Story: My Father's Second Family

For eleven years I believed my father was a liar. I was wrong about him, and I found out on the thirteenth day after his funeral, which is exactly eleven years too late.

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I was seventeen when I found it. I was looking in his almirah for my birth certificate because the college needed it. Under a bundle of insurance papers there was a brown envelope, and inside the envelope were things that did not belong to my life.

There was money. Not much, about two thousand rupees. There were school fee receipts, more than twenty of them, in the name of one Ravi Kaushal and one Anita Kaushal. There was an address in a town four hours from ours. And there was a photograph of a woman I had never seen, standing with two small children.

I sat on the cold floor of my parents' room and my whole idea of my father died right there.

I did not tell my mother. I want to be honest about my reason: it was not to protect her. It was because I was ashamed of him and I could not say the words out loud.

Two weeks later I asked him. I remember I was rude, because being rude felt safer than crying. I asked him who Anita was and why he was paying for someone else's children while my mother stitched her own petticoat borders to save money.

My father did not get angry. That is what I could never forgive. He just sat down, looked at his hands for a long time and said, "It is my duty. One day I will tell you everything."

That was all. Not a denial, not an explanation. A guilty man's sentence, I decided.

So I stopped. I stopped asking him things. I stopped taking money from him after my second year and paid my fees with tuitions. I stopped calling him Papa and started calling him nothing at all, which is a thing you can actually do if you are careful with your sentences.

He kept being my father anyway. He stood in a queue for six hours to get my mark sheet corrected. He came to my wedding wearing the same brown shirt he had worn to my school farewell, and my husband's relatives noticed, and I was humiliated, and he apologised to me for it later. I did not say it was fine.

He died in April, of a stroke, in his sleep. I reached home eight hours later. My mother kept saying he had complained about a headache and she had given him tea and gone to make lunch.

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On the thirteenth day we held the ceremony at home. Relatives, neighbours, my father's old mill friends, all crowded into two rooms.

At about noon a woman in a white saree came to our door with a grown son and a grown daughter. I knew her face immediately, because I had been carrying it in my head since I was seventeen. Something in my chest turned to stone. I got up to stop her before my mother saw.

My mother reached the door before me. She took the woman's hands and said, "Anita. You came."

I stood there like a fool.

Her name was Anita Kaushal. Her husband, Raghav Kaushal, had worked beside my father at the mill. In the winter of 1998, a pressure line burst in the boiler section. My father was pulled out with burns on his back that I had seen a thousand times and never once asked about. Raghav was not pulled out at all. He was thirty-one years old.

He had two children then, aged four and two. My father promised him at his cremation that those children would go to school. For twenty-one years he kept that promise, in instalments, in cash, in bus journeys he told us were mill union meetings.

He never told anyone outside the house, my mother said, because in that town the talk would have started immediately, a man giving money to a young widow every month, and her in-laws were only waiting for a reason to throw her out. My father decided that her reputation was worth more than his own comfort of being understood.

My mother had known from the first day. Of course she had. She had stitched her own petticoat borders on purpose.

Ravi Kaushal teaches mathematics in a government school now. Anita, the daughter, is a nurse in Nagpur. At the door, Ravi touched my father's photograph and cried in a way I had not been able to cry in thirteen days.

They light a lamp in front of my father's photograph in their house every morning. In my house the same photograph stands in the same frame, and for eleven years the woman standing in front of it had been ashamed of him.

I light my lamp very late. But I light it.

Note: This is a fiction story.