A Letter to a Relationship

An inheritance of grace

Dear B-Foi,

As I relish the sound of your laughter in my head, the photo before me swims with nostalgia — the happy, half teared kind. We seem to be in the middle of a joke. You’re reaching out with one only slightly wrinkled hand to ease an even smaller wrinkle on your sari.

It’s not your grand-aunt-ness that has me writing this letter. Or your love for letters. It’s not even the easy banter that we’ve had across a 40-something gap of age for more than two decades. It is your sweetness that has shattered my one-year old writer’s block splat on the twenty seventh page of last year’s journal. Your shy spunk feels good, like a small branch of the family banyan within my memory tree. It is inseparable from what is good and beautiful and right with this world.

I write this on the seventeenth day after a discharge from the hospital for Covid. My hand is not steady yet. Every word is struggling to make itself clear through the fog that is my mind. Each sentence liberates me a little from the regret of not seeing you in person for the last one year.

If you meet Keisha, please give her a hug even though I know you are a little afraid of dogs. A bit of a sprinkle with water will tell her when you want her to adore you from a distance. Don’t forget, she can’t see so she will want to stick close to your heels. And of course, to the sandalwood whiff that seems to break into a jig around you at all times.

You will be happy to know that the oxygen crisis here has receded by a small degree, especially when compared to last month. Several MNCs (international companies) are working on importing oxygen concentrators for hospitals in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Our Government clearly has its priorities right since Lindt dark chocolate is available for delivery via Amazon within twenty-four hours but oxygen concentrators have failed to make the approved list of essential items in the current lockdown, half way through the biggest oxygen crisis in the history of our country.

In other news, we’ve been sharing pictures of our coffee mugs (and Ensure glasses or chai cups) on the family WhatsApp group so your apple-of-all-eye daughter doesn’t feel like she is starting her day without you. I don’t know if you have access to these pictures, but I’m sure you will figure it out!

I will write regularly. I need to place an order for decorative writing paper for future notes, also available on Amazon. The delivery may be delayed — shall arrive within two days instead of one.

Hope you’re well stocked on Sprite, because we both know that is the only cola that is not junk food.

Rest easy in the arms of your mother. Hope the mattress in heaven is both soft and firm at the same time, just the way you like it.

Love, S.