The Ancestral Letters in a Language We Lost
A shoebox of ink nobody in the family can read anymore.
My grandmother kept thirty-one letters that no one ever saw her read, and when she died, the alphabet died with her. We found them the week after the funeral, in a biscuit tin inside a trunk that smelled of mothballs and dried neem leaves, tied together with a shoelace. The paper had gone the color of weak tea. The ink still looked wet in places, which is a thing old ink does to trick you into believing it was written recently, by someone still alive.
The script flowed right to left in long, joined strokes, like water finding its way down a window. Shahmukhi. Urdu letters carrying Punjabi words, the way my grandmother's generation wrote before Partition redrew not just the map but the direction of our handwriting. Everyone in my family reads Gurmukhi now, left to right, a different alphabet for the same tongue. We can all say the words.
Not one of us could read them.
My father held a letter up to the tube light and said, probably land documents. My mother said, love letters, obviously, look how small the writing gets at the end. My aunt said we should burn them unread, because whatever a dead woman kept hidden for sixty years was hidden for a reason, and reasons do not improve with age.
I took the tin home to my flat in Chandigarh and did nothing with it for eleven years.
That is the part of this story I would edit out if I could. The tin moved with me through three flats and one marriage. It sat on top of wardrobes, under beds, behind a box of winter clothes. Every Diwali cleaning, my wife would hold it up and raise an eyebrow, and I would say, this year, definitely... and put it back.
There is a particular kind of guilt that comes from owning words addressed to your own blood and letting them stay sealed inside their alphabet. It does not sting. It just sits on the wardrobe.
What finally moved me was, embarrassingly, homework. I had started writing again after years away from it, working through a page of prompts the way other men my age take up cycling. One prompt said: write about an object in your house you cannot read. I sat down to write something clever about the washing machine manual, and instead wrote four lines about a biscuit tin, and then put down the pen and got the tin down off the wardrobe with shaking hands, as if it had heard me.
Finding someone who reads Shahmukhi in a city built entirely after Partition took three weeks. A librarian gave me the number of a retired schoolmaster named Ashraf sahab, eighty-one years old, who taught Urdu for four decades and now, as he put it on the phone, teaches it to pigeons on his balcony because no one else enrolls. He lived one bus ride away.
He had been one bus ride away... the whole eleven years.
He put on two pairs of spectacles, one over the other, untied the shoelace like it was a surgical knot, and read the first letter aloud in a voice you could have poured over ice.
They were from my grandmother's elder sister. Sarwari. A name I had heard exactly once in my life, in a fight between my grandmother and her brother that stopped the moment children entered the room. Sarwari had married into a family in Lyallpur in 1944, three years before the border came down between the two of them like a shutter. The letters ran from 1948 to 1953. Thirty-one of them... Then nothing.
And here is what undid me: they were boring.
Gloriously, unbearably boring. The price of mustard oil in Lyallpur. A recipe for carrot pickle that apparently their mother had taken to her grave out of spite, which Sarwari claimed to have reconstructed, and which she wrote out in full. Teasing about my grandmother's husband's ears. Complaints about a neighbor's rooster.
Again and again, one line, in letter after letter: send a photograph of the child. The child was my father. There was no photographer in the village. She asked eleven times.
The last letter was shorter than the rest. Ashraf sahab read it twice before translating, and the second time his voice dropped the way voices do at the border of other people's business. Do not write to this address again, it said. Things are not good here for us. I will write to you when I can. Kiss the child. Live long.
She never wrote again.
Nobody knows the rest, and by nobody I mean nobody: that generation is gone, and they took the rest of the story with them, the way they took the script.
We did not lose the language in one generation. We lost it one unanswered letter at a time.
I understood, then, what my grandmother had been doing on those afternoons when she sat by the trunk and told us she was checking her papers. She was the last person in the family who could hear her sister's voice, and she visited it the way you visit a grave: alone, regularly, telling no one, because what would there be to say. For sixty years she held the only key to a room, and we never once asked her what was in the room.
We were busy... I was busy. She offered to teach me the script when I was twelve, one summer, with a slate and a reed pen she had kept. I remember the slate... I remember choosing cricket.
Regret is mostly imprecise, a fog. Mine is precise. Mine has a date, a slate, and a reed pen.
So I do the only repair available to a man holding thirty-one letters and no time machine. Every Tuesday and Friday I take the bus to Ashraf sahab's balcony, and he teaches me Shahmukhi among the pigeons, three letters of the alphabet per week, his hand over mine correcting the angle of the stroke. I am fifty-three years old and I write like a kindergartner, and he tells me the pigeons have seen worse. When something in a lesson snags on a memory, I go home and write it down, because I have stopped trusting my family's ability to carry anything unwritten across even one more generation.
Last month, for the first time, I read a full word from the letters without his help. I sat with the seventh letter, the one with the pickle recipe, and worked through the salutation stroke by stroke, sounding it out the way my grandchildren sound out English on cereal boxes.
Behna, it said. Little sister.
Sixty-eight years after a woman in Lyallpur licked the envelope, her word crossed the border, the shoelace, the biscuit tin, the wardrobe, and eleven years of my cowardice, and arrived.
I am translating them all, at my kindergarten pace, one letter per month. I have also written out the carrot pickle recipe in Gurmukhi and given it to my daughter, who made it, and reports that it is far too sour, and that she will make it again anyway.
The tin sits on my desk now, open. The letters have waited long enough to be read; they should not also have to wait to be seen.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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