Ghost Letters Read online

  BOOKS BY STEPHEN ALTER

  The Phantom Isles

  Ghost Letters

  GHOST LETTERS

  Stephen Alter

  Content

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  1 Gripe Water

  2 The Calligrapher’s Apprentice

  3 Trash Hill

  4 Versification

  5 A Moving Finger

  6 The Yankee Mahal

  7 Curried Okra

  8 A Bottled Message

  9 An Edict in the Basement

  10 Bad Luck

  11 Trout Fishing

  12 Rattle Beach

  13 The Postmaster’s Tale

  14 Par Avian

  15 Lenore

  16 Dead Letter

  17 Texting Through Time

  18 A Rolltop Desk

  19 The Overland Mail

  20 To Whom It May Concern

  21 Alone in the Jungle

  22 The Philatelist

  23 Salvilinus frontinalis

  24 Beyond Xanadu

  25 Penmanship

  26 The Himalayan Mail

  27 Parcel Post

  28 First Snow

  29 The Postage Stamp War

  30 Trapped

  31 The Siege of Ajeebgarh

  32 More Rhyme Than Reason

  33 Special Delivery

  34 Rest in Peace

  35 Terms of Surrender

  36 The Inkstand

  37 Scrambled Alphabet

  38 Reveille

  39 Shattered Hopes

  40 Rewriting History

  41 Epitaph for an Unknown Postman

  42 Erasing Fate

  43 Back to School

  44 Postscript

  Imprint

  For Rohan and Suresh

  My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!

  And yet they seem alive and quivering

  Against my tremulous hands …

  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

  If all the world were paper,

  And all the seas were ink …

  ANONYMOUS, 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 …

  1

  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 before—no 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 blue—almost 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 letters—some 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 a
nyone 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.

  2

  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 illiterate—villagers 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 tints—from 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 lovers—the charred bark of an ashoka tree mixed with the attar of roses. Another is employed to write a curse—the 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 pen—the one with the nib made of gold and a stem of the clearest jade.

  3

  Trash Hill

  Gil let Kipling off his leash as soon as they crossed the street into the town forest. The old dog put his nose to the ground and headed straight for the trees. A scruffy mix of English setter and bloodhound, Kipling was fourteen years old, the same age as Gil. Though the dog was completely deaf and almost blind, he had a nose that could find anything from a half-eaten tuna sandwich to a chipmunk hiding in a brush pile.

  It was about three in the afternoon and there was nobody else in the park, except for a dozen geese near the old ice pond. The birds raised their necks and gawked at Kipling as he raced off across the uncut grass.

  Gil whistled for the dog, though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Kipling had a habit of searching out anything that smelled bad and rolling in it. A few days back, he had discovered a rotten blue jay’s egg that must have fallen out of its nest. Throwing himself upon the cracked white shell, he had writhed about with dogged pleasure, grunting in delight and covering himself with its stench, as if it were the sweetest perfume. Bits of greenish yolk and eggshell clung to the fur around his neck. Walking Kipling back home, Gil almost threw up, it stank so bad. Worse than skunk. He and his grandfather had to hose the dog off in the backyard, then shampoo him twice before they could let him back in the house. Even then, the faint odor of rotten egg lingered on his fur.

  After that, Gil had decided to keep Kipling on a leash whenever they went out for a walk. But today he’d given in and unclipped him, knowing how much the dog liked to run free. Now he wished he hadn’t.

  “Kip!” he shouted, chasing the dog. “Hey, Kip! Come back here, boy … Kipling, you stupid mutt!”

  Gil knew there wasn’t any point in calling. Kipling couldn’t hear him from even three feet away, and by now he was a hundred yards ahead, a shaggy brown torpedo with a ragged tail. Maybe he’d caught the scent of a deer, or a coyote. Gil wrapped the leash around his fist as he ran, cursing the dog under his breath.

  As he reached the edge of the woods, dead leaves crackled under his shoes. Pushing aside branches, he tried to spot Kipling in the underbrush. There was no sign of the dog.

  “Kip!” he shouted again, more out of frustration than from any hope of being heard.

  A moment later Gil heard a bark. It wasn’t the gruff baying noise that Kipling usually made, but higher pitched, an exclamation of alarm. Hurrying in the direction of the sound, Gil had to climb over a fallen oak and wade through blueberry bushes. He hoped there wasn’t any poison ivy. Where the trees ended stood a rusty, chain-link fence with a large sign.

  DANGER

  NO ENTRY

  CARVILLE TOWN DUMP

  POLICE TAKE NOTICE

  Beyond the fence lay a marshy area full of swamp grass and ferns. Fifty yards farther on rose a humpbacked hill overgrown with vines and weeds. Gil could see Kipling sniffing about near the foot of the hill. He tried calling again but knew it was pointless. Moving along the fence to his left, he found a place where the wires had been torn open, a hole just large enough to scramble through. Glancing back at the sign with hesitation, Gil got down on his hands and knees and crawled inside.

  By this time Kipling had stopped barking. Because of the marsh, Gil circled around until he found a section that wasn’t as muddy as the rest, though his shoes squelched as he jumped across. When Gil reached the dog, Kipling was standing still, one forepaw raised. Even though he wasn’t a trained hunting dog, his nose and tail pointed straight out, quivering with excitement. Coming up beside him, Gil clipped the leash to his collar.

  “Come on,” he said. “Crazy pooch!”

  But Kipling wouldn’t move. He gave another bark and Gil looked up to see what the dog was pointing at. By this time, he had realized the hill was actually a garbage heap, a huge mountain of rubble and discarded junk. It looked as if it had been years since anyone had dumped things there, and most of the mound was covered in creepers. Bushes were growing out of old tires, and a stunted birch tree had taken root in a cracked bathtub half filled with dirt. One corner of a rusting refrigerator jutted out from under an avalanche of rotting leaves and dead branches. There was even an old
sofa half buried in the hill, moss growing on the cushions. Kipling was pointing to the left of this, at a dented tin mailbox with a red plastic flag. It was attached to an iron stand and leaned precariously to one side, sticking out of the junk pile.

  Gil couldn’t understand why Kipling was pointing at the rusty old mailbox. Maybe a raccoon had its burrow in the hill. Tugging impatiently at the leash, Gil was startled to hear a voice behind him.

  “Does your dog bite?”

  Swiveling around, Gil saw a girl about his age, sitting astride a mountain bike. She had black windblown hair and dark brown skin. The sleeves on her sweatshirt were rolled up to her elbows, and the knees on her jeans were torn. She had one foot on the ground and the other rested on a pedal. The wheels and sprockets of the bike were covered in mud.

  “I heard him barking,” the girl said. “What’s his name?”

  “Kipling,” said Gil. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite.”

  “Do you live nearby?” the girl asked.

  Gil nodded, eyeing her cautiously. “I just moved here last week.”

  “I’m Nargis,” she said.

  “Hi. My name’s Gil,” he said, winding Kip’s leash around his hand self-consciously.

  “How did you get in here?” Nargis asked. She had a blunt way of speaking but seemed friendly enough.

  “There’s a hole in the fence,” he said, wondering how she had entered the dump. “I guess we’re not supposed to be inside this place.”

  “Well …,” said Nargis. “There really isn’t anybody to stop you. The dump has been closed for years. There’s a new recycling center and mulching station on the other side, over there beyond the trees.”

  “Must be a whole lot of junk buried here,” Gil said.

  “Yeah. I call it Trash Hill. If you climb to the top, you can see the ocean.”