One day she will be grown up and gone, and none of this will matter. But today, now, I cannot do it to her. This is when she needs a father most. But you, understandably, want me to make the break now or never. I respect the way you feel, my precious Priscilla, but I cannot do it now.
I realized, too, during this tormented night, that I could only make you unhappy too, because my guilt at abandoning my family — which is how I would see it — would corrode my feelings for the person for whom I had abandoned them. When you evoke that kind of love, you want to be worthy of it. I could not have abandoned my responsibilities to my daughter and felt worthy of you.
In other words, dearest Priscilla, I was — I am — torn between two kinds of love and the prospect of two kinds of unhappiness. I chose my love for my daughter over my love for you, and the unhappiness of losing you to the unhappiness of shattering her. That is my choice, and I must live with it. I never thought either would be easy: this one is killing me.
I know you will think this proves I never really loved you. That you were a sexual convenience at worst, an escape from a loveless marriage at best. You know that’s not true, Priscilla; you’ve seen what happened the first time I tried to leave you. I still love everything about you, no less than I ever have. I can’t bear the knowledge that you are no longer mine, but I want you to be happy. I would do anything for you, short of destroying my family.
In pain, and with love,
Lucky
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
September 19, 1989
Dearest Cin, what am I to do? It’s over now, he’s written me this awful letter, and I’ve been crying all night. I suppose Mom was right when she said that I see things in people that they don’t see in themselves. I saw so much in Lucky — a good man in a bad marriage, someone capable of love who had no opportunity to love until I came along, a man who hadn’t seen his own unhappiness fully until he met me. With me I think he realized for the first time that he hadn’t truly known love in his life and that he could find happiness loving and being loved. Happiness, of course, at a price. A price that in the end he was not prepared — with his upbringing, his sense of his responsibilities, his inability to escape from Indian society — to pay.
On one level I feel bitterly angry with him. I feel used. And I can’t believe a man of his intelligence would be so blind and conventional. And cowardly. In my tears last night, there were moments of deep rage at the way he dumped me. “You two-faced jerk!” I screamed at the letter he’d written me.
And yet, I can’t bring myself to hate him, Cin. There’s a part of me that wants to, but I can’t, I still love him so much. I’m in terrible pain, but I don’t want to regret a minute of the seven months we had together. “Had together” — I don’t even know if I can say that of a relationship where we were only together two evenings a week, except for those occasional dinners at his home where I was beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable. But yes, “together.” Because I loved being with him, Cindy. I saw in him all the things I wanted in a man — not just his looks or his voice, but his earnestness about the world, his desire to make a difference, his easy confidence in his own authority, and his command, quite simply, of India. The India I’d come back to rediscover as an adult, the India that had changed my life so profoundly a decade ago. Loving Lakshman filled every pore of my being; it gave me a sense of attachment, not just to a man, but to this land. Does this sound hokey to you, Cin? I hope not, because I can’t explain it any better.
What hurts is that it must have meant so much less to him. I suppose at the beginning he just thought of me as an easy lay. Our relationship must just have been a sexual adventure for him those first few weeks. I know he came to love me afterwards, but I realize now that I’m not someone he would have started off falling in love with. He was attracted to me, sure, but he began it all, that first evening at the Kotli, as just an affair. Through sex he found love, and in love he found confusion, uncertainty, fear. Whereas I loved him from almost the first moment and felt nothing but certainty about him. The sex was just a means of expressing my love, a way of giving myself to the man I loved. I’m not sure that he ever understood the difference.
He used to quote Wilde about hypocrisy being just a way of multiplying your personalities. That was part of Lucky’s problem — he had multiple personalities, and they didn’t match. The district administrator, the passionate lover, the traditional husband and father, the closet writer who fantasized about a masterpiece he could write one day on an American campus — all of those were him. I couldn’t hold on to all of them at the same time. And so I lost him.
But then I borrowed a copy of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” from him, and I came across the actual quote. And guess what, Wilde wasn’t talking about hypocrisy at all, you know, but about insincerity! Was Lucky trying to warn me that his love was insincere? I think about these things and it drives me crazy!
It’s strange, isn’t it, Cin? Ever since Darryl it’s been I who walked away from relationships, I who ended every one of them. Poor Winston could never understand why I wouldn’t marry him. Nor could my mother. Instead I fell for someone completely unsuitable by Mom’s standards — married, foreign, tied to another life — and I’ve allowed him to dump me. Mom would probably blame it on India. You were overwhelmed by it all, dear, she’d say, this big, hot, foreign, oppressive, unfamiliar place, and you attached yourself to this man as a port in the storm. Once you come home you’ll realize he didn’t really mean that much to you. You’ll get over it.
And that’s why I’ve never been able to tell Mom about Lucky. She’d never understand.
Do you remember, Cin, when we were little and you used to tease me about the amount of tender loving care I gave my Barbie doll? How I’d sit with my little nylon brush and gently smooth down her golden mane, over and over again? “Give it a rest, Prissy,” you’d say. “She’s a doll. She can’t tell whether you’ve brushed her hair three times or two.” And I’d be shocked. “But I’m all she’s got!” I’d reply. “If I don’t do it for her, who will?” Which of course was totally beside the point you were making. But that’s the way I was! And I wonder if I wasn’t doing the same thing with Lakshman — stroking him over and over again, oblivious to his reaction? Telling myself I was all he’d got — the only true love he’d ever know? Was I projecting onto him the needs I imagined he must have? Oh Cindy, have I been a fool?
But I have to see him once more. There’s something I’ve got to tell him. And I have to look into his eyes when I say it. Only then will I know if he really ever loved me.
Kadambari to Shankar Das
September 20, 1989
Sir, I am so scared, I am so upset, I don’t know what to do, sir. Yes, sir, I will calm down, sir, I just wanted to tell you that that man Ali, sir, the chauffeur, Fatima Bi’s husband, he caught me in the street, sir, when I was going to visit one of our IUD cases, and he threatened me, sir. He said he would cut off my — cut off my breasts, sir, because I had told his wife to get an abortion. Sir, I was so scared, I told him it wasn’t me, sir, it was the American girl, it was all her idea, and she would be leaving the country soon, so please leave me alone. And he said, sir, you tell that American whore that if I ever lay my hands on her, she won’t be catching that plane to America. Sir, I don’t know what to do, if I tell her she will just be frightened, but he seems to mean it, sir. What should I do?