The letter that missed its mark

In April 1988, I wrote a letter that never reached its destination — yet it etched itself forever into my life story. Just days earlier, I had got engaged in a quiet village in Una, Himachal Pradesh. Like many young men of my generation, I longed for a secure job and a simple, content life. At the time, I was working as a document writer in the district courts of Amritsar, far from my village in Kangra. My fiancée and I had only met briefly, but her name — and her father’s — stayed vivid in my mind. Soon after the engagement, fortune smiled. I received an ad-hoc appointment as a stenographer in the Income Tax Department. Overjoyed, I wrote a heartfelt letter to my bride-to-be. With no mobile phones or Internet back then, a handwritten letter was the only means of personal communication. I addressed it carefully, using her name and her father’s, trusting the postman to deliver it safely.

But fate had a twist in store. When the letter reached her village, my sister-in-law was at the door. She feared village gossip. A letter from a future groom could be misread, so she refused to accept it.

To make things more complicated, another man in the village shared my fiancée’s father’s name. The postman, confused, handed it to that family. As luck would have it, a cousin of mine — a former classmate now married into that household — saw the envelope, recognised my handwriting, and understood the mistake. She replied warmly, congratulating me and explaining what had happened. When her letter arrived, my heart skipped a beat. Could it be from my fiancée — a quiet nod to our new bond? Perhaps a shy message or a hand-drawn flower? But as I opened it, reality smiled — it was from my cousin. Not the romantic reply I had imagined, but a moment that still makes me chuckle. And yet, the warmth of that letter stayed with me — as did the one that never reached its mark.

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