The Friend Who Kept All My Letters
Thirty years later she returned them, a biography I'd forgotten writing.
Kavita handed me a shoebox at a wedding buffet and said, "Careful, that's your whole life."
She was not exaggerating.
She is the only person I know who has never once exaggerated.
Inside the box, held in rubber bands gone brittle with age, were one hundred and forty three letters. All of them in my handwriting. The earliest was dated June 1994, written in gel pen by a fifteen year old who dotted her i's with circles. The last was from 2009, typed, printed, folded badly. Thirty years of me, filed by a woman I had somehow let become a Diwali text and an annual birthday call.
"I'm moving to Leeds," she said, spooning dal onto her plate like this was a normal conversation. "To live with Ritu and the grandkids. I'm not shipping your life across an ocean. It's yours. I was only borrowing it."
We became letter writers by force. In 1994 my father's transfer took us from Nagpur to Jamshedpur in the middle of ninth standard, which at fifteen is not a relocation, it is an amputation. Kavita and I promised to write, the way all separated teenagers promise, and the promise usually lasts three letters. Ours did not stop for fifteen years. School, college, first jobs, her arranged marriage, my chaotic one, cities changing under our feet. We only trailed off when email won, and then the phone won, and then the great convenience of it all quietly starved the thing it had promised to feed.
I took the box home from the wedding and did not open it for eleven days. I want to be honest about why. I was afraid of her... the girl in the box. I was fifty one years old and I did not want to be seen by a fifteen year old with strong opinions.
When I finally opened it, on a Sunday, with chai going cold beside me, I discovered something strange: Kavita had not just kept the letters. She had curated them. Little pencil notes on the corners of envelopes, in her tidy accountant's hand. "The one about the physics teacher." "First mention of R." "Read this one when angry with her."
She had built an index of me. A referencing system for a friendship.
I read them in order, which took three evenings, and it was the most disorienting thing I have done in years.
Memory, it turns out, is a terrible secretary. It throws out the files and keeps the furniture.
I remembered 1996 as a good year. The letters say I cried in the chemistry lab and made the peon promise not to tell. I remembered my twenties as lost and frightened. The letters are hilarious, cocky, alive, full of plans drawn in the margins. The woman I thought I had been all along was nowhere in that box. Someone better and worse and far more specific was.
Then I reached March 1999 and stopped being able to read for a while.
The letter is four pages. It was written eleven days after my father died, and I have no memory of writing it... None. That entire spring is a corridor I walked through with the lights off. But there it was, in my handwriting, steadier than it had any right to be, describing the last conversation I had with him, on the verandah, about mangoes, about whether the Alphonso hype was justified, him laughing, the whole thing recorded in detail by a twenty year old who somehow understood she was writing down something she would need returned to her someday, at a kitchen table, at fifty one, when the sound of his laugh had otherwise gone wherever sounds go.
I called Kavita at eleven at night. She picked up on the second ring, as if she had been expecting it for thirty years.
"The mango letter," she said. Not a question.
"You knew."
"Beta, why do you think I kept them?"
And then she told me the part I had never known, the turn my own story had been hiding from me. In 2004, the year she lost the baby, the year she describes as her floor giving way, she did not manage books or prayer or people. What she managed, some nights, was the shoebox. She reread my letters in order, all of them, twice, like a serial. "You were the only voice that didn't know what had happened to me," she said. "Everyone else spoke carefully. Your letters just went on being ordinary. Ordinary was the only thing I could digest."
I had spent thirty years thinking she kept my letters out of sentiment, the way you keep concert tickets.
She had kept them the way you keep medicine.
A true friend keeps the rough drafts of you, in order, for decades, and never once mentions the corrections.
There is a whole shelf of poems about memory, and most of them get it wrong in the same way. They treat memory as something inside us. It is not inside us. It is distributed. It is stored in other people, in their spare cupboards, in their pencil indexes, in a flat in Pune belonging to a woman patient enough to be your archive. We think we carry our lives. Mostly, our lives are carried.
One more thing was in the box. At the very bottom, under 2009, was an envelope in her handwriting, marked "Open last, don't be dramatic about it." Inside was a single page. It said that her favorite letter of all of them was from October 1997, where I had announced, with the total confidence of nineteen, that I was going to be a writer, a real one, published and everything, and that she should keep my letters because they would be worth something.
"They were," she wrote. "Not the way you meant. But you still owe me the other thing."
I sat with that page for a long time... Then I did something I had been circling for three decades and finding excuses around. I took the truest thing I had ever written, a poem about a verandah and a mango and a laugh, and I sent it to a monthly poetry contest, at fifty one, with the shoebox sitting next to the laptop like a witness. It felt less like ambition than like settling an old bill. Whatever happens to it, a girl in 1997 has finally been taken seriously by someone, and the someone is me.
Kavita flies out in August. Before she goes, I am giving her a box of my own. It is smaller than hers, because I was a worse archivist, but her letters are in there, the ones that survived my careless decades, and I have started adding pencil notes to the corners. "The one about the baby." "Read this one when Leeds is grey." On top of the pile I have put one new letter, freshly written, stamped out of pure ceremony, the first in seventeen years.
It opens the way every one of my letters to her opened since 1994, four words I once wrote without thinking and now cannot write without my chest doing something complicated:
"Dear Kavita, you won't believe..."
Because she always did. That was the whole gift. For thirty years, on paper, somebody believed me, filed me, kept me. Hope is usually described as a thing with feathers. In my experience it is a thing with rubber bands, slightly brittle, holding a life together in a shoebox, waiting at a buffet to be handed back.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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