My father was not a man who wrote letters.
He was not a man who talked much either - not about feelings, not about the past, not about the things that had been difficult. He expressed himself through actions. He fixed things. He showed up. He paid bills on time. These were his sentences.
When he died we found a tin box in the back of his wardrobe.
Inside were letters. Forty or fifty of them, bundled with a rubber band that had dried out and cracked. All in his handwriting. All addressed. All unsealed, unsent, unposted.
There were letters to his father - my grandfather, who had died when my father was twenty-three. Letters that started formally and became less formal as they went on. One that was only two lines. One that went on for four pages and stopped mid-sentence as if he had run out of whatever had been making him write.
There were letters to his brother, who lived in Lucknow and with whom he had a falling out I had always known about but never understood. The letters were not angry. They were just - trying. Each one a different attempt at saying the same thing, the words slightly different each time, never quite right, never sent.
There were two letters addressed to me.
I have not read them yet. They are still in the tin box which is in my wardrobe now. I know they are there. Some mornings I think about reading them. Then I think about it a little longer and close the wardrobe.
I think about my father sitting somewhere - at the kitchen table late at night maybe, or in his office on a Sunday - writing these letters he never sent. Trying to say things he did not know how to say out loud. Getting close and then stopping.
We all have those letters. Most of us never even write them down.
I am glad he wrote them down. Even if he never sent them. Even if I cannot read mine yet.
The writing was something.
