When a daughter discovers letters from her mother’s lover

The top letter of the pile is almost twenty-three years old. The one beneath it is a week older: from Ahmed to Yasi. His is typewritten and the ink has begun to fade. There are two stacks of letters in the box, each thick as a phone book, and I wonder how far they go back, whether they’re all Ahmed and Yasi or if she had other correspondents. So many letters, my mind screams.

So many secrets. I must not panic, I tell myself. I must proceed systematically. It’s better to ease into it. Before I begin, I will establish a context. If the letters are just between the two of them, I must be prepared for the fact that my mother exchanged ten pounds of letters with a man I don’t know. I must begin at the beginning and end at the end. I will peruse the stacks before I read them, looking just at the date and the addressee. I’ll establish a count and order them chronologically.

Before I’m even a quarter of the way through, it’s apparent my mother was one step ahead of me. The letters are arranged from oldest to newest, first hers and then his. There isn’t a single letter from anyone else.

My mother must have ironed the letters before she put them in order.

The creases look pencilled in on pages so perfectly flat they seem never to have held a fold. There are hundreds of pages in the box. How long did it take her to leave them all so perfectly? Did she lie in bed at night waiting for morning when she knew she would be free for this arduous task? I would like to believe she left them so well ordered for me to find some day, but the dearest of delusions are often the most fragile. This box and its secrets were hers alone: when it came to its contents, I suspect she didn’t think of me at all.

The sheets accordion across my floor by the time I finish counting. There are two thousand four hundred and fifty-six pages in front of me. The earliest ones are brief notes they sent to one another during their college years. It must have been there that they met. The later ones are much longer, going on for pages. But I want to start from the beginning. At the bottom of the box is a newer-looking manila envelope stuffed with something and taped shut. Why would my mother attempt to seal away something in her box of secrets? The sense of dread that’s been creeping up on me all afternoon intensifies. For a second, I’m unsure if I really want to know about all the skeletons my mother hid so carefully in her closet.

It’s too late to back out though, and I find myself lifting up the envelope as though in a dream. My fingers mechanically pull back the scotch tape, leeching yellow from the paper and leaving fuzz along the strip. Now she’ll know I’ve been into this, I think as I flick away the tape. She’s never coming back, I remind myself. She has left you this time for good.

The envelope contains an awkward bundle wrapped in an old handkerchief of my father’s. I unwrap it to find a stack of cash. There’s a little over seven hundred dollars there, plus a cheque from a Mrs Randolph for another two hundred and forty: the forgotten dividends of her painting classes. She started them around the time I first began school and continued until about a year before she left. Her students were elderly local women and the unemployed wives of other professors. Occasionally, a college student enlivened the generally subdued group with wild stories of failed love affairs and late nights.

While these lessons were in session, I was prohibited from entering the front room – or the “studio” as it was called during those times. I lurked in the kitchen, eavesdropping as I stuffed myself with varying iterations of the Tollhouse cookie. The crackle of the fireplace and the syrupy afternoon sunlight that streamed through the wall of windows seemed to put the women at ease. They often paused, paintbrushes suspended mid-air, to confide indubitably important but unendingly mysterious things like that since they’d turned forty white cotton panties were all they could be bothered with.

After the last of her students left in their clouds of perfume and patchouli, my mother would lead me to the rapidly cooling front room to assess their work.

“What do you think of Meredith’s use of yellow here?” she’d ask, cocking her head and resting a hand on her hip, as she stepped back from a painting. “It strikes me as slightly garish, but I can’t decide if that’s her point.”

I’d consider the canvas in question with what I hoped was a thoughtful look and reply, “Yes, I think so. To me, it looks like she meant it.” I loved it when my mother asked my opinions on things. Her students painted a lot of abstracts, which seemed to me far inferior to the intricate little girls with poufy dresses and elaborately bowed hair I painted in art class at school. I knew my mother hated my little girls, but a streak of unusual stubbornness made me persist with them anyway.

“They look like little wedding cakes,” my mother would say. “Children don’t look like that in real life. Where are the scabs on their knees and the dirt in their hair?”

At times like this, I came close to hating my mother.

How could she not see that the children I was drawing were perfect, just like I wanted to be for her? Maybe if my hair was always neat and my skirts stood out in starched penumbras, my mother wouldn’t cry at the breakfast table and drink whiskey in coffee cups. Although I never told her, I couldn’t stand the crazy, chaotic messes of colour her students produced. They seemed dangerous to me, too difficult to understand. I forgave them though, for the crisp parcels of cash their creators brought in and for the chance they gave me to be an adult with my mother.

“Let’s go for ice cream,” my mother would sometimes say on the coldest of winter days. “We need to remember that summer exists.” She seemed to me to use her earnings primarily to finance unplanned adventures. Once, she picked me up from school in the middle of the day and took me to the city for a multiple-fork lunch. Sitting across from her, over the sparkling white tablecloth, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. Every man and woman in the restaurant sensed my mother’s presence and couldn’t help but watch her from the corners of their eyes.

The busboy was at our side to refill her glass every time she took a sip, and the hot rolls in our basket were continually refurbished. My mother was the centre of my world, and it pleased me to see how she could so easily become the centre of everybody else’s, while still being all mine.

Excerpted with permission from Yasmeen, Sophia Khan, HarperCollins India.