“I’m married. I’ve been married, multiple times.”
“Twice? More?”
“For a while I was Meena Rupaka Hurkaru – he was a Jak- a mail carrier. It can be dangerous work, you know. Kill the messenger type stuff, if you get the wrong route. I substituted in for him a few times, so he could recover.”
“A woman delivering the mail? A woman wanting to?”
“Hush. It was good pay. Anyways. If the roads were anywhere as developed then as they were now, he would have made a fraction of the income… he eventually died of something he caught.”
“Ghastly. Of what?”
Mina shrugged, “does it matter when he’s gone?”
“So that’s number one. Was it a quick remary? I mean, depending on how long he was sick-“
“Oh, my parents didn’t decide on any of them – they were already long gone. No, Mina Rupaka Jadia was – well, Efren, Filipino – he never wasn’t sick. He wanted to go home. He wanted to have lived a proper life. A sailor – to far from the ocean.”
“What, did you marry him for his money?”
“Well, I can say I did get a small amount when he passed – but it was insignificant. There was only … a month or so he was at my flat, out of the hospital.”
“And then he died.”
“And then he died.”
“I suppose Uddyam was your third then.”
“Don’t say was. Just- don’t.”
“He should have been at home with you.”
“Or I should have been on the road with him.”
“He was on the road a lot?”
“His first wife – and son – died together. And because of that, he blamed himself. I think the only reason he married me was because he couldn’t ‘kill me like that’. But still. He couldn’t stay in one place too long. The Tent Cinema was enough to keep him – present. Coming home for monsoon itself was too long without some trip to it. “
“So you were really only married to him two months of the year.”
“I would go see him every so often. And… it did give him time to thing about what he wanted to do when he got home.”
“What are you saying, Mina.”
“Whatever you want to hear, dear.”
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