SHORT STORY
We'll bury our past
G.B. PRABHAT
SOMEWHERE between the age of 40 and 50, the affections between an attached couple shift to a new plane. The couple would rather maintain a minimum distance of three feet between themselves than occasionally hold hands as they did in their thirties. The man constantly grunts his acknowledgement to his wife's lengthy banter though no part of their earlier intimacy is lost. Balu and Anjana, after 22 years of marriage, had reached this stage. One evening, after their two sons had left for their colleges after summer vacation, the house felt empty. Anjana suggested that it might be very entertaining to go through the letters they wrote each other during the long courtship preceding their marriage.
There were six cardboard boxes of the letters, written over three years, stowed away in the attic. With great effort, Balu brought down one box while Anjana held the stool he stood on. With a cloth, he dusted the box and swiped the few silverfish that had managed to invade the fumigated attic.
Anjana proposed that they sit on the staircase to read the letters and sat herself on the second step. He sat on the third step about three feet from her.
He pulled out the first letter. Was the handwriting on the cover his? How it had degenerated into an illegible scrawl. Perhaps the romantic anxiety to make sure Anjana understood every word had forced him to write so legibly.
"My lovely one... ." he read and stopped in disbelief. "Did I write that?"
"Yeah, I remember. That was one of your favourite addresses. Listen to this. Do you know how I start this letter to you? My dark hero... " she giggled, and went on, "... mmm... mmm... it will be another two days before I can see you... this is slow death."
She dropped that letter and picked up a letter of his. "... with wet kisses... that's how you have ended this."
Balu grunted without lifting his head.
When she read out some juicier parts, his dark complexion turned a darker hue.The juvenile outpourings, the cloying salutations, the exaggerated problems, and worst of all, the maudlin statements.
At some stage during the reading, the three feet separation between them had unobtrusively become four.
"Balu, Are you thinking what I am thinking?" Anjana suddenly stopped and asked.
"Let's get rid of them," he said.
She appeared relieved.
"You are so intelligent," she said. "And I am not a jackass. They don't give the university gold medal for the best literature student to a jackass. Yet how did we?"
"That's not us. At least, it's not me. I have no memory of many of these letters. The more unbelievably stupid it seems, the less my recollection," he responded.
For years until today, they were expecting the letters to be an interesting possession to bequeath to posterity. They had imagined that the current e-mail generation and the succeeding generations of who-knows-what-kind-of-communication-technology would gratefully treat the letters as symbols of a quaint and intimate existence, as proof of a hoary lineage. The letters now seemed an inconvenient bridge between their current intelligence, a stately dignity, acknowledged accomplishment, and a dim-witted interlude. Their children had a vague idea of their romance, but nothing so graphic as the letters.
"Would you show these letters to your grandchildren?" Balu asked.
"No... .no," replied Anjana thoughtfully. "Not that we did anything bad. Just that they would tease us to death."
"Yeah, nothing bad. You're right. Can't just have anybody think that's me."
"As you said, let's destroy them," she said.
"Yes, but how?"
"We can't obviously dump the letters into the garbage bin. Somebody's bound to read them."
He agreed. "How about setting fire?"
She thought for a moment and dismissed it. "No. If there's a gust of wind after you set fire, the papers would scatter. Who can run after these papers or manage their behaviour while they burn?"
The mood in the room turned contemplative. The silence was broken occasionally for one to suggest and the other to refute. After a pensive hour, a brainwave struck Anjana. They were building a new house, a few miles from their current home, which was now nearing completion. An open well had been dug in the premises to provide water for construction. Now a new bore well had been dug within a few metres of the old well, and the old well had to be closed. She remembered from the previous day the construction supervisor asking the labourers to organize rubble and debris to fill in first. Fine loamy soil would be deposited on top of the rubble.
He applied for leave the next day. The six cardboard boxes were carefully sealed and taped. They carted the boxes to the site of their new house in the trunk of their car. The supervisor had been warned and was expecting them.
Balu would let nobody touch the boxes despite the supervisor's fervent pleas that the labourers would help. He carried every box, gasping for breath, dropping each one as gently as possible into the open well so it didn't open on falling.
When he was finished with the last box, he was nearly wheezing. "Bloody paper. Weighs a ton."
The supervisor chided Balu for not taking his offer. "All right, sir. You please go home. We'll fill in the rest of the well."
"Nothing doing, my man. You fill the well now. We are going to be right here."
The supervisor protested. "Sir, that may take five or six hours. You don't need to take the trouble," and was taken aback by the chorus, "No. We are staying right here."
With a puzzled expression, he summoned the labourers and ordered them to fill the well.
Balu and Anjana watched solemnly as mound after mound of earth piled on the six cardboard boxes until the well was filled. There was now a formidable barricade between the letters and the ground. Actually, between the letters and anybody.
"In a few years, some archaeologist may dig up the remains of the letters. He would then claim that some ancient civilizations wrote passionate letters in English," she said with a twinkle in her eyes as they walked to the car.
Balu chuckled. "I think that's how history textbooks are written anyway."
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