Dead letters

As a schoolboy, he had decided he was an introvert: later in the course of his maturing, he revised this analysis to "mildly schizophrenic." This had an immensely adverse effect upon his literary ambition: they never took off. As a result, a morbid sense of insignificance grew in him. To mitigate his predicament, he started a game. lie would write long, florid, tasteful (to him) letters and send them to far away imaginary addresses, with the sender's name and address, too. Obviously, they returned. But that was the purpose of the whole exercise: he achieved some sort of sense of importance when the postman came to his doorstep to deliver letters. But while, initially the letters returned, after sometime, they mysteriously stopped coming back. When several letters were thus lost, his sense of abandonment was complete. One afternoon, with no one around to romanticize the tragic act, he took a strange poison and without any fuss, died.

Only one man, also with a smothered literary bent, rued his death — the postman. Every night, by the pale light of a kerosene lamp, he would take out the dead man's letters and pour over them for hours. At the slightest indication of any interruption, he would tuck those exquisite (to him) pieces away. But sadly he will never get to share the experience with others, for he is torn between two fatal choices: to publish them in the writer's name or his own.