Authors: Stephen Alter
Ghost Letters
B
OOKS BY
S
TEPHEN
A
LTER
The Phantom Isles
Ghost Letters
Stephen Alter
2 The Calligrapher's Apprentice
41 Epitaph for an Unknown Postman
For Rohan and Suresh
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands â¦
E
LIZABETH
B
ARRETT
B
ROWNING
If all the world were paper,
And all the seas were ink â¦
A
NONYMOUS
, 1641
Stooped under the weight of a bulging mailbag, the ancient postman trudges along his route. The frayed brim of a gray blue hat is pulled low over his eyes. He plods silently down the street, turning off where the old cart road used to run from Boston to Hornswoggle Bay, now a quiet cul-de-sac lined with a dozen homes. Years ago, there were farms along this route, but the land has been consumed by sprawling suburbs. At places the old stone walls can still be seen, though the furrowed fields have been covered over by lawns and plantings of juniper and rhododendron, as well as the occasional swimming pool. Where barns and silos once stood are rows upon rows of anonymous dwellings. The postman ignores these modern homes.
In the gray twilight, he is a ghostly apparition passing across driveways, through hedges and over sidewalks, between piles of freshly raked leaves, retracing the invisible alignment of the cart road that has long since disappeared. Children playing street hockey do not notice him. A dog looks up, ear cocked, but doesn't bark. The postman carries on, as if the suburbs had never been built. He crosses the
backyards of split-level homes, once a cow pasture, now divided into half-acre lots. New mailboxes line the street, but he doesn't stop.
Slouched with age, a figure vaporous as smoke, the postman travels through a different era, a simpler, less cluttered age, when a first-class stamp cost five cents and the letter carrier knew everyone along his route by name. Now he is invisible, a figure lost in time, an unknown postman from the past â¦
Gripe Water
The trail was clearly marked, even as it twisted down the hill, through an overgrown tangle of scrubby pines and stunted maples. Gil wasn't sure exactly where he was headed, though the sign a quarter mile back read
RATTLE BEACH
, with an arrow pointing in this direction. He still couldn't see the ocean, and when he finally came out of the trees, there was a dense patch of thorns and fireweed. Another hundred yards farther on he came to a broad shelf of granite that overlooked the gray Atlantic. Fifty feet below him, down a natural staircase in the rocks, lay a ragged crescent of pebbles and shingle, littered with tin cans and other flotsam. It wasn't like any beach Gil had ever seen beforeâno sand at all. The water was much too rough and cold for swimming this time of year.
Gil kicked a stone in disappointment and disgust. The grubby fingernail of beach only added to his unhappiness. After being expelled from McCauley Prep School a week ago, he had come to stay with his grandfather, who lived in an old
stone house up the hill. It was bad enough to leave his friends behind and listen to his parents scolding and complaining about his future being destroyed. But worse than that was ending up here in a dead-end town called Carville, on the southern shore of Massachusetts. He liked his grandfather, who was a sort-of-famous poet, but there was only so much they could talk about. After a game of Scrabble last night, Gil had pretended he was sleepy and gone to bed, lying awake and trying to figure out how he was going to survive the next few weeks. There wasn't even a TV in the house, or a computer. It was like living in a museum. The only thing he could do was walk the dog and read old magazines whose subscriptions had run out long before he was born.
Getting thrown out of school was kind of like being on vacation, except everyone else was in class. Though Gil didn't mind taking a break from homework, math problems and pop quizzes, he felt a bit like a castaway. He had never been very good at making friends, but this year he had met a couple of classmates at McCauley Prep with whom he liked to hang out. Now he was alone again, standing on a deserted beach with nothing to do, as bored as a bear in a zoo. He picked up one of the flat stones and tried to skip it across the water, but the waves were too rough. About a hundred yards from shore he could see a couple of lobster buoys. A motorboat went past, but there was no other sign of life, except for the gulls that wheeled overhead. Gil kicked at a soda can half buried in the beach. There was also a frayed length of rope, and slimy fingers of kelp wrapped around a piece of Styrofoam that looked as if
it had been chewed by a shark. Broken clamshells lay among the stones and scattered bits of a crab that one of the gulls must have eaten for breakfast.
As Gil turned around to head back up the rocks, he saw something blue floating at the edge of the water. It was an old bottle. A wave rolled in and he heard the grating sound of pebbles rattled by the tide. Reaching down, Gil fished the bottle out. Though covered with sea scum, it was a dazzling blueâalmost purple. He rinsed it off when the next wave came in, and held it up to the sun. The glass was scuffed with sand and the base was chipped, but otherwise it was intact. There wasn't anything inside, as far as Gil could see, but the bottle was sealed with a cork that looked as if it hadn't been opened for years.
Molded into the glass on the front of the bottle were a few lines of raised lettersâsome kind of brand name. But these were badly worn and hard to read. Tilting the bottle to one side, Gil deciphered the words:
A. K. Jaddoowalla's
Finest Indian
GRIPE WATER
Gil didn't know what it meant, but he suddenly had an idea. Rummaging in the pocket of his jacket, he found a pencil stub and a scrap of paper he'd been carrying around for more than a month. It was an old notice for an overdue book from the McCauley Library.
Putting the bottle down, Gil flattened the paper on one of the rocks and scribbled a message:
Help! I'm stranded on a desert island. Save me!
                 Gil Mendelson-Finch
He felt a little foolish when he folded the paper, yet couldn't help but smile to himself. With some tugging, he was able to uncork the bottle. It was dry inside, and as he stuffed the paper down the neck, Gil wondered if anyone would ever find his message. Of course, they'd know it was a joke, but somehow, writing those words made him feel better.
Replacing the cork, he threw the bottle out into the waves, as far as he could. Then he watched its blue shape bobbing on the surface for a while. By the time he climbed back up the rocks and glanced over his shoulder, the bottle had disappeared.
The Calligrapher's Apprentice
More than a hundred years earlier and half a world away, in one of the narrow lanes that run from Ajeebgarh Railway Station, through the spice bazaar, to the Central Post and Telegraph Office, stands a small shop with a canvas awning and a sign in English, Urdu and Hindi.
Ghulam Rusool
Letter Writer & Calligrapher
Government Forms, Petitions,
General Correspondence & Poetry
The shop has a low, wooden desk and cushions for the letter writer and his clients to sit upon. Most of the people who come to Ghulam Rusool are illiterateâvillagers from the hills, laborers on the tea estates or indigo plantations, and other townspeople who never learned to read or write. As each of them dictates letters and applications, judicial documents
and messages of congratulation or complaint, the letter writer carefully transcribes their words in any of seven languages he knows.
At the back of the shop, his apprentice, Sikander, prepares and mixes the ink.
It's not an easy job. Every day, after his lessons finish at the madrassa behind the mosque, Sikander hurries to the letter writer's shop and settles down to work. There are dozens of different kinds of ink: blue, red and green, but mostly varying shades of black. Though ignorant people think there is only one color of black, Sikander can name eight different tintsâfrom the feathers of a crow to the dark night of the moon.
For ordinary ink, Sikander uses soot gathered from lamps in the town. Each morning, before going to school, he does his rounds of the neighborhood, collecting the oily black residue wiped off glass chimneys. The soot that he collects is mixed with water and shellac from the gum trees that grow in the foothills above Ajeebgarh. Their trunks and branches are nicked hundreds of times, and the resin that oozes out of the trees gives the India ink its permanence and a polished sheen. The letter writer uses this for most of the documents he prepares, but there are special recipes for other inks that have their own unusual purposes.
The calligrapher is an old man, with a white beard and stooped shoulders, but he still has a steady hand. He shares secrets of the craft with his apprentice, whispering the mysteries of the written word. One kind of ink is always used for correspondence between two loversâthe charred bark of an ashoka
tree mixed with the attar of roses. Another is employed to write a curseâthe darkest black of all, made from the burned remains of funerary flowers mixed with the glue of donkey's hooves. There's an ink for writing an old man's will, which uses indelible pigments squeezed from a mountain cherry and the singed wings of moths burned by a candle flame. Yet another ink requires venom from a scorpion's tail, and is prepared only for signing a death warrant by the king. But the most magical ink of all is used for writing couplets to summon a djinn. Never before has the calligrapher revealed the mysteries of this ink, which traces verses that conceal forbidden secrets. Three different kinds of residue are mixed together: the carbonized seeds of a custard apple, the ashes from a water pipe smoked by a wandering dervish and the soot from a genie's lamp.
Sikander holds his breath as he grinds the blend of ingredients with a mortar and pestle until it is as fine as gunpowder. Then with trembling hands, he stirs in a measure of gooseberry wine. When the ink is the right consistency, a shade of black he has never seen before, Sikander shows it to the calligrapher. The old man sniffs the mixture cautiously. He nods approval and asks for his penâthe one with the nib made of gold and a stem of the clearest jade.
