I fished it out.
I slumped back into my chair. My hands never tremble, but for some reason that delicate slip of paper shook.
The letter looked discolored by age, almost transparent, in danger of crumbling into dust. Like Ghosh, I had a moment to decide whether to read a private letter that was meant for another. I was certain that this was the letter my mother had penned just before I was born. Then it was in Ghosh's possession. When I was twenty-five years old, the letter came to me. I had carried it to America, then I had brought it back. For twenty-five years I was unaware that I had it. Until today. “When are you coming, Mama?” I used to ask when I was a small boy gazing up at the picture. She had come at last.
55. The Afterbird
September 19
Dear Thomas,
Last night, God told me I must confess to you what I have never confessed, even to God. Years ago, in Aden, I turned from God as He turned from me. Something happened to me there that should not happen to any woman. I could not forgive the man who harmed me. I could not forgive God. Death would have been better than what I endured. But I came here, to Missing. I came in the dress of a nun to hide my bitterness and shame from the world.
In Jeremiah 17 it is written, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, and who can understand it?” I came to Ethiopia in deceit.
But our work changed me. I would have been your assistant till my last breath. Now, things have changed again.
A few months ago, you were like a man possessed, and I tried to comfort you. Now I am with child. Do not blame yourself.
It was difficult to hide my body from Matron and the others. Many times I thought of telling you. I could never find a way. But now I am frightened. My time is short. Last night the movements became strong. It made me think, What if Thomas wishes me to stay? I should not leave in the way I came to Missing and to you, hiding and in deceit. That is why I write.
I must flee Missing to spare it my shame just as I once fled to it to hide my shame. If you come to me when you get this letter, I will know that you wish me to be with you. But whatever you do, my love will always be the same.
Mary
It took such concentration to finish my last surgical case—a routine vagotomy and gastrojejunostomy for a duodenal ulcer—and not let my mind wander. At last, with that letter in hand, I walked back to my quarters, feeling as if I had never come up this path before.
She loved him. She loved him so much she ran to him from Aden. The bloodstains with which she came to Missing told me what she could not. She made her way to the doctor—the man—she had met on that ship out of India. And then, years later, she loved him so much she was ready to leave him. At the eleventh hour she decided to write and tell him. Then she waited for him to come, or not.
But Thomas Stone did come. Surely she would have registered his arrival. As he picked her up, carried her, ran with her, every tear that fell from his eyes onto her face she would have interpreted as affirmations of his love. He came not because of the letter: he never got it. He came because some part of him knew what he had done, and what he had to do: some part of him knew what he felt.
I pictured Ghosh visiting Thomas Stone's quarters after my mother's death, searching for him. He would have seen on Stone's desk the new textbook and bookmark, and on top of them, conspicuously perhaps, this letter. Thomas Stone never saw the book or the letter because he spent the previous night sleeping in the lounge chair in his Missing office, as he often did, and then after my mother's death he never returned to his quarters. Why hadn't Ghosh simply mailed the letter directly to Thomas Stone? Thomas never wrote or communicated; Ghosh had no address at first. But as the years went by, Ghosh could probably have found Stone's whereabouts. After all, Eli Harris had always known them. But perhaps by then Ghosh was hurt by Stone's silence and his willingness to forget his old friend and leave him caring for his children as he ran from his past. As more years went by, Ghosh might have pondered the effect of the letter on Stone—perhaps it would in fact be a disservice to send it to him. It might have precipitated another meltdown, or, as Hema had always feared, Stone might have returned to claim the children. And perhaps Stone wouldn't understand—or believe—anything the letter said.
Then, as death approached, it must have worked on Ghosh's conscience to be the keeper of this letter. What if the contents could save Stone, put his heart at ease? What if it made Stone do, even belatedly, the right thing by his sons? By this time all Ghosh's resentment for Stone, if he ever had any, had vanished.
So ultimately Ghosh gave the textbook and bookmark to Shiva, and the letter to me, but hidden from me. I marveled at the foresight of a dying man who would entomb a letter within a framed picture. He would leave it to fate—how like Ghosh this was! When would I find Thomas Stone? When would I find the letter? If and when I found it, would I give the letter to its intended recipient? Ghosh trusted me to do whatever it is I would choose to do. That, too, is love. Hed been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love.
“Shiva,” I said, looking up at the sky where the stars were warming up for their nightly show while I recalled the night I fled Missing in haste, and how Shiva had thrust at me my father's book—A Short Practice, that bookmark inside. The few words on the bookmark penned by my mother were the only way any of us knew a letter even existed. Years ago, over the telephone, I had asked him, “Shiva, what made you give me the book?” He didn't know. “I wanted you to have it” was all he could say. The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
WHEN I REACHED MY QUARTERS, I sat down and spread the letter on my lap, and with shaky hands I dialed Thomas Stone's number. My father was well past eighty now, an emeritus professor. Deepak said the old man's eyes were fading, but his touch was so good he could have operated in the dark. Still, he rarely operated anymore, though he would often assist. Thomas Stone was once known for The Expedient Operator: A Short Practice of Tropical Surgery. Now he was famous for pioneering a breakthrough transplant procedure. I was proof that the operation worked, but Shiva's death was proof of the attendant risks. Surgeons around the world had learned to do the operation, and many infants born without a working bile-drainage system had been saved by a parent's gift of a part of his or her liver.
IN MY EARPIECE I heard the hush of the void that hangs over the earth, and then out of that ether, the sound of the phone ringing far away, its high-pitched summons so brisk and efficient, so different from the lackadaisical analog clicks and the coarse ring when I dialed an Addis Ababa number. I pictured the phone trill and echo in the apartment that I had visited once, and which I had left open like a sardine can so that Thomas Stone would know that his son had arrived in his world.
I thought of my mother writing this letter, her whole life compressed on one side of this parchment. She had probably delivered it (and the book with bookmark) in the late afternoon when the pains hit her. She had worsened in the night, slowly slipping into shock, and then the next day she died. But not before Thomas Stone came to her. It was the sign she had waited for. He did the right thing, and yet for the last half century, he was unaware that he had done so.