Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson

served, taken themto his room braced for the exquisite misery of remembering. It was only later that their lurid envelopes had become an embarrassment.
    Now, in the lamplight, he squinted at a picture of her when young. Both of them were in the garden at Mangalath, near the small wooden summerhouse, where she tended her orchids. She was dressed simply in the plain white cotton chatta and mundu she wore at home. Her dark eyes were staring at the camera with a look that was both distant and scrutinizing. He was sitting on a tricycle at her feet, his expression pure and trusting as he looked up at her. She was his entire world.
    Any moment now she would give up her camera face (she’d always loathed having her picture taken), she’d scoop him up murmuring, “My little pot of gold.” Her only son, after years of trying. He can hear her in the kitchen now, barking orders to the servants, clinking the battered saucepans. The spices prickling his nostrils.
    Did she truly love Appan? He wondered now. It wasn’t the kind of question the sixteen-year-old he left behind would ask. He turned the photo over. Mangalath. Anto. Three years old.
    Now, with a sigh, he picked up his mother’s latest letter. It was dated February, 1948, postmarked Fort Cochin.
    My dearest boy,
    I’m sending the pictures taken with my new box Brownie. Sorry to have sliced the head off your father several times. He was the one who gave me the camera for Christmas—not too grateful of me. We had fifty-four family at Mangalath on Christmas Eve but, as usual, missed you badly. I don’t know what I did in a previous life to have suffered without you for so many years, but now I hope it will make sense to me.
    Appan is so proud of you, says the new India needs people like you to show people we can strive and thrive without the British. So I’m proud of you too and the sacrifices you’ve made. One day, I hope you will be a great man in our community.
    I wish I could send you the fresh pineapple we had for breakfast; I know there is still very severe rationing there for you. All I can send is a mother’s love and prayers. Your father, up to his neck in a new case, will write separately and send money for your fare. My love to you,
    Amma
    P.S. Today, Vidya came with her mother; she asked to see a photo of you, sends hers to you. She says you are handsome!
    The sly aside saying the big thing was typical of his mother. The girl in the carefully tinted photograph is slender and shy in what looks like a new sari. She is the daughter of his mother’s best friend, beautiful, as his mother has not failed to point out in three of her previous letters. Did Anto remember meeting her when he was a little boy? Answer—not really, or if he did, only vaguely as a shy pair of big brown eyes behind her mother’s skirts. It was Anu, her mother, he remembered: the head patter, and bringer of homemade sweets enticingly wrapped in tissue papers, and once a new cricket bat.
    This letter, that he’d read anxiously several times, gave Anto a tightness in his scalp, as if parts of his brain were shutting down. He was being netted and hauled in, and yet, during the long lonely years of exile, he’d ached for them, wept for them, looked forward to the security of being married to a nice girl, back safely in the bosom of his family again.
    Now he lay facedown on the pillow as if to smother his confusion and panic. He didn’t feel Indian anymore, that was the nub of it. During the long years of his exile, he’d got used to freedoms that his family would disapprove of. Going off to the cinema on your own when you felt like it. Having conversations with women who weren’t discreetly chaperoned. The one-night stand with the WAAF, a huge and daring adventure before the shame set in; wearing Western clothes—he had no intention of wearing a mundi again, for him it would feel like fancy dress.
    But his most pressing problem