Portrait of a couple.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

This unusual story began a decade ago. Last week, the story met its climax.

In 2014, The Delhi Walla purchased from a vendor at Delhi’s Sunday Book Bazar a crumpled polybag filled with envelopes addressed to cities like New York, Geneva, Dar es Salaam, Paris, Belgrade, Moscow and Delhi. Spanning over 40 years, these were letters exchanged between a husband and wife. The handwritten correspondence began in the 1940s, when he was her suitor. The bag had passed to the vendor from a “raddiwalla,” who had sourced it from a “raddiwalla” in an upscale Delhi neighbourhood.

Without doubt, this lifetime’s worth of letters must have been discarded mistakenly. (Every Sunday, such abandoned family heirlooms surface in the book market). Whatever, the contents in the bundle revealed the evolution of a loving companionship, plus something more. In 1976, the man, who is visiting Tanzania, writes to the woman, who is at their home in the US. “President Nyerere remembered me and spoke to others of my contributions… It’s getting lonesome, I’m beginning to miss you.”

The man routinely interacted with heads of state. Per a UN document, he was “one of the most brilliant officers of the Indian Foreign Service.” Indeed, he served as our diplomat in the planet’s most tiptop cities. In 1968, he writes to her from London. “The flight was boring. I slept between Tehran and Geneva. Switzerland was overcast. So far I have not spent a penny. It is all on Air India. Do take care of your BP. Hope chaprasis are helping.”

The woman’s letters were as descriptive. In the winter of 1961, she writes to him while visiting her elderly parents in UP. “Everything is full of dust and cobwebs. Mamma concentrates intently, as always, on her dilapidated pots and pans, and it is impossible to divert her attention. Papa goes about in a moth-eaten pullover and a wholly patched up dressing gown that even a tramp would discard… It is painful, coming home.”

The rich correspondence ended with the man’s post-retirement death in Delhi in the 1990s.

Back in 1984, the man, then living in Europe, received an envelope from New York. It enclosed a poem, a “sorry, and thank you” rejection slip by the high-brow New Yorker magazine, and a friend’s note, stating: “I return it to you sadly. They kept it so long that I was certain they meant to use it.”

Last week in the Sunday Book Bazar, The Delhi Walla sighted a book. It was the man’s memoir, titled… no, privacy of these good people has to be honoured! Safe to disclose that the memoir’s final part contained what the New Yorker had rejected—the man’s poetry.