Gita would bring some utility items for our Bangalore home whenever she visited her old hometown Bombay, where she had familiar shopping haunts like Lohar Chawl. She’d bring back a good potato-peeler, or a can-opener, even her familiar brand of innerwear. On one such Bombay visit, since she had noticed me having trouble doing my own pedicure, she bought me an imported and expensive nail clipper that would perhaps better handle my toenails, brittle because of my age. “Try it out,” she’d said to me on her return. I did. And said: “Humph, just average. Not better than what I already have.” And she had shrugged and said: “Oh, okay.”

Last month and last week I used that nail clipper and understood how much better it was. “Sorry, Gita, I was wrong,” I mumbled to her.

She passed away, of a sudden heart attack 18 months ago, and the house is full of her presence. The last note she’d left near my toothbrush was: “A: Wake me at 6:30 am, G”.  I have left that note exactly where she’d placed it. 

There is a crossword puzzle she’d left half-solved. I have kept that too, the way it was. Some mornings, when emotions well up, I use her toothpaste tube instead of mine. It is almost empty now, and I dread the day when I will extract the last half inch of her paste. It would be a wrench just as her sudden passing was. She pops up in family photos: of our honeymoon in Kashmir in 1961 and those of our silver wedding anniversary two decades ago, and of holidays. The void feels deeper then.

... contd.