My Parents' Courtship Letters, Found by Accident
In a trunk of winter clothes, two shy strangers I'd never met.
I was looking for a sweater and found my parents instead. Not the parents I knew, the ones who argued about thermostat settings and whether the rice needed more salt, but two strangers with my parents' handwriting, folded into a biscuit tin at the bottom of the winter trunk, underneath the shawls that smelled of mothballs and my grandmother's cupboard.
Forty-one letters.
I counted them twice, sitting on the cold floor of the storeroom with dust turning slowly in the one bar of light from the ventilator.
The first one I opened was in my father's hand, but wrong somehow. Younger. The letters leaned forward like a man walking into wind. It began: "Respected Meera ji." Respected. My father, who I have watched eat pickles directly from the jar at midnight, once called my mother "respected" and meant it so hard the pen dug grooves into the paper.
I should explain what I knew of their courtship before that afternoon: nothing. The official story was four sentences long. Families knew each other. Match was suggested. They met twice before the wedding. "It was a different time," delivered in the tone that ends conversations.
The letters told a different story, or rather, they told the same story the way lightning tells you about a landscape you thought you knew in the dark.
They wrote for eleven months. The first letters are so formal they creak. My father asks after her family's health in three separate ways in one page, clearly out of material, clearly desperate to keep the page going anyway. My mother replies with weather reports. The monsoon arrived early. The gulmohar on her street lost its flowers in one night. "The road was entirely orange in the morning," she wrote, "and by evening the sweepers had taken it all away, and I thought, no one else will remember this."
Reader, I put the letter down and stared at the wall. My mother, the woman who once described the Taj Mahal to me as "crowded," wrote that.
Somewhere around the ninth letter, the formality starts to crack, the way ice cracks, from underneath... quietly, before anyone standing on it knows. My father starts underlining words. My mother starts asking questions that are not about anyone's health. "You mentioned you keep a notebook. What goes in it? You do not have to answer."
He answered.
Letter eleven is the notebook letter, and it is the letter that undid me on that storeroom floor. My father, twenty-four years old, a junior clerk with two good shirts, confessed to a woman he had met once, chaperoned, over tea he was too nervous to drink, that he wrote poems. That he had never told a living soul. That his own father would have considered it a symptom of unemployment. "I am telling you," he wrote, "because you asked, and no one has ever asked."
No one has ever asked. Four words, buried in a biscuit tin for forty years, and they explained my entire childhood.
Because here is the thing. My father read poems to me my whole life. Other men's poems, always. Faiz on Sunday mornings, loudly, over the protests of the whole house. But never once his own, and I never knew there was an "his own" to hide. I grew up to be a writer in a house where I believed I was the first one, a strange mutation, a swan hatched among sensible accountants. I spent years reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and never once suspected I had grown up eating dinner across the table from one.
Letter seventeen contains a poem. His. For her. It is not good. I say that with total love: it is four rhyming lines about her eyes and the evening star, and it is the kind of poem that would get gently murdered in any workshop on earth. Under it he wrote, "Please burn this if it displeases you."
She did not burn it.
It was in the tin. She kept the bad poem for four decades through six house moves, which is the most devastating literary review I have ever encountered.
The Question I Finally Asked
I sat with the letters for three hours, and then I did something I am still not sure I had the right to do. I carried the tin to the kitchen, where my mother was cleaning coriander, and put it on the table without a word.
She looked at it. Her hands went still in the leaves.
"The sweater trunk," she said. Not a question. Then, after a silence with a whole marriage inside it: "Did you read them?"
"Some."
I braced for anger... What I got instead was my seventy-year-old mother wiping her hands on her sari, sitting down, and opening the tin like a girl opening it, checking, I understood later, that they were all still there. All forty-one. She keeps count too.
"Your father thinks I threw these away in 1989," she said. "Do not correct him. He will start behaving like a poet again, and I do not have the energy."
Then she told me the parts the letters left out. How her father read every letter first, so they invented a code: anything underlined was really meant, everything else was for the censor. Which means my father's habit of underlining, the habit I watched all my life in the margins of newspapers, was originally a love language. How she almost ended it at letter thirty because an aunt reported he had been seen laughing with a colleague's sister, and letter thirty-one, which I went back and read that night, is two pages of the most panicked, un-poetic, deeply sincere groveling ever committed to paper. It worked... Obviously. I exist.
"Why did you never show us?" I asked. "Why did he stop writing?"
She thought about it for a long time... folding a coriander leaf into smaller and smaller squares.
"He did not stop," she said. "He just went back to having no one who asked."
I have been sitting with that sentence for a month now. I wrote my way through it the only way I know, ending up with a poem about a love that survives by hiding, and about the way memory waits in trunks and tins for someone to come looking for a sweater. I entered it in a monthly contest under my father's initials, not mine. If it wins anything, I will have to explain that. I am looking forward to explaining that.
Last Sunday I tried an experiment. My father was reading the newspaper, underlining something, and I said, as casually as I could manage, "Papa, did you ever write anything yourself? Poems, anything?"
He did not look up.
But the pen stopped.
"Why do you ask?" he said, to the newspaper.
"Because no one ever asks," I said.
The pen stayed where it was for a long moment... Then my father, eighty-one years old, junior clerk turned senior clerk turned pensioner, two good shirts turned a cupboard full, said quietly, "There is a blue diary. Bottom of my almirah. The lock is broken, you just have to be patient with it."
The road was entirely orange in the morning, my mother wrote once, and no one else will remember this.
She was wrong. I remember it now. That is what the tin was for.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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