I Wrote Letters for the Whole Neighborhood
At eleven, I was the lane's scribe for love, complaints, and visas.
By the time I was eleven, I knew who in our lane was in love, who was in debt, and who was lying to their mother in Canada. I knew because I wrote it all down. Not in a diary. In their letters, at our kitchen table, at the going rate of one letter per laddoo, price negotiable, spelling guaranteed.
It started with my grandmother's pension. Some clerk in some office had misplaced a form, the way clerks in offices did, and she needed a letter in English, in what she called “court handwriting.” My father was traveling. My mother's English was fine but her handwriting galloped. So my grandmother set a blank inland letter in front of me, tapped it once, and dictated with her eyes closed like a woman singing from memory. I wrote “Respected Sir” at the top because it seemed like the kind of thing letters said, and three weeks later her pension arrived with arrears.
In our lane, this made me a licensed professional.
Word traveled the way it does in places where houses share walls. First came Shantabai from two doors down, who needed the municipality to understand that the streetlight outside her window had been dead for a year and that darkness, she wished them to note, falls hardest on widows. Her words, my hand. I remember the pride of finding “vicinity” in my father's dictionary and installing it in her second paragraph like a chandelier. The streetlight was fixed within a month. Shantabai told the vegetable seller, the vegetable seller told the lane, and my kitchen table became an office.
I wrote complaint letters and condolence letters. I wrote to a bank that had swallowed a fixed deposit, to a landlord in Pune, to a school principal regarding a scholarship, twice to an embassy regarding a visa for a nephew, letters I filled with words like “esteemed” and “humbly” while my clients sat across from me shelling peas or just watching my pen the way people watch surgery. I charged nothing and was paid constantly: laddoos, mango slices in season, a five-rupee coin pressed into my palm with such ceremony I once bowed by accident.
The tailor's assistant, Vikram, seventeen and hopeless, paid in shirt buttons for a love letter to a girl named Rekha who worked at the medical store. I took his mumbled inventory of feelings, translated it out of panic and into sentences, and permitted myself one flourish: I compared her presence to the first fan switching on after a power cut. Vikram read it, went silent... and said, “Is that how I feel?” I said yes. He believed me. Strangest of all, so did she.
But the client I want to tell you about is Waghmare kaka, retired from the railways, whose son Suresh had gone to America in 1988 and stopped writing... somewhere around 1991.
Every first Sunday of the month, kaka came to our kitchen table in his good shirt, sat with his back straight, and dictated a letter to his son. News of the lane. The price of onions. A leak in the roof, repaired. He never asked why there were no replies... and I, aged eleven, followed his lead, because he was an adult and I assumed adults understood the arrangements they were in. We sent the letters to an address in New Jersey that I copied each time from a worn slip of paper he kept in his shirt pocket, behind his glasses case, next to his heart, though I did not think in those terms then.
After eight months of silence, I did something I have never fully stood trial for.
I wrote back.
I bought an envelope with my letter money, roughed it up so it looked traveled, and wrote a reply from Suresh in a slanted disguise of my own handwriting. It was short, because guilt kept it short. Work is going well. The winters here are colder than you can imagine. I think of home when I eat. Tell the lane I said hello.
I gave it to kaka claiming it had been delivered to our address by mistake, and I watched a seventy-year-old man read eleven lines by an eleven-year-old and grow, before my eyes, two inches taller in his chair.
He replied the same afternoon. Four pages.
He told his son about a wedding in the lane, about the new scooter the doctor's family had bought, about how the rains had come early. Then he said, “Read it back,” as he always did, and I read a father's whole heart aloud to its actual audience, which was me... which was no one.
Every letter is really two letters: the one that gets dictated, and the one underneath it that says, please, still be there.
I kept it up for three years. A reply every few months, never more, because even a child forger understands rationing. I gave Suresh a promotion. I gave him a cold he recovered from, so kaka could spend one letter worrying and the next one relieved. I never dared give him a wife or a child, some instinct about lies I could not maintain. And every first Sunday, kaka dictated back news of a lane his son had stopped being able to imagine, wearing his good shirt for a correspondence that was, on one side, a boy at a kitchen table learning more about family than any real family had taught him.
He died in my second year of college.
I came home for the rites. And at the condolence gathering there was Suresh, flown in from New Jersey after all, grayer than his father had ever described him to me, holding a biscuit tin.
Inside were my letters... all of them.
He had received every single one and answered none, for reasons he did not explain and I did not ask about, because grief suspends cross-examination. But mixed in with kaka's letters were the replies, my replies, and Suresh looked at me across the tin and said, “The handwriting matches the boy who wrote his letters.”
I waited to be sentenced.
He said, “He read your winters to the whole lane.” Then he closed the tin and thanked me, in the voice of a man thanking someone for directions to a place he should have known the way to, and that was the entire trial.
I stopped being the lane's scribe when we moved across the city the following year. Nobody replaced me; phones arrived instead, and the lane learned to shout its love and its complaints in real time, no stamps required. Something in me has been trying to get back to that kitchen table ever since. The first poem I ever entered into a monthly poetry contest was about kaka's good shirt. Most of what I have written about loneliness since is really about a biscuit tin in New Jersey where a father's voice sat unanswered for years, saved and never opened wide enough to be let in.
People ask writers where they learned. I learned at a kitchen table, eleven years old, shelling other people's words out of their panic, paid in laddoos, trusted with everything.
Respected Sir. Esteemed Madam. Dearest Suresh.
I humbly submit that I have been writing other people's letters ever since. Some of us just start calling them poems.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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