The Letter She Never Finished Writing
It ends mid-sentence, and I have spent years composing the rest.
My grandmother died with a pen in her hand and a sentence half built on the page, and for three years I believed that letter was for me. It began, in her looping Urdu-tinted English, My dear child. It ended, eleven lines later, in the middle of a thought... and if you ever find her, tell her I
No period. No signature. Just the small skid the nib made when her hand came down, a comet's tail of blue ink sliding off the edge of the sentence.
I was the one who found her, at her desk by the window, reading glasses still on, the radio playing an old Noor Jehan song into the empty room. The doctors said it was quick, the way they always say it was quick, as if speed were a kindness they could prescribe after the fact. I folded the letter into my wallet before the ambulance came. I did not tell anyone. Grief makes small thieves of us all.
For three years I carried it. I read it on trains. I read it in waiting rooms. I composed endings the way other people compose grocery lists. Tell her I forgive her. Tell her I am sorry. Tell her I kept the ring. I auditioned a hundred final clauses for my grandmother and none of them would take the job.
Then last spring my mother finally cleared out the old flat, and under the bed, behind the sewing machine and a suitcase of saris nobody will ever be slim enough or brave enough to wear, she found a biscuit tin. Nice biscuits, the orange kind, the tin older than I am, smelling of talcum and cardamom and rust.
Inside were forty-one letters.
Every one of them unfinished.
Every one of them dated the fourteenth of August, a different year, going back to 1962. Every one of them beginning the same way. My dear Rukhsana.
Rukhsana was her sister.
I knew the name the way you know a word in a language you never learned, a sound with a shape but no weight. In 1947 my grandmother's family went one way at Partition and Rukhsana, seventeen, newly married, went the other, to Karachi, and the border sealed itself behind them like water closing over a stone. There were a few letters in the fifties, my mother said. Then an address that stopped answering... then nothing. Sixty years of nothing.
Except it was not nothing. It was forty-one letters, each one abandoned partway, some after a page, some after three words. In 1974: My dear Rukhsana, Ammi's shawl still smells of. In 1983: My dear Rukhsana, my daughter got married on Sunday and I set aside a plate. In 1997, the year I was born: My dear Rukhsana, we have a granddaughter now, she has your
She has your... Has my what? Her nose, her temper, her laugh? For a week I stood in front of mirrors like a detective interrogating a suspect.
My mother wanted to know why she never finished them. My uncle said the obvious thing, that there was nowhere to send them, that you do not address an envelope to a country of silence. But I had been carrying an unfinished sentence in my wallet for three years by then, and I understood something the others did not.
A finished letter is a goodbye. An unfinished one is a hand still resting on someone's shoulder, sixty years and one border away.
She never finished them because finishing was the one thing she could not survive.
As long as the sentence stayed open, so did the door.
I did what people my age do with impossible problems: I took it to the internet. A cousin of a cousin in Toronto knew a family from the same mohalla. A retired schoolteacher in Karachi ran a group that reconnected Partition families, mostly too late, graves shaking hands with graves. I sent scans of the earliest letter, the 1962 one, with the old address my grandmother had written and then crossed out.
Six weeks later my phone rang at 5 a.m., and a young man's voice said, "My great-grandmother would like to speak with you. Please hold the phone. She is small but she is coming."
Rukhsana was ninety-one. She had outlived her husband, one of her sons, and every reasonable expectation. When she spoke, her voice was my grandmother's voice run through fifty extra monsoons. I had rehearsed a whole speech... and I forgot every word of it, so I did the only thing I could think of. I took the letter out of my wallet, the last one, the one from the desk, and I read it to her, all eleven lines, straight off the cliff of the final phrase.
And if you ever find her, tell her I
There was a silence on the line... long enough that I thought we had lost the connection, the way we lost everything else.
Then she said, "Never stopped. The sentence ends: never stopped. I know, beta, because it is my sentence too."
Her great-grandson told me afterwards about the trunk in her room. Letters, he said. My dear Zainab. Dozens of them. She never finishes them, he said, we always thought it was her eyes.
Two sisters. Two boxes. Sixty years of unfinished letters written in opposite directions on the same night of the year, like two people leaving lights on in windows that faced each other across a distance neither of them could cross.
We talk now, most Sundays, Rukhsana and I. She is teaching me the Urdu words my grandmother folded into her English, and I am reading her the tin, one letter a week, in order. She finishes each one out loud. It turns out she knows all the endings. She has had sixty years to compose the rest, same as me.
I have started writing again because of it. Not letters, or not only letters. I built a poem out of the first lines of all forty-one, every My dear Rukhsana stacked like bricks, and posted it on a community wall for poets, where a stranger from Lahore commented that her grandmother had a tin too. I keep circling memory as a subject, the way you circle a house you used to live in. And when the anniversary comes each August, I write about hope, which I used to think was a soft word, and now know is the hardest discipline in the family: the muscle it takes to leave a sentence open for sixty years.
Last month Rukhsana's great-grandson sent me a photograph. Her trunk and our tin, side by side on a table in Karachi, because I mailed the letters to her. All of them. My mother thought I was mad to let them out of the country. But they were never ours. They were only ever waiting with us.
The last letter, the one from the desk, I kept. Rukhsana insisted. "That one is yours," she said. "She was talking to you. She was asking you to find me. And look, beta."
I could hear her smiling down the line, the way you can.
"You finished it."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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