By Imlisanen Jamir
I’ve been going through my father’s old office drawers. Inside them, a small paper continent survives. Faded envelopes and curled edges of letters, receipts from shops that no longer exist, business cards of bureaucrats from Himachal, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Odisha. Shops in Calcutta, Shillong, Manila. Hotels in Mussoorie. A wildlife warden at Corbett National Park. Vehicle repair receipts from Kohima and Dimapur, 1991. Dog vaccination certificates from 1995. My mother’s dental procedure card from then Madras, 1992. Travel agencies, condolence telegrams, get-well-soon letters, job applications written to my father by people seeking work.
Each one is a small act of preservation. Every piece of paper meant something once. Someone somewhere took the time to write, to type, to stamp. My father, for reasons I’ll never fully know, thought they were worth keeping. Maybe he saw value in record-keeping; maybe he just couldn’t throw away names, faces, and fragments of life. Whatever the reason, the result is an accidental archive of a world before screens — a world where every connection had to be physical, tangible, slow.
The handwriting tells you things people’s words no longer do. You can tell who was desperate, who was formal, who wrote in a hurry. A job application typed on brittle paper from someone in Mokokchung feels heavier than the hundreds of digital résumés that float in inboxes today. It was written with effort, mailed with intention, and received by someone who would eventually keep it in a drawer.
There’s something profoundly human about paper. It stains, tears, folds, and still survives. It carries fingerprints and coffee rings and the smell of time. Unlike data, paper ages — and in aging, it tells the truth. My father’s drawers reveal a geography of movement and relationship: the way people once reached across distances to stay visible.
Looking through them, I realized these papers weren’t clutter. They were proof of a lived life — not grand, not dramatic, just quietly thorough. They recorded the everyday negotiations that make up most human existence: getting a car fixed, booking a room, thanking someone, applying for a job, wishing recovery.
Now they lie in my hands, their senders and recipients mostly gone or untraceable. Yet they still hum faintly with connection. Each paper says: I existed. I mattered to someone for a moment.
And I wonder what we’ll leave behind. A cloud folder nobody opens? A phone backup that expires when the subscription ends? Our correspondence now lives on servers that don’t know us, in inboxes that auto-delete after thirty days. Maybe someday, someone will scroll through an old drive and feel a similar ache — a digital archaeology of screenshots and messages. But I doubt it will feel the same. Paper was slower, heavier, more honest. It demanded attention. You could lose it, stain it, save it. And in doing so, it became part of you.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
