The Lighthouse Keeper's Last Letter

The envelope came eleven days after we buried him, which is about right for post from Kharo Point. Abba had a joke about that. He said the fishing boats got to town before the letters did. And honestly he wasn't wrong, because the mail van belonged to Rasool, and Rasool only drove in when his wife needed a new gas cylinder. Sometimes that was every week. Sometimes it really wasn't.

Brown envelope. Cheap. Ten for forty rupees at Haji's, the shop by the petrol pump that sells exercise copies, cricket balls and, for some reason, mosquito coils. He'd written my name in capitals. Logbook capitals, big and square, every letter standing a bit apart from the next one.

MEHR UN NISA. Not Mehr. The full thing. He only did that when he was being formal or when he was annoyed with me, and for most of the last six years it had been hard to tell which.

I didn't open it. I put it on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a mango and went to work.

I answer calls for a bank. Blocked cards, forgotten PINs, people who swear on their mothers they never bought anything from some website called ShopZen. That Tuesday a man from Hyderabad yelled at me for ten minutes because an ATM ate his card, and I said "I understand, sir" thirty-one times. Thirty-one. I counted. Abba got me into counting when I was tiny and I've never managed to stop.

So the envelope sat on the fridge. Four days. I'd look at it every morning while the kettle did its thing. Fifth night I couldn't sleep, gave up around two, sat down on the kitchen floor and opened it with a butter knife because I couldn't find the scissors.

Two pages, torn out of a register, the left edge still all fuzzy. In English. He had this theory that Urdu letters got opened by nosy postmen and English ones only got opened by educated thieves, and Kharo Point didn't have many of those.

Mehr,

The doctor in town says the heart is tired. I told him the generator is also tired and it still runs. He did not laugh. Doctors here have no sense of humour.

Some things you should know. In case.

The fuse box in the cottage sticks. Hit it on the left side, not the right. The right side is where the wasps live.

The lamp is automatic now, as you know. The government man comes every three months, looks at it for ten minutes, drinks my tea and goes. He never checks the brass vent at the very top. I polish it on Thursdays anyway. Somebody should.

There is a gull with one foot. I call him Munshi because he walks like Munshi sahib from the post office. Do not give him bread. He likes the heads of the small fish. Rasool's boy will bring them if you ask.

The third step on the stairs complains. Step on the edge.

Your mother's shawl, the green one, is in the steel trunk under my bed. I did not give it to the masjid people. I know I said I would.

You used to count the flashes with me from the gallery. One light, four dark. You always got bored around forty and fell asleep against the railing, and I carried you down all 112 steps and complained the whole way so you would know it was a big favour.

I still count. It is not the same, but it is fine.

Go and see it once. You do not have to stay. Just once.

Abba

That's it. That was the whole letter. Nothing about sorry, nothing about the graduation.

Okay, the graduation. For six years it was basically the only thing we talked about, by never once talking about it. I finished my degree in Karachi (first one in the family, which my phupo still brings up at weddings) and the ceremony was on a Saturday in March. He promised he'd come. Then on the Friday night Gul Hassan, the relief keeper, went and got dengue, and there was no one else to sit with the light. Abba rang me from the cottage phone and said, "A ship doesn't know it is your graduation, Mehr."

I said something back. I'm not writing it here. He went "Accha," really quietly, and put the phone down.

After that our calls turned into weather reports. Hot there? Very. Raining here? Bit. Sea's rough. Accha. Khuda hafiz.

Two years after that they made the lamp automatic and retired him, and no, he didn't move to the city then either. He stayed on in the keeper's cottage. The department let him, I think mostly so somebody would make tea for the government man.

Next morning I applied for leave. My supervisor asked was it a family emergency. I said, "Sort of. It's eleven days late."

The bus to the coast is seven hours if nothing goes wrong. Something goes wrong every time. This time it was a goat, then a flat tyre, then the driver stopping for twenty minutes to argue with a man about a cousin. Rasool was waiting at the last stop with the mail van and it still smelled of diesel and oranges, same as when I was nine. He didn't say sorry for your loss or anything like it. He looked at me and said, "You've gone thin," and then didn't say another word the whole drive. Good. I didn't want to talk.

Key was under the same flowerpot. Inside, dark, and it smelled like him. Brasso, mint tea, that cheap blue soap he bought by the dozen. I flicked the switch. Nothing. The fuse box was still in the corridor, grey tin, door hanging a bit crooked.

I hit it on the left. Lights came on.

And then, because I'm his daughter and I can't leave anything alone, I leaned over to look at the right side. Wasp nest. Size of my fist, jammed in the gap behind the box. Three wasps strolling around on it very slowly, like old uncles at a wedding who've already eaten.

I laughed. Properly, out loud, in an empty house. First time since the funeral.

Munshi showed up next morning on the cottage wall. One foot, head on one side, staring at me like I owed him money. And he did walk like a postman. No idea how a gull pulls that off, but he did. Around eleven Rasool's boy cycled up with a plastic bag of fish heads and said Abba had paid him for the full month already. "He said maybe someone will come," the boy said, and went red, and pedalled off fast.

Afternoon, I climbed the tower. Third step, I stood right in the middle of it on purpose, just to hear. It groaned like an uncle getting up from a low sofa. After that I stuck to the edge and it kept its mouth shut.

112 steps. Yes, I counted.

The lamp room was clean. Cleaner than my flat, which isn't saying much, but still. The new light sat there humming in its housing, small and boring, nothing like the huge old lens I remembered. His polishing cloth was on a hook by the door, gone stiff. I looked up at the brass vent, right at the top of the dome.

Shining. Really shining, the way brass only gets when somebody's gone at it with their thumb pushed hard behind the cloth.

He died on a Saturday. Somebody had polished that vent on the Thursday.

Logbook was in the drawer under the chart table. Well, not the official one. That stopped the day the light went automatic. He'd carried on in a school notebook with a cartoon tiger on the front. One line a night. Sometimes two.

"Light normal. Sea calm. M did not call."

"Light normal. Wind from south. M did not call."

I started flipping faster. Hundreds of pages of it. Then, here and there:

"Light normal. M called. Said it rained in Karachi. Good."

"Light normal. Sea rough. M called. She has a cough. Told her honey and ginger. She said Abba I am twenty-seven. Still, honey and ginger."

I don't remember telling him about any cough. I remember thinking that call was about nothing.

I sat on the lamp room floor with the tiger notebook on my knees till the sun went. The light came on by itself, no one touched anything. I got up and went out on the gallery and held the railing. Cold. Sticky with salt.

One light. Four dark.

I got to forty. Kept going. Nobody was going to carry me down.

I was meant to leave Wednesday. Told my supervisor the buses were a problem, which wasn't totally a lie. Thursday morning I went up with the Brasso tin from under the kitchen sink and his stiff old cloth and I rubbed that vent till my arm ached and I could see my own face in it, small and yellow and bent out of shape.

Government man's due in December. He won't look at the vent. Nobody checks it.

I know. Somebody should.