Love Letters for Hire in the Old Market
The scribe by the spice shop has written half the city's romances.
Rafiq bhai charged forty rupees a page, and for forty rupees he could make a rickshaw driver sound like a man who had studied heartbreak at a foreign university. His stall stood between the spice shop and a shuttered watch repairer in the old market: one wooden desk, one tin of nibs, a jar of blue-black ink, and a cardboard sign in two languages that said, simply, Letters Written.
I found him because of cardamom. My mother had sent me across the city for the good kind, the fat green pods the spice shop keeps behind the counter like contraband, and while the shopkeeper weighed them out I heard an old woman on the stool beside the desk say, "Tell him I am angry. But write it so he comes home."
Rafiq bhai nodded the way doctors nod at symptoms. Then he bent over the page and turned her fury into three sentences I still think about, something about a door left unlatched all winter, and how a house holds its breath. The woman paid, pressed the letter to her chest like a compress, and left without counting her change.
I was twenty-six and I had never written a letter in my life.
I had typed apologies at red lights. I had ended a two-year relationship over voice notes, badly, at her sister's wedding of all places. Standing there with a hundred grams of cardamom going soft in my fist, I felt like a tourist in my own language.
"You want something written?" he asked, without looking up.
"No," I said. Then... "Maybe."
Her name was Sana. Eight months of silence sat between us, and every one of those months was my fault. I told Rafiq bhai the shape of it, the wedding, the thing I said about her father in front of two hundred guests, the way she had looked at me like I was a stranger wearing her boyfriend's sherwani. He did not flinch. Professional letter writers, I learned, are like barbers and bartenders. They have heard the worst version of everyone.
But he would not touch the pen until he had asked his questions, and his questions were nothing like I expected. What do her hands smell like? Orange peel, I said, surprised I knew. What song does she pretend not to like? What did you ruin, exactly, and be precise, because vague men write vague apologies. And finally: if she were asleep and could not hear you, what would you say?
I answered that last one with my eyes on the spice sacks... and my voice did something embarrassing halfway through.
"People do not pay me for words," Rafiq bhai said, wiping his nib. "They pay me for permission to feel what they already feel."
He wrote for twenty minutes while the market shouted around him. Scooters, a fish seller, two kids fighting over a kite string. None of it got into the letter. The letter was quiet. When he read it back to me, in a flat voice, deliberately flat, so the words had to do their own work, I understood that he had not invented anything. He had only said what I meant, minus my cowardice. Forty rupees for a page of me with the cowardice removed.
I came back the next week without a reason. Then the week after. I would buy cardamom nobody needed and sit on the customer stool while he worked. A soldier's mother dictating steadiness she did not feel. A teenager wanting a letter to his own father, two floors away in the same house, because some distances are not measured in stamps. Rafiq bhai took them all at the same price and the same seriousness.
"How many?" I asked him once. "In total."
He did the arithmetic of forty years in his head. "This market has been married on my ink three times over," he said. "And divorced maybe half of once. My percentages are good."
"And your own letters?" I said. "Who wrote yours?"
The nib stopped.
He looked at me for a long moment, then turned a small brass key in the bottom drawer of the desk, the one I had assumed held money.
It held letters.
Thirty-one of them, one for every year, each in its envelope, each addressed in his beautiful hand to the same name: Mehrunnisa. Not one carried a stamp.
She had lived two lanes over, he told me, above the bangle shop. In 1994 a young customer with good shoulders and no vocabulary had come to the desk and paid for a courtship, letter by letter, a whole monsoon of them. Rafiq bhai asked his questions. The man's answers were thin, so Rafiq bhai thickened them with his own heart, because his own heart happened to be pointed at the same window.
She married the customer in the spring.
Everyone said the letters had done it.
"The best letters I ever wrote," he said, closing the drawer, "are the ones that took her away. So now I write one a year, to keep my aim honest. Sending it would be theft. She built a life on those first ones. You do not get to bill someone twice for the same words."
I posted my letter to Sana that evening from the box outside the market, before I could reread myself out of it.
Eleven days later... she called.
We talked for one hour and forty minutes, and no, this is not that kind of story: she did not come back. She had someone, a good someone. But she said, "I read it four times," and then, quieter, "That was the man I kept waiting for." The letter did not get her back. It got me forgiven, which turns out to be a different, quieter miracle.
Something else happened, slower. I started writing my own things, clumsy at first, then less clumsy, until one night I finally wrote about love instead of around it. Rafiq bhai read the page, grunted, and charged me nothing, which from him was a standing ovation. It was his idea, months later, that I stop letting the pages die in my drawer like his did in his. So I typed one out and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, hands shaking like a man posting a confession.
It did not win... The second one did not win either. He told me to read an essay on why safe poems lose and then, without mercy, told me mine were safe. The third one was not safe.
The third one placed.
He died two winters ago, at the desk, mid-sentence, which the whole market agreed was the only acceptable way for him to go. The spice shop keeps the desk now. They will not sell it, not even to the man who offered enough to repaint the shop.
They gave me the drawer key at the funeral. Thirty-one letters to Mehrunnisa, which I burned unread in the lane behind the market, as instructed in his will, one page at a time, the smoke smelling faintly, absurdly, of cardamom. And beneath them, a thirty-second envelope I was not expecting, addressed in that beautiful hand to no name I knew.
To whoever sits here next, it said.
I sat down... I uncapped the ink.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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