“Sudoku”
Graham Earley

 

“I have no patience. I tell all my grandchildren to have patience, but really I do not have it myself.”

Aaji dropped her pencil and began putting the Sudoku puzzle away.

“Aaji,” I laughed. “You’ve put up with students like me living with you for all these months. That makes you the most patient person I know!” Her eyes remained fixed on the shelf where she was placing her puzzle, but her slight grimace turned into a slight smile, revealing a few black holes where teeth should have been (“Good thing my cooking is so mushy,” she would say). When she smiled, her mouth wasn’t always convincing, but the way her eyes scrunched up, almost concealing her pupils entirely, made up for it. In between the stray hairs of her eyebrows lay a red bindi, directly above the bridge of her glasses, marking the end of a long forehead topped with dark gray hair pulled tight before devolving into a messy bun. She turned and looked at me, setting the puzzle back on the table.

“Oh, you just say that. You know, sometimes I just guess a number to put in the square. There are a few options, and I just pick one. Then, later on, nothing fits. You need patience when making a decision. Isn’t that right?”

I laughed again at her modesty and nodded in agreement. She began erasing her squares, shaking the table beneath her.

A few weeks earlier, after my smartphone suffered a fatal collision with the floor, I had started taking the puzzles page out of the Hindu Times newspaper as a way to kill time. From then on, each morning became my designated Sudoku period. I would wake up, get ready for the day, and then sit in the living room working on the puzzle, waiting for Aaji to shout from the kitchen, “Chai garam!” Hot tea.

Like a true grandmother—a true aaji—Aaji noticed everything and stored it away in her mind until the information was useful. Once, over dinner, I mentioned how it would have been nice to have a bike to travel around the city. Three days later, I arrived home from school to find an old red bicycle chained to the gate of the apartment building. Aaji was staring down at me through the bars of her open-air second-floor window, grinning.

Another time, I reminisced about the sweet potatoes back home, how it felt strange not to have eaten them that fall. Aaji said nothing, but we had them for dinner the next night.

So, on the first morning that I started working on Sudoku puzzles, I had a feeling that Aaji was making a mental note of my new habit. I grabbed the cup of chai she had prepared and brought it to the table, where I began staring at the puzzle. I took a sip from my cup and burned my tongue. I had never done Sudoku before.

Aaji had a special pair of flip-flops that she wore in the house, with soles too thin for the outside. Her feet barely raised off the ground when she walked, and whenever she moved, the flip-flops would drag underneath her, filling the apartment with a soft and drawn out whisper. Even with my eyes fixed on the squares and numbers, I knew she was approaching.

She plopped down with her cup and a biscuit, half eaten and dripping with the chai she had dipped it in. From across the table, her head was pointing down at the prayer book in front of her, but her raised eyebrow and craned neck gave away that she was peeking over at my side of the table.

“Got any tips for how to start these, Aaji?”

“Oh, I know only a little bit about those puzzles.”

She knew a lot. She led me through her method for starting a new puzzle, going row by row, eliminating options, and highlighting squares that could only hold one possible number, and going from there. I continued. As I worked, she sat at the table nodding along, watching me think. Working together on the puzzle was the first time I felt like we had a connection, like we had both learned a new language and were now holding a conversation.

The next morning, before I could reach the table and begin unfolding the newspaper page I had crinkled up in my pocket, Aaji called from the kitchen, sooner than usual. “Chai garam!” I walked in to get it.

“Take, take, take.” She thrust the saucer into my hands.

After shuffling back to the table, she sat down with me. There were two Sudoku books stacked at my seat. Aaji looked at me, gauging my reaction.

“My son, he sent them to me a while ago, but I never use them. You try.”

I looked up at her beaming smile and instinctually said a thank you, but I already knew the response. “You do not need to say thank you. We thank by our actions.”

I smiled and opened one of the books.

***

The puzzles started to get harder as I moved along in the book. Rather than do one puzzle each morning, I started doing one puzzle each week. Aaji noticed. I would have lost interest in Sudoku if it weren’t for her. Though I did enjoy puzzling over the numbers, doing Sudoku had become an excuse to sit with Aaji each day, and I wasn’t going to give that up. The puzzles transcended any cultural barrier.

I came home one Thursday and went straight to the book, trying to make a breakthrough on a puzzle that had stumped me for a few days, hoping that Aaji could give me some guidance. With my usual pen in hand, I flipped to the page. Alongside my pen markings, I saw a few numbers neatly added in pencil. I asked Aaji who my secret helper was, even though I knew the answer.

“Yes, I thought I would take a look. You are so good at starting them, and I wanted to see if I could help you finish.”

I smiled and got to work. With the roadblock cleared, I finished in a matter of minutes.

***

A few weeks later, when I took my chai from the kitchen and sat down to sip it, I noticed something new. A current of spices and tea powder flowed through the milk, warming my throat as I slowly drank. There was something brighter about the taste of this cup.

“Aaji, did you add something new to this tea?” I was pleased at my ability to actually discern a distinct flavor from the blend, even if I didn’t know what it was.

“I started adding ginger a few weeks ago since it is getting colder outside,” she told me. “Now you notice!” She offered me a chapati — “Take!” — and sat down, opening up a Sudoku book of her own.

Aaji’s past was a mystery to me. My new hobby had helped me learn to solve puzzles, but getting Aaji to talk about herself was more challenging than any Sudoku. I knew she used to be a singer—she still hummed around the house. I knew she was married, but her husband lived three hours away in Mumbai, and she never spoke of him. She also never wore the necklace that signified marriage. I wanted to know more about her.

“Did you attend university?” I broke the silence with the only question I could think of, sticking my pen inside the book to save my page.

“Oh, yes. I studied philosophy. I used to be quite a smarty!” She smirked and stared out the window, her eyes fixing on something in the distance.

With only a little more prodding, she went off on a seemingly rehearsed story of her past, reciting achievements in short sentences like she was spouting off bullet points from a resume.

“Yes, and the company I worked for had a field hockey team. I was the captain, and we went to nationals.” Looking at the old woman, the one who hardly left the house, who wore nightgowns that doubled as saris in the day, who took the smallest footsteps, I couldn’t believe it.

“Ah, and my sister, she was a great singer. Very talented.” Her sister’s voice was so beautiful, she said, that she decided to start singing too. She sang in musicals and plays in the city and was awarded Best Actress a few times. She talked about her accolades as if they were nothing, just another hobby she had in the past.

After moving on to the story of her stint as a wedding hair stylist with her sister, she slowed down. “And then we got married, and you just have to stop those sort of things, you know? Now I am a tutor and an aaji for students like you.”

I didn’t know how to respond. The story was over within ten minutes of my question, but it felt like she had been talking for an hour. She hadn’t shared anything about her past with me until this point. It was as though the puzzle had eased us into a deeper conversation.

Her eyes gazed out from behind large glasses toward the road outside where the children of the watchman from the apartment across the street were playing in the parking lot, weaving in and out of cars. The trash collector was dragging his cart past the gate, yelling melodically in Marathi. I looked back at Aaji. Her eyes had returned to her Sudoku. She began erasing something, but stopped herself.

“I have no patience. I tell all my grandchildren to have patience, but really I do not have it myself.”

***

Toward the end of my stay, I noticed that Aaji began focusing on the months ahead when I would be gone. One night at dinner, she looked at the empty third chair at the table.

“I wonder what you will be doing in one month,” she sighed. “I hope you get good food over there.”

I assured her that I would be fine when I got back home, but I knew that that wasn’t the only concern. I poured us each a cup of water from the bottle sitting on the windowsill.

“I will get so lonely when you are gone. No grandchildren around,” she trailed off.

I reminded her that there would be more students to fill my place in the next semester.

“No, I will not be taking more students this year. The water cuts make me nervous. I don’t have enough to give.” There had been no monsoons that year, and the apartment hadn’t had water for two days. Only jugs and bottles filled from before. Water came every third day for just a few hours.

We continued eating. The salty scent of pitla, a mash of chickpea flour and spices, smeared on top of warm bhakri, a rice bread, wafted up and filled in the silence of the room. We cleared our dishes quietly.

Aaji brought out bowls of fruit she had prepared for us as an after dinner snack — papayas, chikoo, sweet lime, and custard apple. She smiled at me and handed me a spoon. “Take.”

We both picked up our Sudoku books.

***

The final month passed, and I flew home. On the flight, I noticed a new note written on the first page of the Sudoku book. To Graham, With Love, from Aaji (India).

When I got my new phone, the first text message I got was from Aaji.

Is your Sudoku book over or still going strong? Keep it up.

I read the message a few times and re-opened the book, paged past all the puzzles I had done incorrectly, all the grids filled in with a mixture of pencil and pen, all the notes jotted on the side, and continued.