The Letter My Grandmother Never Finished

My grandmother kept letters in a Fox’s Glacier Mints tin on the top shelf of her cupboard in the flat she lived in until she died three years ago. When we cleared the flat I took the tin home to Simei because nobody else wanted it and because I could not bear to throw away something that had been closed with that much care for that many years.

Inside were thirty-one letters. Most were from her sister in Malacca, written in a mix of Malay and English on paper that has gone soft at the folds. Dates from 1987 to 2004. Birthday wishes, recipe exchanges, news about cousins I have met once and cousins I have never met. Reading them felt like listening to a conversation where you arrive after the important part and stay until the speakers forget you are there.

At the bottom of the tin, under a rubber band that had lost its elasticity, was a sheet in my grandmother’s handwriting. She had written Dear Siti at the top — her sister — and the date 14 March 2019, six months before she died. The first paragraph was complete. It thanked Siti for the dodol sent at Hari Raya and mentioned that the knee was better after the physiotherapy. The second paragraph began I want to tell you about the night your brother and then stopped. The rest of the page was blank. No crossing out. No sign that she had intended to continue on another sheet. Just the sentence, unfinished, and then nothing.

The last sheet was there. The last sentence was not. She left the telling open like a door on the latch.

I asked my mother whether she knew what the night was about. My mother said no. I asked my aunt in Malacca. She said Siti never mentioned receiving the letter, which means it was probably never sent — another kind of unfinished, the story that did not even leave the house. My grandmother might have run out of time, or courage, or the right words. She might have decided mid-sentence that some things should not be posted. The blank page gives no instruction.

I kept the sheet in the tin. I read it again on the anniversary of her death last month, sitting at my kitchen table with teh tarik cooling beside me. The sentence still ends at brother and. I still do not know what night she meant. I have stopped expecting to find out, which is not the same as accepting, but is close enough for now.

There is a photograph of my grandmother in the tin as well, tucked behind the letters — her at a wedding, younger than I ever knew her, someone’s arm around her shoulder cropped out by whoever trimmed the print. I looked at the arm’s edge and the blank page and the unsent letter and thought about how many ways a person can fail to finish telling you something, and how many of those ways are not failure at all but choice, or time, or the limit of what paper can hold.

I write this entry so the tin is not the only place the unfinished letter exists. If my aunt reads it and remembers the night, she can write to me. If she does not remember, the sentence stays open, and I will live with it the way you live with a song that cuts off before the last verse because the tape ran out and nobody recorded the rest.