Three of Anita Sethi’s grandparents died before she could get to know them, so she was delighted to find a pile of letters from her maternal grandfather who lived in Guyana. After reading them, she felt a profound connection

I only ever knew one grandparent, my father’s mother, who emigrated from India to Kenya and then to Manchester. But she died when I was 16 and that gave rise to curiosity about my other grandparents, all of whom had died before I could know them. They became almost mythological figures in my imagination, oddly larger or smaller than life, but never quite life-size. And they took on a fairytale quality thanks to the stories my parents or other relatives would tell about them. But mostly there was a silence surrounding them.

My mother’s father, who lived in Guyana, South America, and died before I had reached my first birthday – had been a ghostly figure, known only through a single black-and-white photograph of him. Yet one day, after he had been gone for many years, he reached out from the past in an oddly tangible way. I was on a trip to my childhood home in Manchester. The place was empty and still, a rare day of perfect summer sunshine, and I was hunting for some of my lost stuff.

Lives become entangled in any household and so I opened a document wallet that I thought might hold my university notes, to discover instead a pile of his letters to my mother.

There was his handwriting, beautiful in blue ink, curling over now faded paper in letters that he had sent from thousands of miles away in Guyana.

I started reading them and didn’t finish until darkness fell.

Through them I was able to discover so much about his life. Each one was another piece in the jigsaw: they chronicled everything from working in the rice fields to my grandmother’s decline and death and his own failing health, until I reached a letter with a ribbon around it and a note signalling that it was his last one.

As a child, I would often forget his real name and have to ask my mother to tell me again: “Mum, please tell me again, what was your father’s name?” She would tell me – Ramnehar Prashad – sometimes having to spell it out. Never having met him, I didn’t know him as a real, flesh and blood person. I never heard his voice or knew the size of his hands, how tall he was, or how his hair fell. I never knew how he laughed or what might make him laugh.

Here, in these letters, his voice – its rhythm and cadence – leapt off the page and I loved the casual poetry in the sentences, the pidgin English he used.

Holding a piece of paper that he had once held, upon which he had written his thoughts and emotions and details of his daily life, I felt a profound connection with him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anita’s grandfather Ramnehar Prashad.

Each letter held a story. Some were about his life in Guyana, toiling beneath the burning sun, the practicalities of maintaining a functioning life, such as buying parts for a tractor. Others expressed regret and remorse that he could not be with us in person to see the various changes and stages of his daughter’s life, including the birth of his grandchildren. Others charted the slow decline in his wife’s health as she became increasingly bed-bound.

In each new letter was another piece of the story of his life and, by extension, the story of my own history, of my ancestry.

He chronicled not only his daily life during the 1970s and 80s, milling and reaping rice but also how the political situation affected him; how the government of Guyana not allowing certain imports meant that he struggled to get parts for his tractor. “Guyana is running out of everything,” he complained in 1978, asking for Complan, the nutritional supplement drink, for his sick wife and basic parts to repair a fridge.

The deterioration of his handwriting marked his declining health, indeed, he explains in October 1978: “My right hand fingers is not feeling as good as should be, they seem week and num and sometime pain me and behave like cramp. It also hamper me to whole my pen. I am seeing doctor and are using tablets but it is not getting better but don’t getting worse; if you notice my writing is not as good as before time. Nothing to worry about …”

Then there was the letter asking if I had been born yet, followed by another after I had just been born, lamenting that he wasn’t able to see me as the plane fares were too expensive. “I glad to hear Anita weighs 20lbs now. Try your best and care all of them. They will care you one day. I am closing this letter with my respect to al family and kisses for the little one, kiss all of them from me …”

That was his final letter.

I wondered if he knew, when he wrote those letters (though I very much doubt it), that they would last, and one day, far into the future, his granddaughter would be reading them? Did he know that he had left a gift of knowledge to the future?

I began to think about how we keep up with family on the other side of the world today, how things have changed. We might communicate between family members through a Skype call, a Facebook message or a tweet to someone on the other side of the world. These messages are in real time – they don’t chronicle the passage of time in the way my grandfather’s letters do. They don’t tell stories the way his letters told stories.

Then I think of my own hypothetical grandchildren perhaps yearning to know about the world I inhabited, what it looked like, how it felt, so different from the one that they will probably inhabit. They will want to know about the factors that, in some way, however small, shaped them. What should I share with them, of the life and times I had? What kind of words would I want to leave behind for them?

I wish I had known my grandfather but I am grateful for those few hours I had with him – his mind joined with mine through those letters – during those few summer hours one August evening in Manchester, long after he had passed away.

His words illustrated the power of writing, the power of language and of letters, to linger on long after the person who has written them has gone.