My family and other people

My dad used to save letters. It just struck me - while thinking about them - that some of those letters are from his late teens. He must have treasured them to have hung on to them through moves all around the country and across the ocean and back. He never mentioned them. I just found them at the back of a shelf in my parents' old almirah, lying behind discarded purses and dog-eared photo albums. There were too many for me to carry across the ocean, so I brought a selected sample home to the U.S. after my dad passed away in 2008. The earliest letters are from the mid to late nineteen forties when my father was away at Darbhanga medical college. Most of them are postcards written by his mother, reminding him to eat properly and write often, with added notes from his younger siblings still at home (he was the eldest). The letters are not very interesting - they talk about exams or illnesses or relatives coming and going - and yet some of these unremarkable things are illuminating ...

The first time I got on a plane was to come to the U.S. That was also the first time I got on an escalator, a steep one, with a bulky carry on bag (with a tendency to tip over), in the recesses of which I lost my boarding pass and very nearly did not make it on to the plane. Below is a picture from that day, August 5th, 1987. I am wearing one of my five new outfits, a pickle green kameez with yellow piping. It was a new beginning for me, after years of drifting and hitting emotional bottom, so I was happy to leave. My dad, of course, knew I was never coming back (at least to stay). You can see it in his face. Thirty five years and hundreds of hours on planes, in airports. Years ago, we had many options to travel from Detroit to Kolkata with just one stop - British Airways, KLM, Royal Jordanian, Lufthansa. Now both airports have lost many airlines and our travel time these days is never less than 30 hours. Once, when KLM was our airline of choice, we put all our heavy luggage in a...

The gold Moto E4 I've had for 5 years had been in decline. It would suddenly freeze and have to be rebooted. People would call and say that they couldn't get through. The Android version was too old to have it sync with my new Fitbit. Finally, yesterday it stopped eating...the battery wouldn't charge. I checked on it many times throughout the day as the charge gradually drained out. In the last hour, I suddenly realized that there were pictures in it I hadn't uploaded anywhere else. So as the final minutes ticked away, I sat with the phone and called up memories of the last five years. I liked my Moto, it was a very reliable phone. But the camera wasn't the greatest. Also, I'm not really into taking pictures. So it was surprising how much made it into the photo album on my phone.. Five years ago Rashmi was still at U of M doing competitive ballroom dancing. Rahul was still in high school, where, once he decided to get a diploma, he put his mind to studying a...