Letters to other people

"Was he creative?" my friend asks, looking at the photographs on the wall. There's something strange at work here that I find interesting only now. I 'took' those five photographs of my father that are on the wall. Four of them from fourteen years ago; the last one, where he's holding my son and laughing, head thrown back, seven and a half years ago. All are black and white and though nobody else has noticed, I know that two of them have been flipped. It's easy to tell with the ones where my parents are on the swing: they have their positions reversed.

It's interesting because the printer seems to have looked at the ancient negative from the other side and not even I realised until much later. Looking at those five photographs gives me a strange sense of unease; as if I have deliberately falsified this man in it, said something about him that was true and yet not right. There's been a sleight of hand here.

"Was your father creative?"

I answer by saying other things about him. None of them are offshoots of the word 'creative.'

With a slight sense of panic I realise that there's very little to go on. Very few photographs; none that I can bear to look at from the last three years. And letters to other people.

I left home to go to boarding school when I was 12. That means the father I knew was the one who wrote me letters. When I was 10 and going through a premature adolescence, I locked myself in my room and he slipped letters to me under the door. I don't know what they said, but they must have charmed me out of my sulks.

'Charmed' is the wrong word. My father was more solid than that.

In school, when others got one letter every ten days or so, I got two letters a week. One from my mother and one from my father. I was the object of everyone's envy. Then there were all those other years when I studied in different cities, got married and never returned home except for holidays. All those years of letters and nothing to show for it.

Because I don't keep any letters. I tear them up, sometimes after a few years, but I tear them all up. No exceptions. Especially not letters that came regular as clockwork, spoke of routine things at home with the customary questions. I don't remember if I even answered as frequently as I used to.

When I returned, those letters stopped. Instead, I took on secretarial duties. He would write the letters out longhand and I would type and print them out. "One plus one" he'd say. "Two plus one".

"Why can't you just say you want three copies? What is this 'two plus one'?"

To, The Commissioner, GHMC. Sub:

To, _______, The HMWSSB. Sub:

To, _______, Sub:

Sometime in May, sitting around the table after lunch, one conversation set my father off on some tangent that led him to the airing of some long-nourished grievances. Having worked himself up into a frenzy, he claimed he could show us proof: letters he had hoarded that would demonstrate someone's perfidy. These stories were decades old. My mother and I looked at each other in dismay.

A few days later, my father, unable to do the climb of one flight of stairs, decided to shift his things downstairs. I found him sitting on the floor, tearing up what looked like letters, but came out of a file. He would take one out, read it briefly, tear it up into tiny bits and throw them in a plastic bag.

"These are those letters. I decided not keep them anymore."

One and a half months later, he was gone. There are no diaries, no journals, no private letters. Not even an anniversary or a birthday card. Not even the letter I wrote to him on his 69th birthday, a long one that turned out to be other than the carefully composed manuscript I had been working on because we had had a fight the night before. He read that one early in the morning and cried. As he had the year before, when he read the poem I had written for him, by hand, on a scroll-length piece of paper.

I feel envious. He left nothing except those official letters and numerous small pieces of paper with practical notes pinned on to files.

"Was he creative, your father?"

He wrote like an angel, I should have said. That would be a typical piece of misdirection, like those photographs that are reversed on the wall.

In Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, the dead sister's book is received with high praise. She wrote like an angel, people said. But she didn't write any of it; the narrator did. The dead sister kept a diary with brief, cryptic notes, numbers, practical things. Like angels who keep ledgers, marking off who goes where and who deserves what. She wrote like an angel.

He wrote like an angel.