Causing a great deal of dismay
To Satyajit Ray.
That letter is reproduced in the book
Travails with the Alien, which is a time machine into an epistolary world of ruled yellow notepads and formal letterheads. Even the envelopes tell stories. Stanley Kubrick’s letter came in an envelope with a
2001: A Space Odyssey seal.
Aerogramme memories
A few years ago, while emptying out my storage locker in the U.S., I found boxes of letters that friends and family had sent in the days before email. My mother’s handwriting fills every possible inch of the aerogramme letters, eventually crawling sideways along the margins to squeeze in the last bit of news from Kolkata. At the end, a tiny rectangle is left for my father, who I suspect wrote his bit under strict instructions from my mother. But any day a letter arrived was a red-letter day in our immigrant lives because despite its humble, even banal details, it smelled of home.