Letter and Narrative contributed by Swati Bhattacharya, Gurgaon

Blame it on my only child-ness if you must, but I love famous people loving me. I like provoking intimacy. But only from the jet-setting beau monde. I crave intimacy from people who have no business to get intimate with me. After coming back from school (Delhi Public School R.K.Puram), and doing the stuff I had to do, I’d sit down and think of writing to someone.

The first person I had written to was Hiroko Nagasaki, a Japanese 13 year old swimmer who had swept the Asian Games in 1983. She and I became pen-pals for the next two years. She’d send me paper stickers, perfumed erasers and then one day in school somebody stole my Hiroko box.

Traumatic as it was, I quickly recovered because by then I had received a flowery handmade-paper letter all the way from 22, Zaman Park, Lahore, Pakistan. Imran Khan, the famous cricketer, had written to me. The letter became my raison d’etre for a while. The fact that love does find a way, the fact that the letter had 18 red flowers printed at the back, and the fact that it had been signed as ‘Imran‘ and not ‘Imran Khan‘, to me it was a sign of a cosmic connection. We were meant to be and all that…Anyway, I lost this letter in a crowded Mudrika bus, while doing my nth show and tell.

The letter I am sharing with you is one that still lives with me. Born out of jealousy, it got written in the November of 1985, when newspapers were full of Rajiv Gandhi writing to a Sri Lankan kid. The TV cameras had gone loooking for her and captured her big 100 watt grin much to my annoyance!

I wrote a letter then and there. I lied and said it was my 3rd letter to him. I vented…and wrote that “just because I am too young to vote, my letter had not been replied to”. Next I know is this letter arrived, in a huge envelope with the PMO seal. Even though this is a letter from the Prime Minister to a girl in 10th Grade, I found everything in here. Every emotion. Every truth. Later when I made a ‘Thank You’ card for him, Sonia Gandhi, his wife, sent me a note back on that. In one month I had received 3 letters from the Gandhis.

The uncanny thing is, when I joined HTA (Hindustan Thompson Advertising, now JWT Advertising) as a copy-writer in 1992, my first assignment on PEPSI, was to write to Michael Jackson and ask him to come to India. My client delivered the letter to him personally. I was told, Michael had read it and kept it safely with him.

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