Letters My Grandfather Didn't Send

We found them in the Godrej almirah
beneath the land papers and a tin of old coins,
tied with the jute string he used for everything.

Eleven inland letters, blue, folded,
addressed and stamped and never posted —
fifteen paise each, in a year when that was something.

One to his brother in Warangal
after the quarrel over the mango orchard:
I was wrong about the boundary stone. Come for Ugadi.

One to a schoolmaster in Nalgonda
who taught him the English he wrote the letters in.

One to my grandmother, though she slept
three feet from him for fifty-one years:
Your hands smelled of jasmine at the wedding. I never said.

The rest are to people we can’t place —
a Lakshmi, a Ramulu, a man called only Sir.

I think of him at the post office counter,
the letter warm in his shirt pocket,
the clerk looking up — and him buying instead
a packet of envelopes, some glue,
walking home the long way through the bazaar.

What did it cost him, keeping them?
What does it cost any of us,
the things we write and fold and carry
until they soften at the creases
into something like a second skin?

My grandmother read the one addressed to her
standing at the almirah, not sitting down.
Then she tucked it into her blouse
and made two cups of tea that evening —
out of habit, she said. Only habit.