A life in letters
By Adil Jussawalla

TWO enormous bundles stare at me as I write. They look like bundles of clothes, the sort dhobis carry, but they’re not. They’re bundles of letters, the sort we carry to the nearest post-box. There are letters from London, Iowa City, Honolulu — places I’ve been to. There are also letters from places I haven’t been to — Tokyo, Madrid, Seoul. What are they doing with me?

I put the question that way rather than ask what I am doing with them because the answer to what I’m doing with them is too simple. What I’m doing with them is keeping them. But the answer to what are they doing with me is complicated. What they’re doing with me is keeping me from going insane.

That’s simple answer too, you’ll say, Yes, but look at the complicated routes by which the answer’s arrived at. You get nasty letters, nice letters, loving letters. The truly nasty ones are those which are official — the sort that threaten to disconnect your phone or electricity because you haven’t paid a bill which was sent to you three years ago.

You have the bill, you have the receipt, you know you’ve paid. The matter sorted out with the authorities you want to burn the offending letter but you can’t. Because you fear a similar letter will reach you in three years’ time and you’ll be asked for proof that not only have you paid the bill but that you’ve received the previous letter.

Terrorised in this way, we keep certain letters. But why do we keep them, if at all we do, when there’s no such terror?

The letters in the two bundles I mentioned earlier and several other bundles in different parts of the flat don’t know how narrowly they’ve missed extinction. Several times over the years I have thought of handing them over as they are, in their protective bundles, to the raddiwalla, much, I supposed, as someone would hand over a littler of kittens he was meant to drown to someone else: he himself couldn’t do it.

At times I’ve felt he/I could do it. I’ve stalked those bundles, my fur rising, wanting to tear those pigeons to pieces. They take up so much place, they mess my place. But I don’t pounce, the claws withdraw, and I’m ashamed of my thoughts.

Every few years I go through the letters I’ve received, not to read them again but to separate the accumulating heaps. I’m in the process of doing so now.

I think there are times in everyone’s life when he or she thinks that there’s never been a life. Separating the heaps, reading an old letter or two by chance, is a way of discovering you’ve had a life and that some of its details are glorious — it’s just that you’d forgotten them.

— Associated News Features