The Lost and Found Box Full of Letters
The station master let me read the unclaimed mail of thirty years.
The station master turned his key in the cupboard the way you would open a grave you had been tending politely for thirty years. “Regulations say destroy after seven years,” he said, not looking at me. “I have been very busy for thirty.”
I was stranded at his station because of fog. This was Deolali side, a junction whose name you have slept through a hundred times, and my connecting train had been cancelled at 11 p.m. with the cheerful finality only Indian Railways can produce. The waiting room was full. The tea stall was closing. And the station master, a tall stooped man named Mr. Gaitonde with reading glasses pushed up into white hair, took pity on the one passenger scribbling in a notebook and asked what I was writing.
“Nothing useful,” I said. “I collect other people's stories.”
He looked at me for a long moment, the way customs officers look at suitcases. Then he said, “Come. I will show you the saddest shelf in Maharashtra.”
Behind his office, in the lamp room that no longer holds lamps, stood a steel trunk beside the usual lost-property junk: seventeen umbrellas, a single child's shoe, a harmonium with no keys in the middle octave.
The trunk was different. The trunk was full of letters.
Unclaimed, undeliverable, orphaned mail. Letters that spilled from torn mailbags in shunting accidents and were never matched to a sack again. Letters addressed to houses that had been demolished, to villages renamed, to men who had died between the posting and the arrival. Parcels refused and never retrieved. Thirty years of the postal system's quiet failures, funnelled by some bureaucratic tide to this one junction, where a man who could not bear to burn them had simply kept renewing their lease.
“Read,” he said. “They are nobody's now. Which means they are anybody's.”
I want to tell you I hesitated over the ethics... I did not. I sat on an upturned crate under a forty-watt bulb, fog pressing at the single window, and I read strangers' mail until four in the morning, and I would do it again tonight if the fog would have me.
There was a letter from 1994, a son writing to his mother: Aai, I passed. Second class, but passed. Tell Bhau his cycle got me to the exam on time and I will repay him in sweets. It never reached her. Somewhere a mother waited for a result that had been sitting in a steel trunk since the year I was born, folded around all that shy triumph.
There was a Diwali card that still shed glitter, twenty years old, the glitter outliving the greeting the way glitter outlives everything. There was a money order slip for eighty rupees with a note in the margin: For medicines. Do not tell father. There was a wedding invitation addressed to a man in Byculla; I hope somebody told him another way. There was a love letter so careful it never once used the word love, seven pages of weather and cinema timings and one sentence at the very end, pressed so hard into the paper it was nearly embossed: The platform is not the same on Tuesdays now.
Mr. Gaitonde brought tea at 1 a.m. and read a few over my shoulder, adjusting his glasses, making the small sounds of a man revisiting rooms in a house he had lived in too long. He knew certain letters by heart. He had opinions about the handwriting. “This one,” he said, tapping the careful seven-pager, “this fellow I could have delivered. Byculla is findable. But by the time I read it, the date inside was already nine years old. Some trains you cannot flag down.”
An unread letter is not silence. It is a voice holding its breath, sometimes for thirty years, waiting for one reader to let it exhale.
I asked him, near 3 a.m., the obvious writer's question: why keep them? Regulations gave him permission to burn the lot. Retirement was two years away. Whoever came next would not be sentimental; whoever came next would want the lamp room for inventory.
He polished his glasses on his sleeve for a long time...
Then he went to the bottom of the trunk, moved aside a brick of rubber-banded postcards, and took out one envelope, handling it by the edges like an X-ray. Brown, foxed, the stamp from a series discontinued decades ago.
The address, in a slanting confident hand, was the station master's quarters of this very junction.
The addressee was S. R. Gaitonde.
“It came in 1998,” he said. “From my brother. We had not spoken for six years by then. Property matter. Ugly words at our father's terahvi, the kind you cannot take back, so instead you take back the whole relationship.” He set the envelope on the crate between us. “I recognised the hand and I put it in the trunk. I told myself: when I am less angry, I will open it. A man thinks anger has a season.”
“And then?”
“And then he died. 2003. Heart. After that, how could I open it? Whatever is inside is the last thing he will ever say to me. As long as it is sealed, he is still mid-sentence.” He straightened the envelope's corner with one finger. “So I keep the whole trunk. You cannot keep one unread letter honestly unless you are willing to keep them all. The others are, what is the word. Chaperones.”
The fog shifted against the window. Somewhere down the line a goods train moaned through a crossing.
“You collect stories,” he said, not quite a question, and pushed the envelope an inch towards me. “My eyes are bad at night.”
His eyes were fine. We both let that lie stand, because it was a load-bearing lie.
I have read many things aloud in my life: poems to sleepy audiences, minutes of meetings, my own rejections in funny voices to feel better. I have never read anything the way I read that letter, at 4 a.m. in a lamp room with no lamps, to its addressee, twenty-eight years late. I will not give you all of it; it is not mine, it was never mine, I was only the voice on duty.
But I will tell you it was two pages, that it mentioned a mango tree and a cycle and their mother's method of making poha, and that the last line was: The property is yours, all of it, I do not care about the property, write back before we are old, fool.
Mr. Gaitonde sat with his hands flat on his knees, the way men of his generation absorb direct hits, and said, “He called me fool from the age of four.” And then, for a while, the station announcements had the room to themselves.
My train came at 5:40, out of the thinning fog, absurdly punctual... now that I no longer wanted to leave. He walked me to the platform. The letter rode in his shirt pocket; the trunk, he said, could finally go to the divisional office after all, though I noticed he did not say when, and I would bet my notebook it is still there.
I write about that night more than any other night of my life. I have written into memory and around it; I finally wrote the poem about forgiveness arriving late but arriving, and sent it to a monthly contest with his blessing, changed names, same fog. He asked only that I keep the mango tree in.
From the moving train I watched him grow small on the platform, a tall stooped man with white hair, standing where the letters wait.
He was not reading it again... He was just keeping his hand over his shirt pocket, the way you do when the wind picks up and you are carrying something that took thirty years to arrive.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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