The Typewriter in My Grandfather's Attic
It still held a half-typed page, mid-sentence since before me.
The page was still in the roller. That is the detail I cannot get past, even now: not the typewriter itself, but the fact that for thirty-one years, through monsoons and power cuts and my entire childhood happening two floors below, a sheet of paper sat clamped in that machine, stopped in the middle of a sentence.
We were clearing the house to sell it. My grandfather had been gone eight months, and the attic was the last room because it was the room nobody wanted. I went up with a torch and the family's lowest expectations: broken fans, moth-eaten razais, the usual archaeology. Under a bedsheet gone yellow at the folds, I found a Remington portable, and in the Remington, the page.
"and if you had stayed, I would have"
That was where it ended... No full stop, because the sentence had never been given one. The ribbon had dried to grey. The date typed at the top was March 1994.
I was born in 1995.
You have to understand who my grandfather was. A retired stationmaster. A man whose letters, when he absolutely had to write them, read like timetables. Family legend held that he had never in his life written anything longer than a complaint to the electricity board, and that the complaint had worked, because even the electricity board could sense he was not a man for second drafts. He signed my birthday cards "Blessings, R.N. Sharma," like a receipt.
So the half sentence in the roller did not sound like him. It sounded like someone who had been living in his room without paying rent.
The rest of him was in a tin trunk beside the desk. Carbon copies. My grandfather, railwayman to the bone, had kept carbons of everything he typed, and what he had typed, from 1962 to 1994, was letters. Hundreds of them. Every single one addressed to the same man: his younger brother, Om.
I had heard of Om exactly twice in my life, both times as a warning to change the subject. The brothers had quarrelled in 1962, over the ancestral land, over a signature, over something that four decades later nobody could describe but everybody could feel. Om had left for Nairobi. As far as the family knew, not one word had crossed between them since.
Except my grandfather had written to him every few months for thirty-two years.
And mailed none of it.
The early letters are furious. Legal, almost: numbered points, the word "betrayal" typed so hard it pierced the carbon. Then, somewhere around 1971, the anger starts to lose its posture. "Amma asked for you before the end. I told her you were well. I do not know if you are well."
By the eighties they are not arguments anymore, they are dispatches: my father's wedding, the mango tree coming down in a storm, the new fast train through the junction, "which you would have liked, you always liked speed, it was your worst quality and also I miss it."
He wrote to his brother the way other men pray: privately, regularly, and without any real hope of an answer.
We were a family that kept carbon copies of everything except our apologies.
The last letter, the one still in the machine, was different. It was the only one that began "My dear Om" instead of just "Om." It ran fourteen lines and then: "and if you had stayed, I would have". March 1994 was the month, my father confirmed later, that the tremor in my grandfather's hands became impossible to hide. He never typed again. He could have finished the sentence in pen, in speech, in anything... He chose instead to leave it in the roller and cover the whole apparatus with a bedsheet, the way you cover a mirror in a house of mourning.
Downstairs, my family reacted the way we react to everything: tea was made, and the subject was changed.
But I could not change it.
I had just spent two years teaching myself to write, taking every course I could find, treating the craft like a trade you apprentice into, and here was the discovery that the trade was already in my blood, running underground for three decades in a locked attic. My grandfather was a writer. He simply had an audience of zero, on purpose.
It took me a month to find Om's family. The Nairobi address on the earliest unsent envelope led nowhere, but an old railway colleague's son remembered a forwarding address, which led to a daughter, Rekha, in Toronto. Om had died in 2009. I wrote to her, apologizing for the strangeness, explaining the trunk. Then I did the thing I still cannot fully justify: I rolled a fresh page into the Remington, cleaned the ribbon with methylated spirit until it consented to print, and typed out the last letter in full. All fourteen lines.
And then I finished the sentence. "and if you had stayed, I would have grown old arguing with you, which is all I ever wanted." It was not my sentence to finish. I finished it anyway, because the alternative was that it stayed broken forever, and I have come to believe that some inheritances are instructions.
Rekha wrote back in eleven days.
The envelope was heavy.
Inside were photocopies of nine letters, in Hindi, in a hand that slanted exactly like my grandfather's.
Om had written to his brother too.
Nine times over the years, from Nairobi and then Canada. He had mailed none of them either. "My father kept them in his Gita," Rekha wrote. "We found them after. I did not know who to send them to. I have been waiting fifteen years for your letter without knowing it."
Two brothers, two continents, one quarrel, and a combined lifetime of correspondence that never once risked a stamp.
I have read those nine letters more times than I can count. The last one, from 2008, ends: "I hear you have a granddaughter who reads."
That is me... He knew about me. The line travelled from a man I never met, through fifteen years and a photocopier, to land in my lap like a hand on the head.
I have written about the two of them since, trying to understand how forgiveness can be fully drafted and never sent, how a grudge can be nine tenths love and still hold its shape. I typed the first of those pieces on the Remington itself, which my family let me keep, possibly because they were afraid of it. The keys stick. The bell at the end of each line is the loudest thing in my flat. I have grown to need it, that bell, telling me the same thing sixty times a page: the line is over, return, begin again.
The original half-typed page is framed above my desk now, unfinished sentence and all. People assume it is a memory I am preserving.
It is not. It is a deadline.
Say the sentence... Send the letter. Whatever is in your roller, whoever your Om is: the attic is patient, and it will happily keep your silence for thirty years, and it will hand the whole undelivered weight of it to a grandchild with a torch.
Mine is the last generation that got to finish his sentence.
I intend to finish all of my own.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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