The Pen Pal

The class sang “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to me on my last day at Bedford Road School. Mrs. Haber, my first grade teacher, had taught it to my classmates by having them listen to a vinyl record spinning on a portable turntable in the middle of the room. One child at a time donned the large padded headphones connected by a thick spiral cord to the player. The song was the Mitch Miller version featured in Giant, the movie that painted a picture of a West Texas town that was as unfamiliar to me as Mars.

Many decades later, I would learn the history of racism associated with that song I loved so much. But, in the moment, this gesture by Mrs. Haber to wish me off was, for me, one of pure love. My eyes teared up as I bit my lip and tugged at my motley quilted vest and mustard-colored corduroys. I hugged the kids and Mrs. Haber, and she let me go.

I was a true New Yorker, the second of two siblings born in this country. My father had immigrated early, before the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act; he must have been one of the first Indians his colleagues met. And, in 1978, I, too, must have seemed a little alien, the only brown kid in a class of white kids, mostly Italian and Jewish.

Outside our home in Pleasantville, a quick train ride to New York City, my big brother and I raked leaves. We picked apples from the tree in our yard, and we walked down our block in the evening to greet our father after his commute home. In the summer, we’d wander aimlessly, passing the gazebo where the small band played on national holidays.

Between the singing of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and the departure to West Texas the next week, several friends came by offering going-away gifts in the form of stationery: one set, with a border of daisies, was given to me by my best friend. The others featured ladybugs and cats, and were nestled in flat boxes with separate compartments for the colored envelopes and for the gold stickers with which to seal them. I kept them for years afterwards, as they were too precious to use. I probably still have them somewhere.

My father had taken a job as a professor at the medical school in Lubbock, Texas, and he’d purchased us a house there. However, not until we stayed at the motel down the road from what would be our new neighborhood did I realize that we were going to live in Lubbock. And here we were now, in this strange, uniformly brown landscape: the ground was brown, the flat buildings were brown, the sky at the end of the day was brown with dust, which eventually settled into striations of pinks, purples, and magentas. At the end of the block, my New York apple trees had been replaced by a cotton field.

The new kids I met were not quite friends yet, so thank goodness for that stationery. I wrote letters to my friends in New York, and they wrote back. My mother read them all, checking for spelling errors and marks of silliness or stupidity, because the move from New York to Texas had not changed the expectation that my work was to be excellent.

I also wrote a card to Mrs. Haber. My mother proofread it, offering feedback on the niceties (“Don’t forget to ask how she is”) and confirming that it carried a positive tone, a sunny image. I don’t know exactly what that first letter said, but I’m sure it contained the essentials: We now live in Texas. I started a new school, and it is fine. My mother and father are fine, and my brother is fine too. Love, Suchi.

When Mrs. Haber responded the first time, my mother said, “How nice of her to write back.” Adults didn’t have to take that kind of interest in children, she believed, and Mrs. Haber’s letter was a favor. I, on the other hand, was elated by this piece of mail with my very own name on it, that insisted that I existed.

I wrote back immediately with the same fervor that later propelled me to our local library branch, just to pore over the Yellow Pages of other US cities I wouldn’t visit for decades. With expensive long-distance rates in those days, no home computers, and a six-hour drive to the closest major city, Lubbock may as well have been Brigadoon. So, I took the time to draft another letter to Mrs. Haber—an affable note, a fine note—and copied it onto a piece of stationery. That summer, I received my first birthday greeting from Mrs. Haber. I answered it.

From then on, almost without fail, Mrs. Haber and I corresponded around my birthday and Christmas. In between were letters about the weather, about my new friends, about my dread and excitement of having to leave those friends for extended summer sojourns to India. In turn, Mrs. Haber wrote about her trips and her teacher friends, some of whom I knew. She told me about her children.

In time, my mother stopped spellchecking my letters, which was fine with me, because the truth was that I’d started loving to write, and, even in my letters about nothing in particular, I’d weave together sentences that I loved about experiences that were all my own.

I wrote about my high school classes and teachers, the academic honors I’d received. There was, of course, no mention of the strangeness, the ill fit, of being Indian and Hindu in the middle of a Panhandle Bible Belt town, no mention at all of my listening to the Smiths or Depeche Mode on college radio in the dark, dry nights after everyone else had gone to bed.

By my high school graduation, Mrs. Haber had retired from teaching and moved to her family’s nineteenth-century farm in Connecticut. I set out for Yale, just an hour train ride from Mrs. Haber’s.

My letters from Yale to Mrs. Haber were rose-colored to the point of mania: All my classes are “amazing” and “challenging,” I am lucky to be here, and my roommates and I are “soulmates” who engage in occasional ribbing. Nothing in those letters revealed the extraordinary imposter syndrome that I lived with from the very first day on campus, when I became unassailably aware of my public-school education, my non-legacy status, and the trifecta of brilliance, charisma, and confidence that my college-prepped suitemates exuded. It’s also hard not to feel a little compassion for that younger me, who “fell in love" so often with my English professors that once I actually started dating a boy my own age, Mrs. Haber expressed her profound relief, peppering me with a page of questions about him.

Perhaps it was the challenge of my classes at Yale, or just my being overwhelmed, but it did not occur to me to take the train to New London to visit Mrs. Haber. One hour away, and still I wrote to her about college, about boys, about balancing school with writing fiction. I tend to think that I wanted the relationship to exist solely in those letters, that it was the writing between us, the narrative it created, that kept us tethered, and me safe.

Yale was a blur, but I gave Mrs. Haber the play-by-play of graduation after I returned home without a job or a graduate program to attend. I was in my early twenties, and I spent so much of my time in a haze of self-pity that I glossed over pieces of a transformative story that Mrs. Haber was telling: her beloved husband’s health was declining. I remember feeling privy to something very important when I read those letters, and I passed on my condolences when the time came, but it was only decades later, when I lost my beloved father and Mrs. Haber’s sympathy note arrived, that I realized how profound her grief must have been.

During that haze, my paragraphs actually became substantial. There were ruminations about whether to reconsider a career as an English professor (though I was clearly not suited) or pursue a career in medicine, like my respectable Indian friends. I wrote about the pressures of being Indian-American, with a particular obsessive focus on the need to get married—and pronto. I began to talk about my parents as actual people, apart from me, with different thoughts than my own.   

* * *

At my fifth college reunion, feeling bold after reacquainting myself with friends who remembered me, I finally dialed her number from a payphone in the courtyard of the Silliman College.

“Hello?”

Even one word in, I heard a voice that was raspy New England genteel, sweet but tough as nails, with a tinge of the tri-state area in which she grew up.

“It’s Suchi.”

“Suchi!” It was the first time since I was six that I’d heard my name in her voice. It was exactly how I’d imagined it when I read her letters. “What an absolute treat!”

“I’m at Yale, at my reunion,” I blurted, “and I thought I’d call you, because I can’t visit, but I just wanted to—” Rambling, in case conversation stalled.

And then, lots of agreement, lots of nervous laughter, and the warm security of talking to an aunt I hadn’t seen in ages, who was happy to listen to anything I wanted to share. “Is it really you?” Mrs. Haber kept interjecting, and we’d giggle some more.

As I was apologizing for the brevity of my trip, and she lamented not being able to come out to New Haven for the day, I spied old friends across the campus. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to shake the cognitive dissonance created by this odd convergence of people from different moments in my life. All that time I thought I was living different stories—the kid one, the high school one, the college one—it was just one long one, with chapters shared by folks I’d been meeting along the way. But very few of them knew the collective story. And fewer still had the receipts to prove it, like Mrs. Haber did.

I opened my eyes when Mrs. Haber said, “This is kind of a unique relationship, don’t you think?”

“I owe you a letter,” I said, digging in my satchel for another quarter.

“Oh, I know you’ll get to it,” she said. “But this is better. I get to hear your voice.”

I had to laugh. She had been hearing my voice since I was six years old.

“And call me Alison,” she said.

* * *

Mrs. H—our compromise when I refused to call her Alison—and I did meet several years later on a trip I took from my home in Brooklyn. I’d been working in New York, still writing to her about my battle to find time to write creatively, and she continued to write me back with the best heckling I will ever receive (“Glad to hear that your goal this year is to relax. Yeah, right.”). I was twenty-four years out of first grade. Accompanied by my husband-to-be, Joe, and my girlfriend Nandini, I took the train out to New London along that winding path around the Connecticut coastline, watching the summer terrain change from bright green marshland reeds to dark green woods, sheltering white clapboard houses. I saw my other possible life—if only we’d never moved—pass before my eyes. But I was a stranger here now.

I was expecting someone older, frailer. She was, after all, nearing eighty. I could not have been more off the mark. Mrs. H was tiny and sturdy, showing us around her hundred-year-old, wood-beamed farmhouse. Of course, she had wrinkles, but her dark eyes shone behind her big glasses in a way that made it seem like she was tickled by just about everything. In my five-foot-two–high body, I felt giant, ungainly, just watching her walk spryly past the iron stove to the brick oven.

She joked with us and at us, laughing and rolling her eyes hilariously, but mostly she and I just looked at each other and smiled the way small children do when they haven’t seen each other for a long time and their parents are hanging about. That summer afternoon, we sat on her porch, eating a fresh salad and looking out on the bright, lush farm. Upon leaving, Mrs. H and I hugged both a long-lost hello and a long-lost goodbye.

I sobbed on the train ride home. Maybe it was from knowing that, as my mother had stated, Mrs. Haber’s letters had been a favor to a little girl, to help her to write, to tell her story. When I met her, in her space, at her farm, I recognized her as a person, and not just an address to send complicated thoughts from a confused young woman. And to that person, I was so grateful.

Nandini invited Mrs. H to Joe’s and my wedding shower in New York. Mrs. H drove down by herself from New London and parked right there in the East Village.

“I put this together for you,” she said, after we’d finished our tea and sandwiches. Her sweet voice was shaky, and her face was etched with lines, but she still peered out of those mischievous eyes. She handed me a heavy box.

As I unwrapped it, I could see it was a keepsake box, about fourteen-by-sixteen inches, in the shape of a book. On the front, an engraved plaque read, “Suchi’s Letters 1978-2002.” I placed the box carefully on the table and stared. My future mother-in-law burst into tears.

I opened the lid: There was my childhood, in my own words.

I saw daisy-bordered envelopes; thick deckle-edge Crane’s stationery I spent my high school allowance on during the days when I pretentiously drank coffee I didn’t like and read The New Yorker; my high school graduation invitation; and my college graduation invitation. I saw the most precise cursive handwriting, each lowercase f a flourish, every capital L demonstrating calligraphic perfection. There were microscopic print characters scrawled into cards and my own signature, studied and stable when I was tiny, and sprawling as I approached adulthood.

From under these gifts, I pulled from the box a brand-new journal. In it, Mrs. Haber had written, “What better story could you write than the one of your own adventures?”

I’d like to think that in that moment, I abandoned my insecurities: about my writing ability, about belonging, about excellence. I did not. But, even so, I was overwhelmed by the certainty that, whatever unfamiliar paths I’d tread or choices I’d made, I was living a life that was both ordinary and yet extraordinary, because someone had chosen to remember it.

Mrs. H was unable to come to our wedding, but our correspondence deepened, now defined not just by birthday and Christmas cards but also Christmas photos of my growing boys and, incredibly, email. Thanks to her daughter, Cindy, and her creative granddaughter—who is my age and a writer—Mrs. H began using email like a boss (after she learned to remove the caps lock).

Some years later, I was attending an education conference in Storrs, Connecticut. Given my understanding of what it meant to be an outsider in my school, it seemed fitting that I’d become neither a doctor nor an English professor but an educator focused on diversity and equity. I reached out to Mrs. H, who confidently got on the icy highway to meet me at Geno’s Grille, owned by legendary University of Connecticut women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma. We were reminiscing and eating when Geno himself came by the restaurant to broadcast his radio program. We both gawked like teenage girls.

“Go, get a photo,” Mrs. H said. “Go.”

“No way,” I said.

“Geno!” she yelled. He turned our way. I flushed.

“Can we take a picture?” she asked, sweetly. She could go from bossy broad to charming little old lady in no time. Geno graciously agreed, because, who’s going to say no to Mrs. H? As if I were twelve years old all over again and not a middle-aged mother, I stood up in the restaurant and took a photo with Geno.

When, in 2015, Cindy reached out to friends to help celebrate her mother’s ninetieth birthday with personal messages, Mrs. H and I had been corresponding for thirty-seven years. I sent a page that included a note of appreciation for the farmhouse lunch, for the wedding shower gift, for the photo with Geno. I thanked her for her faith when she wrote to me: “I do believe your life story so far could be the novel you want to write.” I included the path of our friendship as the weather changed: scans of my different addresses in her handwriting—from dusty Lubbock to damp New Haven, humid Atlanta, frigid Chicago, temperate New York, and the blinding sun back in Austin. I also included two images: a photo of us at Geno’s Grille and a photo of her first grade class in 1978 on the day they sent me off to the notes of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

SUCHITRA V. GURURAJ

Suchitra V. Gururaj is a New York-born, West Texas-raised South Asian-American who currently lives in Austin, Texas. She is a writer, teacher, and university administrator who holds degrees in English from Yale and the University of Chicago. She completed a fiction residency at Ragdale.