(Not to be opened until he or she is eighteen)

Vellore, 11th July 1927

Dear Child,

It is indeed my misfortune that I will not be around you when you are born. It is a greater pity that you will have to grow up without a father. I pray to God that the years have been kinder to you than they have been to me. At the time of my writing this, it has already been 13 years since my father, your grandfather, disappeared into the forests of Burma chasing wooden dreams. He did not provide a happy childhood for me when he was around and he did not help improve things by disappearing either. It is a story you must know.

Your grandfather disappeared 13 years ago promising me the life he did not have. I trusted him on the day he left simply because he was my father and fathers could move the earth if they said so. Thirteen years ago when he landed in Rangoon he wrote me a letter, the only letter he ever wrote to me. He promised that things would happen soon and he sounded so confident I trusted him. I never heard from him or of him for six years after that, but I still trusted him. It takes a lot for a son to lose faith in his father but it happens if it must. Six years after I last saw him, six years of suffering a life full of nothing but expectancy, hope and disappointment, I finally began to come out of my delusion. My father, I began to realize, was not coming back. When you have expected as much as I have and have been disappointed as much as I have, bitterness gets to be as harsh as it can in a human. I have suffered the rest of my short life drenched in that bitterness.

I do not know what you will know about me when you are 18, I do not know what your mother or others may have told you and I also do not know if you have suffered only as much as I have or if it is worse with you. I do not expect that things will improve considering that I have achieved no greater heights than my father has, perhaps only greater depths. I know it is important for every son to look up to his father, to look up to a role model to emulate, to face a benchmark in life for improvement. It is my greatest tragedy and yours too that I will only be a great disappointment to you in this regard.

I write today from a prison cell. I'm surrounded by political prisoners, patriots all of them. They are confident that they and their scions will look back upon their incarceration as for a good cause and they are proud to be here and suffer their sentences with dignity. I, however, have only ignominy to offer you. I'm a criminal by any standard and one doomed to die. Perhaps you might have been better off not knowing this but I would like you to know what became of your father. Life has too many mysteries of its own to add any more ourselves. I'm sorry for not being a better person and father.

In all that I hold against my father I must admit that he at least left me with hope for a while and I pitifully do not have even that to offer you. I cannot even make the false promises to you that my father made to me. But irony is not when promises are broken, it is when they are made by people not worthy of making them. Greater irony is a father telling his unborn child that life is going to be a lost cause even before it is started. I wish there were something I could do for you. I wish I didn't have to breathe my last knowing in great misery that I have failed in everything. I wish my last words to you were of happier note than this. I can, however, only say that I sincerely hope life is kinder to you than it has been to me. My blessings to you for what they are worth.

Your father,
N. S. Raghavan.