Family memoir: A stack of letters, a ruby ring. Who was the mysterious American woman behind both?

The death of my parents within days of each other had removed the last link to the ring. Then serendipity intervened. A chance remark by one of my uncles in the early 1980s started my journey to learn more about the ring. My uncle, number four out of the nine siblings, and his wife were visiting me in DC where I had moved from London. By now, I was divorced and alone. During a nostalgic evening of do-you-remember and did-you-know, my uncle and aunt, at my prompting, told me about my father’s early life in Quetta. Much of this was unknown to me, partly because my father never spoke about himself.

“Your father wasn’t always bookish like you remember him. No, not at all: he was handsome and charismatic, engaging, and friendly,” my uncle told me. “He had a large group of friends and inspired a great deal of loyalty from them. He was quite a catch and sought after by parents with marriageable daughters,” my uncle added. “Did you get that from your father?” he queried, pointing at my ruby ring.

“Yes, he gave it to me when I was quite young,” I replied, totally nonplussed about where this was going. He then asked what I knew about the ring. I shrugged and told him I knew very little. My uncle then proceeded to fill me in with his knowledge of the ring and its history. ‘Your father met a woman in America, and they had a passionate love affair. “Did you know that?” This was the first time I’d heard about this. I was stunned. “So, this was before he was married? Was she married? You called it an affair.”

“I’m not sure, but I think she was not married. He came back from the States in 1928, I believe. He didn’t get married until 1937, almost ten years later.” He didn’t have any more details about the woman in America, not even about how and where my father had met her. But she was the person who gave him the ring, my uncle said. “Here’s what I know,” he went on. “When my brother left America to return to Quetta in 1928, the woman, whose name I do not remember, had calculated that the journey home to Quetta, by boat and train, would take him 40 days. She gave him a packet of 40 letters. She also gave him that ring you are wearing.”

“After he reached Quetta,” my uncle continued, “he used to get daily letters from her which he meticulously kept in a large, locked trunk in his room. The letters were long and came regularly for about three years. He told us he never responded. Then, when he finally wrote to her, the letters ceased.” My first reaction to this bit of news was shock. I never imagined that my father would be romantically involved with anyone other than my mother, and even there he showed no outward signs of affection for her.

Then all the other questions came flooding in: Did my mother know? Had he told her of his past love affair when they got married? How had it ended? Why did it end? I wondered, too, what had happened to the letters: Did any of them survive? If so, who had them?

Then my uncle astonished me even further by telling me the following story. He had heard this second-hand from yet another uncle of mine who lived in Delhi. “In 1967, an American man arrived in Delhi. He met your parents and your middle sister Kiran in a hotel in Delhi. He claimed to be the son of the American woman.”

“Was my father his father?”

“That I don’t know.” My first reaction to hearing this story was that it was nonsense. But, in later years, the story of the man claiming to be her son was confirmed by two other uncles who lived in Delhi at the time of this encounter. When I later talked to my sister, who did not recall much of the meeting, I asked her, “What was his name? Surely you remember that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, “but it sounded like Cary or Gary.” She could not add much to my uncle’s story. But she did say that she had seen some of the letters among our father’s books in his library. “I know my daughter saw them. She was nine or so, and she had discovered a bunch of letters in his study. She used to try to read them but couldn’t.”

Suddenly I was determined to find out more. The ring now had a story and a past, though one that was fraught with danger. Did I want to find out more about the woman? Did I have a half-brother somewhere? Then there were the letters. If my sister had seen them, why hadn’t she told me about them? Where were they now, and who had them? The more I thought about it, the more fascinating the mystery became. And I loved solving problems. This was a more personal knot to unravel. But for another long period of time, life intervened and the mystery of the ring remained untouched. I forgot about the whole thing.

Excerpted with permission from My Father’s Ring: The Story of a Lost Romance, Ajit Singh Dutta, Speaking Tiger Books.