She liked letters. When she was little, she used to see her grandma’s face so alive when she tore open the letters from her masi who lived in Mumbai. She remembered that smile now. It always gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Those blue sealed letters were so special. There were little titbits about Masi’s life, how she was coping in a strange new place and even what she had cooked recently. When her cousin grew older, the letters even contained drawings he had made of her, her brother, and everyone the toddler could think of. These letters she could only remember by smell, visions, sarees her grandma wore and bits and pieces of smiles and almost tears.

She grew up in the era of emails and then smses. She disliked those perfunctory words, the phrases that did not have a slant and details of one’s personality. She had written love letters once. They are as lost to her now as the person she had written them for. She still thought of letters. The scrapes and scratches of personalised emotions. The tip of the T, the missing dots of Is. The quality of the paper, the fineness of the ink. She jumped up and looked for a page she could write on.