To You, Divya and Gurdit

(Background: This letter request came to me from my friend, Divya. “I want you to write me a love letter on marriage. That can be your wedding gift to me. 

Oh and these are the dates for my wedding, and sending you the card”. 

This was the not so detailed brief I got and a few quick messages on the day of her mehendi on all the reasons she and Gurdit chose each other. So this one’s for you, my lovely, a letter and a case for marriage).


To you
Divya and Gurdit,


I don’t know what makes up a marriage. Perhaps, it is the sum of:


The years, the people occupying it, their secrets: both those they share and those they never do, a thousand irritating habits, nights of soft comfort, the feeling of having made your own family in a hyper-social world that can feel eerily strange each time you pick up or put your phone down. Familiarity, stillness and safe spaces (far sexier than a rush of newness). The plans for vacations, for building empires together, making schedules to meet relatives and friends, never actually being able to meet all the relatives and friends. Somewhere over the weekends of buying groceries and wondering which movie to not eventually watch becoming a team, a tribe, and most importantly loyal friends.


People from different  points of views will give you advice on marriage. From all that you should expect and why you shouldn't. Terribly sexist Whatsapp message memes, to whispers of “just compromise and adjust, that’s all”. You’ll be tempted to take their advice since you’ll assume that having lived through it they’d know better or know more. But, smile through it and remember that, like fingerprints, snowflakes and nature of fat cell deposits, there are no two marriages which are completely identical; a strength you should never forget. 

Your marriage doesn’t have to look, sound or behave like anyone but your own and you get to design it. Paint its walls a different colour every year, put a painting up or not, invite friends over, throw a rug to hide a hole in a couch and like any beautiful home fill it with love and above all laughter.


You told me in breathless texts that sometimes your quiet worry is how different you two are. 
How Gurdit would prefer to stay home on a lazy Sunday, plan out his week and share quiet silences and music with you, while like a whirling dervish you’d love to go out into the sun, meet friends and make up new plans every day. How wonderful that Gurdit’s quiet and your ecstasy will get a chance to find places of rest and expression in each other! I’d take that over similarity, any day.


The making of a family seems to me like making art. 
You’re not going to start with a finished Monet landscape of water lilies that millions can admire, immediately. You’re going to find frustration and paint all over your hands and clothes, times when the big picture doesn’t seem to come together and days when you’ll wonder looking at a splotchy, purple, unfinished canvas why you took on this project anyway?

Because, maybe all the books, songs and art is right: love really is the best kind of magic there is to living.


I don’t know the insides of a marriage, or the sometimes tough times all of us will inevitably face, but the promise of a partner seeing you through the routine, everyday, non-Instagram worthy moments is what this adventure seems to be all about.

Someone to document, sometimes record and never fail to remind you of the different pitch and bass undertones to your snoring, the person most likely to wake up and pass you a glass of water at 2am, hold your head when you suffer from a street food induced poisoning, whose voice on the days you choose to pay attention will still make you weak in the knees when all he would’ve said is “pass the remote?”. Someone who will bear witness to useless pro-con lists of all the decisions you take, try their best to support what they think (to themselves) are clearly idiotic decisions, most times call you out on them, watch you  shed skin off old habits and remake yourself into all the new people you’re going to be.


And somewhere along the way, that Monet landscape will come together and you’d have made art, kid.


Congratulations, Divya and Gurdit, do this your way and do it in style.


All my love,
Kakul

(Divya and Gurdit, the first time they met)

(At their engagement)

(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com or on my Instagram account @hyperbolemuch)

To You, Ayeshu

(Background: This love letter comes with a side serving of an apology for how long it took. A mother wanted me to write a love letter for her daughter, Ayesha, as a first birthday present. After an email and speaking to her for half an hour, I struggled with representing a feeling I didn't know of myself. So here it is, "amma", a love letter from you to Ayesha, I hope I've done this justice. Happy birthday, may every year feel like new magic and old love).

Dear Ayeshu,


The making of a person is a great many things.

But first comes the making of the two parents. Their zig-zagged journey of becomings, unbecomings, coming together and navigating life until they’re ready to make space for a new one. Your father and I finding each other, in this mixed up world, and building our home together felt like it’s own special miracle to me. Our love felt so incredible and complete that I wasn’t sure there was room in our world for any more. That is until you came along.


I don’t remember when you became a part of me, maybe it was that hot evening your father and I had just eaten gol gappas at Om Sweets and I felt a wave pass through me, like a tiny fish swimming home tired after a long day. Or one of the many, many visits to our doctor where I’d ensure that I saw the scans over and over again to make sure every toe was exactly where it belonged. You were building yourself inside me, kunju kutty, verterbra by verterbra and all I wanted was to give you the best first home you’d ever know.


I wish I could tell you the specific moment you became a part of us but something feels like you’ve been here all along, in ways neither me nor your father can ever understand. You’re made of an old school love, romance and a friendship a decade deep that I wonder sometimes, if that’s where you get your personality from. 
I know you get your big, beautiful eyes, your dimples which flicker like stars each time you laugh, and your voice from me, but the way you love and trust so completely is magic I didn’t know of before. 
Do you know that you also inherit the thickness and heart of four languages (English, Hindi, Marathi and Tamil)? When I scold you softly, or when I hold you against my heart to feed you, I whisper to you only in Tamil, “kunju kutty”, ,my “ammu kutty”, like my mother used to talk to me. Is this why they call it mother tongue? 
In your flesh, I find myself remembering and being my mother. 
Are you teaching me soft lessons on memory, legacies and roots, my little girl?



Because this year, I’ve learnt so much from you. 
How before any fancy corporate title, I will always be Chief Worrier of anything that can happen to you. I will successfully imagine, dismantle and preemptively take action against a thousand things that can go wrong, when you’ve only so much as rolled over on your back. You’ve taught me that reason you’re called my “flesh and blood”, is because every time you’ve fallen sick and not been eating, I’ve watched my own heart sink and my appetite curl up in a foetal position refusing to get up.



You’ve taught me that I cannot plan everything. Don’t get me wrong, kid, I will still continue to, but with you I know that along the way I’ll learn how to give up control and just laugh along, because look there’s a bird in the sky and that’s all that’s deserving of our immediate attention at this moment. 

I’m watching you become a little person. I see shadows of moods cross your face. I see hints of edges of your father and me and I see already, all the things we will talk about when you’re talking to us. 
I have a list Ayeshu, and I know it will not hold a candle to the wonder and world of questions you’ll bring to us.


You’ve taught me that my one year old precious girl can be the master of appearances. Strangers stopped us after your first birthday at Tirupati, to comment on how calm and well behaved you were. Baby girl, do you specially reserve this peaceful calm for strangers and all your beautiful storms for amma?


More than anything else, Ayeshu, you’re teaching me how to renegotiate, navigate, learn and unlearn contours of love and life. I’m learning with you, how to love differently, insistently and more permanently: myself, your amazing father, our life together and you.



Happy first birthday.



All my love,

Amma

                                            (This is Ayesha, in "Amma's" belly)

(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com or on my Instagram account @hyperbolemuch)

To You ~ Boy From Yesterday

(I hadn't written a #ToYou letter in so long because everything I was getting was a ticky-tack version of the same, until this one. Anyone who knows me or has spent an afternoon with me knows that I’m fascinated with love, most with its undulating shape which hold more questions than answers.

 I got this sad-funny email from a client who wants to be called N. “Is it still love, if it’s over? I met my ex-boyfriend, someone I had deeply loved and been engaged to, for dinner after three years. I want to write a love letter to that night, to him that night and to everything that hangs in space unanswered. I want you then to hand-write it and post this letter to my address, because it’s really a love letter from me to me”.

How could I say no?)


To You
Boy From Yesterday,


This is so strange.
This is so strange.
This is so strange.

I tell myself while walking up the stairs to the first floor of this restaurant we’re getting dinner at.

This feels like home.

I tell myself the first time we break into a laugh, five minutes in.


Time has a special muscle of relativity when mapped against someone we used to love, it feels like years are wrapped up and preserved in familiar smells. You smell the same. I don’t know this from confirmation today (we only awkwardly hugged) but I do. You smell the same.


You’re married now. Your face is different, small wrinkles have set up tenements beside each eye but you sip your drink the same way- the first sip always the largest. I don’t remember the particulars of what we talked about. 

Did I tell you enough how good it was to see you?


I knew you when you were 26 and I was 23. We find those kids in each other’s sentences twenty minutes in.
Have we ordered enough food?
Have we ordered any food?
We’re never going to run out of things to say.


You tell me about work and ask me about mine. I answer in rapid, heat-filled sentences rushing against one another eager to get out and meet you. You tell me you have to leave before midnight, I don’t ask why. You’re giving me advice about marriage, about my love life and you’re still smiling the same way you used to. Why are you so nervous?
I have thought about you when things were right. Did you think of me when things went wrong?


I realize if I reach over and hold you, I can time travel and be 23 again. 
I don’t. 
I want to tell you that I will always love you in a way I've stopped trying to explain or define now. I know you’re married and happy and I wish nothing but grand happiness for you. That I will love other people too, differently but as fiercely, and I’m neither sad nor lonely.


But between friendship and affairs is a broken down castle where our kind of love lives. It stays alive despite the years, the violence of storms and the ever changing of the two people who gave birth to it.

It holds in its towers the bad songs these two loved, the ways they fought and broke one another, how holding each other felt like a coming back to life, how they knew when they were together and now when they’re apart that despite its brokenness they’d held in their palms the kind of love everyone else is always searching for and how walking away was a scribble of a circle than a straight line leading out.


The night feels different tonight, there’s definite magic in the air. Everything I want to say to you is laced with a question- why/when. Old wounds and things we never understood hang in the shadows. Baiting us, willing us. I’m surprised to see them there, it’s been years. You’re looking surprised to see them here too, I think. So I stick to basics.


Yes, I’ve worked out.
Have you?
Do I look different?
I’m happy, I think I’m falling in love with someone new.
It’s so good to see you.


I don’t know how we said goodbye. I tell you we should have dinner once every year. 

“For closure”.
You laugh, “There’s no such thing as closure, kid.”
I don’t know when I will see you again.

Is it still love if it’s over? Is that dinner even allowed? Will that break the rules of adult positions of play we have assumed? Will that hurt the new people we love and hold close today?


Once a year, let’s meet to take a walk back to our castle, dust some old shelves, put some books and music in order and leave.
And there it will stand braving storms, watching over us and waiting for us to return.


All my love,
N

(This picture is mine, taken this May during a road trip across Scotland. This picture is on loan for this letter :) )

(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com or on my Instagram account @hyperbolemuch)

To You, Running

(Background: Nazuk wrote to me asking me to write a letter from her to running. Having fallen in love with it myself followed by having lost my will to do it, how could I pass up this chance?
I remember starting out with Nazuk when she trained for her half marathon (2015 for both of us), I remember being inspired by her run timings and her dedication to the program, I remember also bragging about this to colleagues over lunches.
But more than any of this I remember running lifting me up on days I didn’t even realise I needed lifting. So here it is.)



To You
Running,


Slap.
Thwack.
Slap.
Slap. Sla. SL.Slap.
Slap. Slap.
Sllaaaaaapppp.


Those could read like dance beats to the new hip-hop track that’s dropped just in time for the Grammys, a reality check that 2016 was on a larger political level, or the simple, quiet crunch and sound of my footsteps every morning when I’m on the trail. That running is all of this: a waltz with yourself where you’re sometimes leading and sometimes falling behind, a meditative reality check and sometimes just footsteps is something every runner could tell you.
That it’s meant the world to me, and changed how I moved in my own, is what I’m trying to say here.


It’s interesting how you remember colours, sounds and smells from a time that does not feel right. 

I was in between jobs, lost, and settling deep into a strange void which I can identify much easier in hindsight. There was the regular buzz of people, drinking and seeking of good times which at the time felt like an easy remedy. Essentially I was trying to perform open heart surgery by reading instructions off WebMD. That’s when I met running.

I'd been working out with Chavvi who encouraged me to try my first outdoor run in Phase 1, Gurgaon. From there I found my way to a running group, unsure if it was safe for a girl in these times to run alone in Gurgaon. That group gave me what I needed most then, a focussed program and a clear understanding that despite the best intentions I ran fastest and clearest alone.


Pinkathon 2015 came around as my first competing 21km run, followed by Airtel Delhi Half Marathon, both of which I finished in a sub-2 hr time. The Adidas Grand prix (one of my favourite runs) came when I ranked on the podium three times in a row and found myself a part of the Adidas Run program. The races came with a training schedule to match and a deeper understanding of my own body and what my lifestyle could take away or add to it. Talk to a runner and they will tell you how sleep or water intake can impact time and pace, but you’re going to have to lace up and be out of breath outside to understand how running can change your mind.


If I listed the ways it changed me, it would sound like a self-help book, it would all be true of course but the best love letters sidestep the cliches. So I will too. To wrap those up quickly, yes it made me empowered, self-reliant and gave me confidence while teaching me lessons that only sport can teach you. But above all this, it sculpted a relationship between space, the micro-acres my body occupies and the continents my mind stretches towards. Like potters clay, this is a relationship I’ve made and remade into useful objects (a bowl to place your feelings and to-do lists in) and some purely decorative ones (a phoneix sculpture for days when the world is too small to contain me.) I’ve pounded trails, hit uneven grounds hard while making and rethinking identities for myself, ideas and perceptions. I’ve found new ways to articulate my own drive, to struggle with it and make friends with it so we’re at peace. I know better than to just “will my body”, I know how to work with it when it hits a slump, I invented a trick to scream out loud when my legs don’t go faster and to find reserves of energy and peace when my mind won’t be stilled.

I know there are days when I start my warm-up feeling euphoria which morphs into anger, fear, desire sometimes mid-run and ends with a stillness and nonchalance. I can watch these emotions fly in and out while my legs, knees and feet are working out a rhythm and resting place for each of them. I can take a feeling of humiliation out for a run and come back with the lightness of having a friendly parrot hanging out on my shoulder. Cuckoo bird references aside, Running, you’ve changed the way I move inside and out, when I’m on the trail and when I’m not.


You’re a shape-shifting beast who is a friend, mentor or a sulking cousin on a different day.
And every day, I lace up my shoes, face the sky and get to know you and fall in love with you, all over again.



Breathless,
Nazuk. 

                         








                  (These pictures above are some of Nazuk's favourite run memories.)


(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com or on my Instagram account @hyperbolemuch)

To You, Aish

(Background: Namratha called me to write this letter for her best friend, Aishwarya.
Me: “I’ve barely been doing To You letters, Nams. I don't want to commit to something I may not be able to do. I want to be very particular about what I take on.”
Nams: "You can’t be more particular than Aish. I mean....."
She followed up that gibberish half sentence with three pages on how amazing Aish is and proceeded to give me one of the longest interviews ever. She was right I haven’t heard a more loving story in a long time.

Happy birthday Aish, sorry this took a long time coming, hope you’re smiling when you read this.)



To You
Anju/Aaaaishhaaa/Aish,


Anyone who knows me can testify how casually I sometimes use the word “best friend”. Anyone who knows you can testify how seriously you take this role.
How you wear the word around your shoulder like a red suede cape. What else would explain the countless times you’ve flown to my rescue no matter which part and weight of the world I’m curled under? 


I don’t remember a life change you haven’t Captain navigated me through. 

From the time I wanted to switch from tech to marketing and had trouble with my first presentation. Or the time I failed my first GMAT attempt and like a soul wizened beyond years you took me to have cheap wine (Rs.125!) and somehow I came out of there hopeful, shiny and very, very buzzed. Like a knight in shining armour I wouldn't recognise at first, you came into my life in Class 12 on your sidey Kinetic Honda, which in your hyper-active imagination was almost a bullet! The revs and throttles still resound on MG Road. 

We had the routine that most kids about to enter college do: aim to escape home and roam wild for as long as you can. Especially if the day of the week was Wednesday and everyone was going to be at FBar. An espionage level of lying mechanism would auto-kick into place: Rachita would say she was at Swati’s house,who claimed to be at the college fest and I would be over at yours.

Those days and nights seem like a 90s music video blur to me. Time was endless, the days stretching on like sticky toffee and the city was our personal playground. The weather seemed to congratulate our bad behaviour and despite your asthma we’d ride like warriors into the rain, singing at the top of our lungs and getting soaked to our bones.

Some of the rain from those scooter rides must’ve sneaked inside and set up tenements inside my bones. It’s what keeps me warm on days when life seems like a badly written plotline.


Sneakily and without notice Aish, you turned into my family, foundation and the space from where I takeoff on happy days and on other days where I put my head down to rest (even if via texts). Because everything’s safer and quieter there.
Which is why I worry when you worry.


You’ve been going through a phase where your self worth and you are making faces at each other. But Anju, you’re the girl who has it all. That fact is standing at your door like a childhood classmate waiting for you to recognize and embrace it.
Since you’re a fan of lists, here’s mine:

You left a job at a top consultancy to run your own startup in the developmental sector.

You are dedicated like a Buddhist monk in prayer, when it comes to going to the gym and focusing on fitness.

You take Kathak classes with such dedication that after 3 years of brilliance you even performed on stage, while all my hobbies till date have a life span of a two weekends.

You’re learning the piano.

Despite being hurt in love, you can stretch your heart to love as well and as hard as only you do. Ask anyone who has been loved by you and they’ll attest.

In a world where people are built and destroyed daily over likes, you have your own personal cheering squad: one so head over heels in love with you that they will fly in from Singapore for a weekend if you find yourself unable to face the world. (Hi Li!).

Just listing this out gave me a headrush. And while you’re doing all this, which to me is short of running a country, you manage to check in on a friend if she’s having a rough time.

Do you see what I mean Anju? You’re superhuman and that terrible Kinetic was a cost-cutting alien ship.



So this is what I want for you this year my darling girl.

To see you like we do. To be staggered, bewildered and amazed by your own accomplishments, grit and ability to extend yourself. This year stop judging yourself by any harsh standards and until you find your own, take mine for you. (Cheat sheet: you’ve excelled in all parameters already, you can really just take the whole year off.)

You’ve struggled with your weight for a while and while on some days the road ahead to perfection is all you see, what I see and admire are the three years of hard work, dedicated fitness goals and the amazing journey you’ve covered, warrior-princess.

This year Anju, I want for you to know that I would not want to live in a world where Anju doesn’t love me. 
And I hope you don’t have to anymore either.


Happy birthday beautiful.


Love,
Nammy

(Nams and Aish, in Aishwarya's room where they did most of their growing up, 2011)

                                          (Aishwarya, Hampi , 2011)


(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com )

To You, Universe

(Background: GG wrote to me telling me how angry, broken and sad she was with life. In the middle of our telephonic interview I asked,

"...wait. You know that To You is a love letter writing service, right?”

It can’t just be an angry rant I thought, no matter how justified, delayed or well deserved.
So this love letter is wearied, frayed at the edges and slightly worn: like how love is for a large chunk of its life. But despite how wearied, frayed and worn it gets, sometimes knowing that it’s just around the corner waiting for you, chewing gum and whistling an obscure ad tune from the 90s, is enough.)

To You
Universe,



I’m so mad at you I could hurt you if I only knew where you lived.



I’ve stood at your highest points, gathered love like a full season’s harvest in my hands, I’ve seen glory made flesh and I’ve known what so many women’s blogs use as a template title, “what it’s like to have it all." And I knew I did. I know this in the razor sharp brutality of retrospect, because right now I don’t.


The apple of my parents’ eyes, loved, nurtured and protected, I knew hard work and the sweet fruits of labour. The head girl at my school, the title winner at the college farewell and an easy shoo-in into medical school: The Golden Girl, my tuition teacher would say.
Until with a throw of dice, you didn’t just think I’d had enough, you decided I’d had too much and moved up from the floor where you’re always lying indifferent to grotesque problems like deaths of children from starvation, terrorism inciting people to blow themselves and each other up for an abstract belief and daily cruelty. 

For years I watched you, from the corner of my eye, not stir, not once for any of this. Until you decided to get up for me and not just correct the balance, but take it all away so quick and so fast, that even my memories are singed with burn scars.


Full thickness burn is what we call this level of fire damage. 

The outer skin may bear telltale signs of scarring but the heat and burns sometimes permeate all the way down to the muscle and bone. Which was all that my father was to me: bone, tissue and sinew. I could go into details of his first heart attack in 2010 or how wonderfully you timed his death, a month into my marriage in 2013 but the weight of time will not carry the burden I do. Of shouting at him five months before, telling my mum as I stared shocked at an empty mithai box, that if he continued to eat so recklessly he wouldn’t survive for more than six months. He didn’t.


I never gave you permission, to work through my body or my words, because you’ve left me with the spine bending weight of grief and guilt. I replay those words in my head like a scratched record, hoping that one more time would mean I hadn’t said them.
Of constantly wondering why all those years I fought his beliefs.

“No Papaji, I call myself 23 because I have lived 23 years of my life. I haven’t turned 24 and I can’t call myself 24 because what if I don’t even get to see the end of this year? That is how birthdays work.
Now please write my correct age on the application, you cannot live by your own age rule.”

He died 13 days short of 58 and I don’t want to be right, I want to be horribly wrong and humbled and ashamed: I want to be all of this and have him back.



You let me walk into a marriage, which was weighed down with a depression like big, smooth-surfaced, heavy rocks in my coat pocket invisible to everyone: everyday felt like a walk to the river where all physics had planned for me was to sink swiftly to the bottom. Seven months of marriage with a depression and a throbbing, violent lack of warmth, passion and intensity was like a permanent cold.
You think you can get through life with a permanent cold? 

It will disintegrate your days with the precision and purpose of an atomic bomb. And yet I pleaded, cajoled, begged and negotiated when I was served one day with divorce papers. I searched for loopholes and drew up lists to stay. In between sobs, which still echo inside my ribs, I understood that somethings have no answers, no blame, no reason and no brakes.



So back to why I’m mad at you, Universe.

You took my best years and put them in a blender. I have nothing to show for them except aches and wounds and who has the time or hashtag to look at that?

My face at 32 today, isn’t what it was at 29 when I married. My heartbeat races to win against my pulse if I ever Facebook stalk my ex-husband to see how happy he is with the girl he married a month after we divorced.
No, I am not mad at him. 

He lived in a small town where gossip served as the only form of evening entertainment. I was a fish out of water and I know you pulled me out to put me where I belong. 

I have forgotten how to talk though. Somewhere in the internal screams hurled at you, I lost my voice. I replaced it in my throat with a constant sinking feeling.


I’m seething with rage when I think of those misguided attempts to marry myself on shaadi.com. On the boy I spent months talking to and never heard from again.


So why am I writing this letter to you?
Because I know that sometimes even the best love breaks down, and you and I were epic. 

It always starts with faith. Mine’s as shaken as a weary bridge under a train track, rusted and corroded with years of rain. But it’s still standing and this is why I am reaching out.



It’s time we spoke, you and I.
It’s time we worked things out.
I think of you when it rains, each time it does. 

I almost forgive you then for creating sadness, because you created both and rain comes on top winning. On some tough days only by a small margin, but it does. 

We were beautiful together when we worked. You and I. You perfected blush coloured sunsets on blue skies and my smile never learnt how to contain itself. I look up often and I still catch glimpses of those sunset pinks, so I’m going to give it my best to smile again, hoping that together you and I can recreate the magic.

My father, when I was three, always had on his desk a jar full of lollipops. Carrying one in his back pocket, he would sit in front of me and conjure up gibberish spells and all kinds of complicated incantations. He convinced me he knew magic and would produce a lollipop for me, sneakily from his back pocket, wherever I went.


Well, he’s sitting in your living room somewhere. I’m sure between the two of you, you have enough magic saved up to remind me how to love, be loved, find a doctor who understands me and my work, build myself  a simple, small, content and meaningful life and be your Golden Girl again. 

Yours in waiting and standing faith,
Golden Girl
(GG).

                                    ( Gunjan said she had no picture to give me, so until she finds her own, I'm leasing out my happy picture and caption from last week to her, with all my love: "Roses are for other girls, dammit. I'm going to be that goofball, sunlight chasing, badass sunflower.")

(To You is a letter writing project I started because there are not enough letters and love going around. If you have something to say with love-- for your ex girlfriend, you current husband, pizza (promise not to make it cheesy), your landlord who let you skip rent or even Ryan Gosling-- I'll write that letter for you. The love letter can go with real names, back stories, as many pictures as you like, aliases and even super powers.
The final letter will be up on my blog and a copy will be handwritten and posted to you or to an intended recipient. Kisses on the envelope only on my discretion. Give me a shout at: kakulgautam@gmail.com )