Page 16 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“I would never allow it.”

I smiled, thinking of how he’d defied his own father in the first war. A decision that changed both of our lives. “He is too young.”

“A blessing.”

For another long moment, we listened to the space connecting us. “You should hang up,” I said in English. “Every second will cost a million pounds.”

“I should.” I heard his breath, in, then out. “I am so relieved that you are still here. There.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. “Look for Venus tonight.”

A short pause. “I shall.” And then: “Write. Every day. Do not miss. Swear.”

“I swear.”

I heard the click of him ending the call, but I listened to the silence a moment longer. I thought of him sitting with his long fingers resting on the receiver, far away in Delhi.

Still connected.

One Small Beauty

1907

Nainital

—9—

Tanveer left for school, but as he promised, he wrote many letters. He always included a joke or a riddle or a story about a book he was reading.

Until I met him, I’d considered myself the most accomplished reader I knew. He was even more avid than I, and bested me by reading in several languages—the English we shared, but also his family’s Punjabi, and the courtly language of Farsi, and of course Hindi and Urdu, which were spoken mainly the same under the umbrella of Hindustani, but were written entirely differently.

When he first revealed this to me, on a rainy winter holiday afternoon when our mothers had taken refuge in their friendship, I narrowed my eyes.

“How can they sound the same and be written so differently?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?” He took paper from the stack I used for drawing. “Do you want to learn?”

“Speaking or writing?”

“Both,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Writing words brings a different understanding, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I suppose.” It sounded like a lot of trouble. “Maybe I’d rather just draw.”

“Suit yourself.” But he began to write out script on the page, and the flowing look of it piqued my interest.

“It isn’t like English letters at all.”

“No.” He pushed the pencil and paper toward me. “Try it.”

And while he might be entranced by the words, the elegance of the script itself, the beauty of it, captured me so I could not resist.

A few weeks after he returned to school, I received a letter written almost entirely in Urdu. He opened withDear Elsie, I have news.Then the rest was in Urdu.

It was a challenge I couldn’t resist. It took me two days to decipher his simple paragraph, another week to compose a few words in return. “Tigers live in the forest.”

He was so delighted by my return letter, he sent another. I asked my mother to find a textbook for me, so I could study, and she did.

And so we began our long history of writing letters in Urdu.