The Last Letter

I discovered her diary three days after we put her in the ground. No family. No mourners. Me and some priest who didn’t know her name.

The house smelled of old wood, silence, regret. Her room was preserved, frozen at the moment she had left it. On the bedside table was a cloth-bound journal — old and yellowed, stained and faded — labeled “To Arjun. Don’t hate me anymore.”

I’d not talked to my mother for 15 years.

“You were not a baby born of love, Arjun. You were born because he raped me.”

Her first sentence took my breath away.

When he or his father saw anything they didn’t like, he would disappear again with Nicole and the children soon behind; once, though, not soon enough to avoid the explosion — a bomb strapped to the axle of a station wagon, blowing a hole in the roof of their house as they watched from a safe distance half a block away. He and his son would beat the men when he was locked up for drinking. He called it “discipline.” He’d shave her hair, burn her skin with cigarettes, say he was building the army within her. She pleaded with her mom, but her mom was dead — hung from the ceiling fan when my mom was 10.

“I used to sleep with her suicide note. I figured it would be enough to cover me.”

She married a man double her age at 18. My father. A polite schoolteacher in public. At home? A sadist. He wasn’t looking for a wife: He was wanting a thing to dragoon.

“The first night, he tore the bedsheets … and me. I bled and bled. He said, ‘Now you’re mine.’ ”

Within months, she got pregnant. She hoped it would die inside her. But it didn’t.

“When you were born I didn’t have the ability to stare at you. You had his eyes. I couldn’t feed you. You cried for hours and I didn’t react.”

I read those words shaking.

I remembered that crying. I recalled approaching her on all fours, grabbing her sari and being shoved aside. I grew up seeking a hug that never arrived.

“When you were 3, I ran a bathtub. I sat inside it with you. I had sleeping pills ready. I was just going to let us go together.”

It’s not something she wrote like it was nothing. Like describing the weather.

“But you laughed. You had just thrown water at me and said, ‘Maa funny.’ I dropped the pills. I screamed into his water until my throat was bloody blue.”

I don’t know how many times I threw the journal against the walls. I wanted to scream. To cry. To break everything. But I picked it back up. I had to finish.

“I tried. I really did. I left a gift with a message for you on every birthday. But you never read them.”

She once gave me a chessboard. I hated chess. Inside the box, she had scored “I’m sorry I don’t know how to love.” I never saw it.

“I saw you grow up from childhood. Strong. Angry. Just like him. That terrified me. Not because of you … But I saw what I had bequeathed.”

In one she reflected on the day I left home at 18, slamming the door.

“I wanted to run after you. But my legs refused. I was frozen there in the hall and pissed on myself. I sobbed as I had sobbed as a child of 6, on first realizing its power.

The last were penned in shaky ink.

“Cancer gave me six months. I didn’t tell you. I knew you wouldn’t come.”

It was alone that she spent her last days in that rotting house, vomiting blood between diary entries.

“The pain is unbearable. Not the disease — the silence. My own son doesn’t recognize me. Maybe I don’t, either.”

On the very last one was taped a photo. It was of me, when I was about 5, sleeping with my arms around her foot while she read a book.

“I took this secretly. It’s the only time I give myself permission to smile.”

“I’m sorry I failed you. I’m sorry I hurt you. But I never quit loving you. I just didn’t know how to express it.”

“If there’s another life, I will be the mother you deserved.”

I didn’t cry. I screamed.

And I just sat there in that room — rotting wood, peeling walls, and the ghost of the woman I had never really known — and I screamed until I lost my voice.

Then, I buried her again.

This round, not underground —

but inside my heart.

From the letter she never gave me.

In the love that I was too blind to see.

And I forgave her.

Too late.

But I did.