Every afternoon, I saw my grandmother waddle out to the lobby and wait for the lift to take her down six flights of floors. On the ground floor, next to where the scooters were parked, was the room where the letter boxes were.
Apart from Sunday when the post-office was closed, my grandmother received a letter every day. They came from all over, and in varying shapes. Yellow card like postcards, folded blue inland letters, and palm sized envelopes and the most exciting of all, blue rectangle aerograms that spoke to me of worlds farther away.
I knew because the addresses had to be written in English, and grandmother needed my help then. Every day of the week she wrote to someone, or the other, members of a vast family that had grown from a tiny coastal corner of Bengal, now Bangladesh to spread out across the world, different branches moving in straight zooming lines or in loping arches across seas, continents and across borders.
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She wrote to her daughters in Bengal, her sisters in different cities of eastern India, a cousin in Bombay, and a variety of nieces and nephews, whose links to her she could yet work out in the most accurate and succinct manner possible. It was through her that I knew of places as far apart as Bombay, Chinsurah, Pondicherry, Barisal, Karachi, London, Toronto, Dallas and Los Angeles.
As telephone technology improved and trunk dialling gave way to STD calls, my parents and I pointed out to her the marvels of improved communication. Grandmother wrote her letters and said nothing. It was as if she knew that a letter contained a charm and a mystery that could simply not be replaced. The places she wrote to were those that came to existence first in my imagination, places I would only later chance upon in my Oxford School Atlas.
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At her urging I wrote too. Write a line here, she would say. Already the three pages of an inland would be full but she insisted that if I was concise, economical and neat, I could write what I wanted to on the margins, or on the foldable flap itself. My first lines in English were written, in my deliberately tiny, neat handwriting to an uncle in faraway Los Angeles. How are you? I am fine.
There would be many more times I would write those lines, ‘How are you? I am fine.' I liked seeing the pride in my grandmother's eyes when I wrote in English; the thought too of my few lines being carried all the way to someone far away. In time, for some part of my childhood years, I wrote letters too, replicating my grandmother's ways. I wrote in English, describing my life, asking about other lives strange and unknown. And as I wrote, my grandmother told me bits of family history, how these people I wrote to were my relations and, in a way, the world grew smaller. I learnt to recognise people through their handwriting; it fostered a new familiarity.
My grandmother fell down one day as she traipsed down to the letter box room. She recovered and resumed her old ways, but we put an end to that when younger children of the locality mimicked her cruelly, as children do.
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My grandmother wrote as she grew older but grew suspicious too. Letters weren't being delivered, she complained. I did not have the heart to tell her there were no replies because no one wrote letters any more.
In an age of ever-expanding social networking, I remember my grandmother's letters when I came across some of her letters to me. She had had someone write out lines in English and then copied them down, in the painstaking, neat way she wrote her other letters. Staring at those tiny whorled words, I wondered how near my grandmother felt to me that moment. A postcard written 20 years ago had its own resilience against the thousands and millions of words that emails carry, that vanish somehow in the vast vaults of cyberspace.