Fifty years of Sunday letters

Every Sunday morning since the spring of 1976, Venkat Raman has sat at the kitchen table before anyone else is awake and written a letter. It runs to one side of a sheet. It is always addressed to the same person, and it is always left in the same place: under the blue teacup on the second shelf, where his wife, Lakshmi, finds it when she reaches for her first coffee of the day.

The rule has not changed in fifty years. The letter is written by hand, in pencil if the pen has run dry, and it never runs past the bottom of the page. Some weeks it is a single line. The bus was late, the neighbour's dog has learned to open the side gate, the mango tree is finally fruiting. Other weeks it fills the sheet with something he has been trying to say since the previous Sunday and could not find the words for.

Lakshmi has kept every one. She stores them in a tin that once held biscuits, sorted by year and tied with string. When the family counted them recently, the total came to roughly 2,600, with a few gaps in the early years when one of them was ill and a neighbour's child wrote the note instead.

The habit began when they were newly married and still living in separate rooms of the same boarding house. He worked nights at the sorting office and she was training to be a schoolteacher. Their waking hours overlapped for about an hour each week, and he discovered that this was the only time they could talk without being interrupted by the house. Asked why the practice has lasted, Venkat does not describe it as a duty. He describes it as the one part of the week that belongs entirely to him. "Everything else is shared," he says. "Money, the children, the roof. The letter is the only thing I make on my own, and it is for her."

Lakshmi has a more practical answer. She reads each letter once, slowly, and then puts it back under the cup. She does not write back. She replies at dinner, usually with a question about something he mentioned. "If I answered in a letter, we would be having two conversations," she says. "This way we have one, and he gets to start it."

Their children have asked whether the letters should go to a museum. Lakshmi thinks not. "A museum would turn them into something we did," she says. "The tin is where we still do it."

Asked what he would write about if he had to stop, Venkat thinks for a long time. He says he would write about the teacup. He would write that she still drinks from it every morning, even though the handle has been loose for years and she refuses to replace it, because it was the first cup she ever bought for the house.