I drove six hours, knocked on the door and a young girl opened the door. Behind her stood a middle-aged woman with short hair and a smiling face. I would not have recognized her on the street, for I was seeing her after forty years. But I knew she was Cathy. Cathy was unforgettable.
Forty years earlier, I was a sophomore student in Kolkata, India, when Dick Johnson, my father’s new colleague from New York, moved into the apartment next door. With him came his wife Esther and daughter, Catherine Isabella.
Cathy could not bear the burden of her polysyllabic name and promptly reduced it to a short, spiffy Cathy. It fitted her better, for she was lively, brisk and direct. Meeting me for the first time, she smiled shyly, but then quickly took my hand and said, “I’ll be your friend.”
I was her friend if only because I was the only one around of her age who spoke English.
She did not speak a word of the local language and needed someone to explain the strange new world around her.
I felt important showing her around, walking crowded streets and narrow lanes through throngs who marvelled at the odd pair of a gangly youth and a pretty foreigner with flowing tresses. She wore Madras shirts and denim pants and explored with me noisy bazaars, smelly fish markets, decaying old palaces and, when our joint resources permitted, cheap roadside tea shops.
We took long walks in the dusk on the crumbling boardwalk on the Hooghly River, and flouted, with unspeakable joy, our parents’ firm instruction not to go anywhere near unhygienic street snacks.
We had our parents’ liberal permission to go to the libraries – they believed it would broaden our minds – and we took full advantage of it, sitting for hours with open books, our fingers discreetly interwoven under the desk, conveying messages our intermittent whispers could not. On rare occasions, we were permitted the other mind-broadening luxury of going to selected plays in local theaters. We dressed specially, which meant I wore cologne and a decent pair of trousers, while Cathy looked resplendent in a cardigan and her mother’s lipstick. We could stay out later than usual, and on the way back we huddled close on the backseat of a taxi.
I left town when I graduated, and Cathy went about the same time to a boarding school far away. A few years later the Johnsons returned to the US.
Forty years later I moved to Washington with a UN job, and, in a remarkable coincidence, had lunch with a colleague who had known the Johnsons when they were alive and living in New York. He found Cathy’s address for me: married and divorced, she now lived with her daughter in Maryland and worked as a teacher.
As Cathy came forward and kissed me, I whispered the words I had always wanted to tell her but never dared to articulate, “You look beautiful!”
The writer is a Washington-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at mnandy@gmail.com.