The Winter Letters

It was morning. The winter was setting in, faster than usual it seemed. The rays of the Sun appeared dull compared to their usual intensity. In an apartment building on the first floor, there were three doors to three different apartments. Three different families lived in them; they had lived alongside each other for quite some time. Children grew into adults, the adults grew into old men and women, some even passed away and of course new children as well.

The door to the apartment in the middle opened and out stepped Gopal. He closed the door and turned towards the stairs, he stood for a while rubbing his hands, getting accustomed to the cold outside and then he made his way down the stairs almost bumping into the milkman.

Gopal was heading to the apartment building in front. That is where the letter box area was. You see the society was one of the oldest in the area and it had letter box areas where letter boxes of the apartments were at one place, in multiple rows on a single long wall. Initially the letter boxes were made of wood, later on they were replaced by metal boxes. Gopal wondered why not replace the whole arrangement with a box along every apartment, but at the same time he was also attached to the place, having grown going to these letter box areas again and again.

Gopal reached his intended destination. He took out a small key and inserted it into the keyhole of the letter box with the correct apartment number and opened the letter box and there it was. A letter, oh not one, there was another which he missed to notice the first time. So, two letters. Who writes letter these days you ask? Apparently elder people still do, they somehow cannot resist the charm of letter which is written by the very hands of their near and dear ones. Now, that does sound charming, doesn’t it? A letter which the sender was personally holding in his/her hand, having written it in his/her very own writing.

The winter letters were special once and still are to some. Winters brought time of festivities and unlike the modern instant messaging, letters were what arrived every year at this time and people took out time to sit and write them to their close ones. Post boxes were everywhere once, now one specially has to go to the post office to post anything.

Gopal looked at the two sealed letters sent to his grandparents and realised there is a good possibility he might never be a recipient of a winter letter, but that didn’t mean he could not become the sender of one and Gopal ran off home to write his winter letter.