Namita Gokhale’s new novel: A middle-aged woman goes back to her childhood mountain home

Who could Nina be? My mother did not have it in her to make a secret life. What I don’t know about her I don’t because I have never really wanted to know.

My mother had cut off from Badi Amma after her marriage. She had been deeply mortified by her mother’s existence as a menial, a mere maid. But Rosinka had tenaciously continued to insist on my annual visits.

My memories of those trips to the hills are garbled into a long dream, sometimes a nightmare. Rosinka’s hold over my mother ensured that she would take leave from her nursing home job in Roorkee to collect me from my school and drop me to The Dacha every summer. The house was called “The Hideaway” in those days – that was the name Rosinka’s husband Peter Paul Singh had given it.

Peter Paul Singh had died young, as had my grandfather. Nobody ever mentioned them after they left the world – it was as though they had never existed, the inheritor of a small fortune who painted, and the man who tilled half a bigha of terraced land twice a year. Rosinka and Lily continued with their lives. The house was renamed “The Dacha” as a reminder of Rosinka’s exalted Russian lineage. But the villagers got confused and began calling it “Chacha”, the name by which it is known to this day.

My father had died early on as well. No one knew how. It was rumoured that he had drowned in the Roorkee canal. There was a concurrent rumour that he had run away with a Tibetan woman and set up a momo stall in the border town of Mahendranagar. I was born a couple of months later in Khata Khumani. It was Badi Amma who brought me up, carrying me to The Dacha with her every day, till her sister arrived to look after me. My mother would come from Roorkee for a day or two every few months to look at me impassively. Her lower lip twitched when she had to hold or carry me. Perhaps I’m only imagining this as I write.

I went to boarding school at Rosinka’s insistence. She paid for it, of course. St Dolores in Jeolikote took me in. It was smarter, more posh than my mother’s Alma Mater, St Anne’s, but they didn’t teach me much. I was in the fifth grade when my mother married again. My stepfather was a widower, an army officer posted in Bangalore. I saw less and less of my mother after that.

I saw less and less of my mother after that. I had a stepbrother I didn’t know much about. But a stepsister? Who was Nina, and what was she talking about? There was a mystery here, a muddled, messy mystery my instincts warned me to steer clear of.

Nina was sitting in the kitchen, staring at a book before her, as if unsure of what she should do with it. Iti noticed the dark roots of her blonde hair, her chewed-up nails, her vulnerability. She struggled to collect herself against the onslaught of memories that Nina’s assertion of being related to her had sparked off. Her memories of this house, her claim to it and to Khata Khumani, belonged to her alone. Not to this imposter.

She fiddled with her phone out of habit. No signal. No social media. No messages. No updates. No alerts.

“None of that here,” Nina said smugly. “No signal. No outside world. We live in a cocoon – or by a lagoon! Would you like a fried egg? Some coffee? Let me get it for you, please.”

As she set about measuring coffee and cracking eggs over a pan, Iti noticed Nina’s practised hands – opening cabinets, finding the right switches, knowing exactly where she must reach to get what she needed. Unlike Iti, there was no lapse of memory. It was as if Nina really did belong to The Dacha.

The coffee was strong and fragrant. Nina had disappeared after placing the French Press and the double fried eggs before her. Iti continued to sit in the kitchen, listening to the rain.

The rain in the mountains felt different, sounded different. The insistent tattoo on the tin roof seemed to be conveying some urgent message. Iti was lost in reverie as she listened to its rhythmic beat.

A poem she had read and memorised many years ago surfaced in her mind.

I was not sorrowful, but only tired
Of everything I ever desired.
All day till evening I watched the rain
Beat wearily upon the window pane.

She struggled to remember the rest of the poem. Who had written it? She reached for her phone again, to check, but of course there was no signal.

Ernest Dowson. The name surfaced from memory, like a fish leaping from a pond. That was the name of the poet.

Excerpted with permission from Never Never Land, Namita Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books.