My mother wrote letters the way other people pray — daily, repetitively, without expecting much in return. I have a tin of them under the bed. I have not opened it in years. This is not, I think, neglect; it is a kind of saving, the way one saves the last piece of cake for a person who has not yet been invited to the party.
The letters are mostly about the weather, the neighbours, and what she had cooked that week. They are also, somehow, about everything else. She had a way of reporting on the bougainvillea that made you feel personally responsible for its blooms, and a way of mentioning my father's cough that made you understand the entire household had stopped to listen to it.
When I was a young man in Bombay, learning to be a teacher, her letters arrived on Tuesdays. The hostel boys teased me for keeping them in a cigar box. They were right to tease me. I would tease me too. But I also kept the box.
She wrote 'God bless' at the end of every letter, and I believed her every time, even on the days I did not believe in God.
I am told the post does not work the way it used to. I am told my grandchildren send each other small films of themselves, and that this is a kind of letter. I do not disbelieve them. But I will say that no film I have seen contains the smell of my mother's writing paper, and that the absence of this smell is, for me, the central fact of the modern age.