Terra Firma

I opened the small packet in which a velvet piece enveloped a small square box. Inside the box was a medal from the Trinity College of Music - a gold coated coin.

She had missed the award ceremony in London. The Trinity administration was kind enough to courier the prize out to the Indian address given out in the application form for the Diploma examination.

A pebble taken from the beach in 2008 (could she really remember the heavy heat of that day or did she need the proof of the pebble to tell her she had been there); a present bought but never given; and inside a neatly folded bag, three envelopes. She glanced around the room, from somewhere inside a wall a pipe clanked - the house clearing its throat - and took out the top envelope.

The paper inside was thick and cream-coloured (or was it off-white?!), it had a blue letterhead and the date in the top right hand corner was December 2010. As she let her eyes wander over the page she noticed it was just a little crumpled, stiff in places, as if it had been wetted then dried.

"This must be something of a surprise. If, that is, this letter gets to you. I remembered your address, of course, but then it suddenly struck me that maybe you had moved and I didn't know and anyway the postal department around here isn't exactly reliable. So perhaps I am only writing a letter to myself.

Really now that I've started, I can't think what it was I wanted to say. I think it was just the act of writing that was important, just to feel as if I was still in contact with things, although I guess a blank piece of paper in an envelope would have seemed a little strange. I've really no need to ask how things are with you. It all seems to have worked out pretty much as you planned. But still I hope you are healthy and happy. I am afraid I've done nothing very exciting to tell you about. Here is just an endless succession of long boring tasks, and then there's the heat and the clouds of mosquitoes that rise from the woods and make everything twice as hard. But this evening as I washed and dried my clothes suddenly there was this feeling of satisfaction. Strange, five months of toil and worry then calm descends as welcome and unexpected as an ice-cream van clattering through the bush.

Why am I writing this letter? Perhaps it's thinking about you in England in the summer, perhaps it's the sounds of the river at night but my mind wandered back to the place of long afternoons, listening to 'Careless Whispers' and 'Lay Lady Lay'. Can you still find a way back to the taste of wine, the feel of grass between your fingers and a world that was all shimmering reflections?
All those people disappeared into the world. How would they be recognised now - perhaps only by the sound of their laughter? I'm afraid I once damaged the environment in your name and took a penknife to the Mahogany we used to sit by. I can remember wondering if the bark would ever grow back. If you ever find yourself driving past one weekend . . . Well perhaps not, it's probably so sadly different. But I know your name will still be there, carved in the memory of a tree."

Angel re-folded the letter and tapped it several times against her top lip. From the hall the clock calling out the quarter hour, then a moment of stillness - time stalling - before, faintly, the clock in her study responded.

She took out the next envelope. While her fingers searched for the flap she looked at the Mahatma's bald pate. The letter was written on paper so white and thin that as her gaze fell across it she saw it as a shade of blue.

"Do I remember that September afternoon when I first met you? Is it possible to remember the slide into sleep or the hypnotist's fingers on your eyelids? I only know that it happened because at some stage I awoke."

Some things are clear, the lucid fragments of a dream, a conversation over the phone. We both felt low because I was working in a stuffy shop and you in a posh office. I hated it and asked you how it was that time moved so slowly. It's okay, you said, it doesn't matter, because it will end and time passed is all the same, and anyway, in the end it's not time that you're left with. You told me to go look for happiness and bring some back when I found it. But you can't bank on happiness. You can't keep it for when you need it and you cannot give to someone else simply by having it yourself.

I thought I would be content to watch the river flow past and drift away on the scent of water lilies. I watched days become nights and nights gently give way to days, believing I was shedding my cares when really I was storing regrets. Now I know that reading is dreaming, that dreaming is sleeping and thought inaction. Whenever I wake up, I find that all I have left is thoughts of you."

The noise of the cat jumping clumsily onto her lap, the feeling of her pressing up and down with alternate paws, claws snagging loops of cotton.

This time the image is not Gandhiji's but that of Nehru's, a white head against an orange background. The stamp is stuck on at an odd angle (but still stuck after all this time!) and he stares down at the scraggly lines of a familiar address. The letter itself is written on a school child's lined paper, as her eyes run down the page they linger on the date and the dappling of yellow blotches. What were they? Had they always been there?

"I still can't believe you decided to go. Why go back to the grey, the dirt, the noise, the rush? There is a lifetime to do those things. I know you chase that dream of yours, but the dream is so sweetly deferred here. Here I feel as if I am absorbing the sunshine and serenity."

Since you left we moved further east where the earth here has a reddish tinge and so does the food. Today we met a group of Tribals. We got a ride on the roof of their van and helped them collect firewood. They say there is an old man who sells the beads you wanted from the front of his hut, and eight miles of white sand. I am writing this in a flickering of orange and blackness. This is the best time, talking and reading, the world melting away into words, although sometimes a phrase is so beautiful I have to walk around a little just to let them settle in. One of these made me think of you. 'Do that which makes you happy to do, and you will do right, I know.'

The fridge's cooling mechanism rattled, then fell silent, and Angel realised that she hadn't been aware of the noise it was making. In its absence the air in the house seemed to hang with that same question; how would her life have been if she had managed to send just one of them? But the air received no answers and went back to its lazy circulation.

In time she would fold the letter away and place it back in its place. But now she just sat for a moment, the noise of the cat's contented breathing filling the house.