I am honest, almost frighteningly serious about studies, the kind of serious that left no room in the calendar for fog poems or self portraits or imagined conversations between a girl and a clock tower. You topped your boards. You were pointed at, in family gatherings, as an example, the way you probably would have liked, at fourteen, if someone had told you that future was coming. And then you spent three years preparing for a very large, very serious exam, the kind that decides, in the eyes of nearly everyone around you, whether a life has been worth living so far.
You did not clear it.
I imagine you reading that sentence, fourteen years old, and feeling something sharp and frightened on my behalf, the particular fear of a girl who has not yet learned that failure does not actually end anything, that it only ends one specific imagined future among many other futures still waiting, quietly, to be discovered.
I want to tell you that I am okay. I am writing this from a kitchen table in the same house, the same Shimla hills outside the same windows, several months after that exam result arrived, and I am, in fact, okay. Not entirely healed, not entirely certain of what comes next, but okay in the way that matters most, the way that means I am still curious about my own life rather than simply enduring it.
I found your sketchbook. Do you remember the drawing of Dadi's hands, the studies of the cedar tree from different angles? I am drawing again, though my hand has grown stiff and uncertain after years without practice. I found your diary on the rooftop, exactly where you must have left it, tucked inside that old trunk. I am writing in it again too, though my handwriting has changed, grown smaller and more careful, the way handwriting does when a person has spent years filling in narrow exam answer columns instead of whatever space a fourteen year old's heart actually requires.
I want to apologize to you, fourteen-year-old self, for something I do not think was entirely my fault, or entirely anyone's fault, but that I carry some responsibility for anyway, the way we carry responsibility for things we allow to happen to us even when we did not actively choose them. I let you disappear. Not violently, not in any single dramatic moment, but slowly, the way a small plant gets crowded out by a larger one growing beside it. I let the exam years quietly absorb every part of you that did not directly serve the goal of clearing a list with your name on it. The fog poems. The clock tower story you never wrote because an essay competition asked for something more serious instead. The dancing you stopped doing in front of other people at age ten, because dancing badly seemed too risky for a girl who had already decided, even that young, that risk was something to be carefully managed rather than embraced.
I am trying to bring you back now. Slowly, imperfectly, some days more successfully than others. I danced badly in my room a few weeks ago, alone, with the door closed, and it felt like one of the freest things I have done in years. I have started writing small unambitious descriptions of strangers I see from my window, the way you used to imagine stories about people walking below with their umbrellas tilted against the wind. I met someone recently, a person who reads poetry aloud in a quiet library, who reminded me, almost without meaning to, exactly how much I used to love stories simply for what they were, not for what they could prove about my discipline or my seriousness.
I think you will be glad to know, fourteen-year-old self, that the line you wrote, the one I keep returning to, has not actually expired. One day I will write a book. I do not know yet what that book will be, the way you did not know either, all those years ago, sitting on this same rooftop with this same blue diary open on your knees. But I think, finally, nine years late, I am ready to find out.
Thank you for writing that sentence down instead of letting it disappear unspoken. I think some part of you understood, even then, that the wanting needed to exist somewhere permanent, somewhere that could survive even if I myself forgot about it for a while. You were right to write it down. I am sorry it took me this long to come back and read it properly.
With love, and with apology, and with hope, Anaya, twenty three years old, still trying to keep your promise
She closed the diary gently after finishing, the small gold lock that no longer locked anything resting against the cover, and sat for a long while in the gathering evening light, feeling something she did not entirely have a word for, grief and tenderness and a strange, hopeful determination all folded together, the particular feeling of writing to someone you have wronged in some small way and finding, in the act of writing, that the wronging itself begins, slowly, to soften into something closer to repair.
CHAPTER 23
DEAR FAILURE
She mentioned the letters to Dr. Bose in her next session, and Dr. Bose had listened with the particular attentiveness she always brought to Anaya's small reported victories, nodding slowly when Anaya described the letter to her father, the letter to her mother, the strange tender letter to her own fourteen-year-old self.
"There is one more I think you should try," Dr. Bose said, when Anaya finished. "Not to a person. To the thing itself. To failure."
Anaya had laughed, a little uncomfortably, at the suggestion. "That feels strange. Writing a letter to a concept."
"Most people find it strange at first," Dr. Bose said. "But failure, in your case, has become something close to a person in your mind. You speak about it as though it has intentions, as though it arrived specifically to punish you, specifically to prove something about your worth. I think it might help to address it directly, and see what comes out, when you finally let yourself speak to the thing itself rather than around it."
Anaya thought about this for several days before attempting it, the suggestion sitting uneasily alongside everything else she had already written. But one night, unable to sleep, the particular restless energy of a mind circling something it has not yet fully said, she took out the notebook again and began.
Dear Failure,
I have been afraid of you for as long as I can properly remember, long before I understood what you actually were. I think I started being afraid of you around age nine, the year I cried for two hours over three percentage points, certain that anything less than the absolute best was some early, frightening glimpse of what you might eventually do to me, if I ever let my guard down.
I built an entire life trying to keep you away. Every late night, every yellow highlighter, every weekend sacrificed to revision instead of rest, all of it was, in some sense, a wall I was building against you, brick by careful brick, certain that if the wall grew tall enough and thick enough, you would simply never be able to reach me.
You reached me anyway.
I want to tell you something honestly, even though I am not sure you can hear it, since you are not actually a person, since you are, I am starting to understand, mostly just a story I have been telling myself for years about what it means when an outcome does not arrive the way I planned it.
I thought you would feel like the end of something. For the first few days after the result, you did feel exactly like that, a flat scooped out feeling in my chest, an absence where a future used to sit. I thought, in those first days, that you had won, completely, and that I would spend the rest of my life somehow lesser because you had found me, because the list had not known my name, because three years of effort had produced, in the end, nothing but your arrival.
But I want to tell you what actually happened, in the months since you arrived, because I do not think you expected this, and I am not sure I expected it either.
You made me open a trunk on a rooftop that I had not opened in years. You made me find a diary, a sketchbook, a stack of report cards, all of it evidence of a girl I had nearly forgotten existed, buried under three years of single minded preparation aimed entirely at avoiding you. You made me have a conversation with my father about an empty chair, and a story about his own father, and a question he had never asked me before, about whether I wanted any of this for myself.
You made me cry into a cup of tea at my mother's kitchen table, and you made me eventually understand what that crying had actually been protecting me from feeling for years.
You made me go to a counselor, finally, after weeks of closed curtains and unanswered phone calls, and that counselor has given me more honest, useful conversation in a few months than I think I had access to in the entire previous decade.
You made me call Meher back after three weeks of cowardly silence, and in calling her back, I found a friendship I did not realize I had been quietly starving.
You made me go back to a library I used to love before the exam years swallowed it, and in that library, you made me meet someone who reads poetry aloud in a quiet voice, who remembers the small details I mention in passing, who has made me feel, for the first time in longer than I want to admit, genuinely curious about another person rather than simply managing them.
I do not think you arrived to give me any of this, specifically. I do not believe, the way Vihaan does not believe, that you carry some built in meaning, some lesson assembled in advance and waiting for me to discover it. I think you simply happened, the way disappointing things simply happen to people who try difficult things, and I think everything that followed, the trunk, the letters, the library, the small terrible dancing in my room, all of it happened because I chose, slowly, imperfectly, to build something out of your arrival rather than simply collapsing underneath it.
I am not grateful to you, Failure. I want to be honest about that. I do not think I need to thank you for arriving, the way some people insist on thanking their hardest moments, as though pain only counts if it comes wrapped in eventual gratitude. I think you cost me something real, months of grief and confusion and closed curtains, and I do not need to pretend that cost was secretly a gift in order to also believe that I built something worthwhile in your aftermath.
What I want to tell you, mostly, is that you are not as large as I once believed you were. You felt, in the beginning, like the entire shape of my future, a verdict delivered once and binding forever. I understand now that you were one result, on one list, for one exam, and that the rest of my life, all of it, the writing, the drawing, the library, the slowly mending relationships with people I love, continues regardless of whether you ever decide to visit again.
You might visit again. I understand that now too. Some other exam, some other attempt, some other door that does not open the way I hope it will. I am not foolish enough to believe I have defeated you permanently, the way villains are defeated in the kind of stories I used to write at fourteen, banished forever in one final dramatic confrontation.
But I think I know you a little better now. I think I am a little less afraid of you than I was the morning the result came, sitting on the edge of my bed with the cursor blinking in an empty search bar.
I think, if you visit again, I will survive you again. Not painlessly. Not gracefully, every single time. But I will survive you, the way I have survived you this time, and I think, strange as it sounds to write this to a thing that is not even a person, I think I might actually owe you something, after all. Not gratitude exactly. Just acknowledgment. You showed me a version of myself I would not have found any other way.
Anaya
She set the pen down when she finished, her hand aching slightly from the length of the writing, and read the letter back once, slowly, feeling something settle in her chest that felt different from the settling after the other letters, less like tenderness and more like a kind of hard won, clear eyed strength, the particular steadiness of someone who has finally looked directly at the thing she feared most and found, to her own quiet surprise, that she was still standing afterward, intact, and in some ways larger than she had been before.
CHAPTER 24
DEAR FUTURE ME
The fifth letter she wrote on her own, without any prompting from Dr. Bose, on a quiet morning toward the end of August when the monsoon had finally begun to ease, leaving the hills outside her window a deep, saturated green that seemed, after weeks of grey rain, almost startling in its intensity.
She had woken that morning with a strange, specific awareness of time passing, the particular feeling of standing at some invisible threshold between one version of a life and another, and she found herself wanting, before stepping fully across whatever that threshold actually was, to leave a message for whoever she would become on the other side of it.
Dear Future Me,
I do not know exactly when you will read this, or whether you will read it at all, or whether this notebook will simply join the trunk on the rooftop someday, rediscovered by accident the way I rediscovered the blue diary, by some other version of myself who has temporarily forgotten the person who wrote these words.
I am writing this in late August, several months after the result, in the same Shimla house I have lived in my entire life, the hills outside my window finally clearing after weeks of monsoon rain. I do not know, yet, what I am going to do with my life. I do not have a plan the way I once had a plan, three years long, with a single defined outcome at the end of it. I have, instead, a collection of small things. A diary I am writing in again. A sketchbook with a few clumsy new drawings added to the old ones. A handful of letters, including this one, addressed to people and feelings I am only now learning how to speak to honestly. A friend, Vihaan, who reads poetry aloud in a library and who I think, though I am not ready to examine this too closely yet, might be becoming something more than a friend, slowly, carefully, without either of us rushing to name it.
I want to ask you something, future self, whoever and wherever you are when you read this. Did you keep going. Did you write the book the fourteen-year-old version of us promised in this very diary. I do not know if it will be good. I do not even know, yet, what it will be about, though I have some half formed ideas, something about a girl who fails an exam and has to figure out who she is without it, which feels almost too close to my own life to count as real invention, but perhaps that is exactly the kind of book I am meant to write first, before I have earned the right to invent something further from my own experience.
I want to ask whether you are still afraid the way I am still a little afraid, even now, even after everything this summer has taught me. I think some fear is probably permanent, a kind of weather that simply exists in a person's chest regardless of how much healing happens around it. I hope, though, that you have learned to carry that fear more lightly than I am currently carrying it, the way you learn to carry a heavy bag more easily after months of practice, not because the bag has gotten lighter but because your arms have grown stronger around its particular weight.
I want to ask whether Maa and Papa are doing well. Whether the empty chair at our dinner table ever filled with someone, or whether it simply remained an empty chair, holding its quiet meaningful space the way it has for years, and whether that meaning changed, over time, into something gentler than the absence it once represented.
I want to ask whether you ever tried the exam again. I do not know, sitting here in August, whether I will try it again myself, and I think that not knowing is, strangely, one of the more peaceful uncertainties I currently carry, because for the first time in years, the question of whether to attempt the exam again feels like an actual open question, rather than an inevitability I am simply waiting to arrive at.
Mostly, future self, I want to tell you what I hope for you, even though by the time you read this, whatever I hoped will have already happened or not happened, will already be settled into whatever shape your life has actually taken.
I hope you kept drawing, even badly, even without any particular purpose attached to the drawing beyond the simple pleasure of a pencil moving across a page.
I hope you kept dancing terribly in your room sometimes, with the door closed, for no audience at all.
I hope you found a way to let people love you without immediately translating that love into pressure, the way I am only just beginning to learn how to do, slowly, imperfectly, with Maa's tea and Papa's careful dinner table questions and Meher's patient four missed calls.
I hope, whatever happened with the exam, whatever happened with Vihaan, whatever shape your actual daily life has taken by the time you read this letter, that you remember this particular August morning, the hills outside my window finally clearing, the strange peaceful uncertainty of standing at a threshold without yet knowing what waits on the other side of it, and that you remember it kindly, the way you might remember a difficult, necessary chapter in a book that turned out, in the end, to be worth finishing.
I am proud of you in advance, future self, for whatever you have managed to become. I think that pride does not need to wait for evidence. I think I can simply offer it now, freely, the way I am learning, slowly, to offer most things freely, without first demanding proof that they have been earned.
With hope, and with love, and with a strange kind of faith I did not know I still had access to, Anaya, twenty three years old, standing at a threshold, about to step through it
She closed the notebook after finishing, the late August light falling across her desk in long warm strips, and looked out her window at the clearing hills, the deep saturated green that the monsoon always left behind once it finally eased, the cedar trees standing tall and undisturbed against a sky that had, for the first time in weeks, gone properly blue.
She did not know, writing that morning, exactly what waited on the other side of the threshold she had described. But she found, closing the notebook and setting it gently beside the others, that she was no longer quite so afraid to find out.
CHAPTER 25
DEAR GOD
The last letter took her the longest to begin, though once she started, it came out faster and rougher than any of the others, the sentences arriving almost before she had decided what they would say.
She had grown up with a small temple corner in their house, a modest arrangement of framed images and a single brass lamp her mother lit every morning and evening, a quiet, undemonstrative faith that had simply existed in the background of her childhood without ever becoming, for Anaya herself, anything she had examined closely. She had prayed, during the exam years, the way many candidates prayed, with a kind of desperate bargaining urgency in the final weeks before each attempt, promises made to whatever was listening in exchange for a result she wanted badly enough to compromise her own usual skepticism.
The result had not arrived. And in the months since, she realized, sitting down to write this final letter, she had not prayed once, not really, not in any way that felt like genuine address rather than habit performed for her mother's comfort.
Dear God,
I do not know if you are there, and I think, if I am honest, this letter is partly an attempt to find out, the way you test a door by knocking before deciding whether to actually walk through it.
I prayed to you, during the exam years, more than I have ever told anyone, including Maa, who would have been pleased to know, and including Papa, who would probably have found it slightly out of character for a daughter who otherwise approached most problems with stubborn self reliance rather than appeals to anything larger than herself.
I made promises. I told you, more than once, in the final desperate weeks before each attempt, that if you let me clear this exam, I would be a better daughter, a better person, more grateful, more devoted, whatever currency I imagined you might actually want in exchange for a result with my name on a list.
You did not give me the result. I want to ask you, honestly, whether that was a punishment, or a redirection, or simply nothing at all, simply the ordinary indifferent mathematics of an exam with a limited number of seats and thousands of equally hardworking candidates, no divine judgment involved whatsoever, just probability doing what probability does.
I think, if I am honest, I do not actually believe it was punishment. I do not think you sat somewhere keeping careful score of my devotion and decided I had not prayed sincerely enough, had not promised convincingly enough, had not earned, through faith, what I had already worked three years to earn through effort. That version of you frightens me, and I do not think I want to believe in a god who operates that way, rewarding desperate bargaining with success and silence with failure.
But I also do not think the result was nothing. I do not think, sitting here in late August with a diary and a sketchbook and a stack of letters addressed to nearly everyone I love, that any of what has happened since the result was simply random, even if the result itself was. I think something in me needed exactly this disruption, exactly this collapse of a single defined future, in order to go looking for everything else I had quietly buried over three years of single minded preparation. I do not know if you arranged that disruption deliberately, the way some people insist everything happens for a reason, or whether I have simply built meaning afterward, the way Vihaan says we all do, out of an event that arrived without any built in purpose at all.
I think, honestly, I do not need to resolve that question in order to keep talking to you, the way I am talking to you now. I think faith, whatever it actually is, might be less about having the right answer to questions like that, and more about continuing the conversation anyway, even without certainty, even without proof that anyone is actually listening on the other end.
I want to ask you for something now, though I am trying to ask it differently than I asked during the exam years, without the desperate bargaining, without the promised currency of being a better person in exchange for a specific outcome.
I want to ask, simply, that whatever I build next, out of this disruption, out of the trunk and the letters and the library and the small terrible dancing in my room, that it be something true. Not necessarily successful, not necessarily impressive to the relatives who will undoubtedly have opinions about whatever I do next. Just true. Built from whatever I actually am, rather than from whatever I think will make the people around me glow with approval.
I do not know if that is a prayer in the traditional sense. I do not know if it requires you to exist in any particular form in order to count. But I find, writing it down, that saying it out loud, even to an uncertain listener, even to a god I am not sure is there, makes the wanting feel more solid somehow, more real, the same way writing the diary entry at fourteen made the wanting to write a book feel more real, simply by giving it a fixed shape on a page instead of leaving it formless inside my own head.
Thank you, I think, though I am still working out exactly what I am thanking you for. Maybe just for whatever this is. The conversation itself. The not knowing, and the willingness to keep asking anyway.
Anaya
She closed the notebook after finishing this last letter and sat for a long time in the quiet of her room, the evening settling slowly outside her window, the brass lamp downstairs visible faintly through her open door, her mother's evening prayers a soft, familiar murmur drifting up through the house the way it had every single evening of Anaya's entire life, a sound so constant she had nearly stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat until something makes you pause and listen for it properly.
She gathered all six letters together that night, Papa, Maa, her fourteen-year-old self, Failure, her future self, and finally this last uncertain address to whatever might or might not be listening, and tied them loosely together with a faded ribbon she found in her mother's sewing box, the same dusty rose ribbon, she realized with a small startled recognition, that had once decorated the debate medal sitting on the trophy shelf downstairs.
She placed the small bundle of letters inside the drawer alongside the blue diary and the rediscovered sketchbook, and closing the drawer, she felt, for the first time since the morning the result had arrived, something that resembled completion, not the completion of an exam successfully cleared, but a different kind entirely, the quiet, private completion of a person who has finally said, in whatever form the saying required, everything that had been sitting unsaid inside her for far too long.
