dear internet,

today's letter is a throwback from my notes app. i wrote this on 11 october, 2020, a different age, when i apparently learnt how to knit; a fact i completely forgot about in december 2022, when i decided to learn how to knit. i do not, as of february 2023, know how to knit.
  every day i finish the crossword with my father. i pick it up from where he’s left it—dining table, next to his lazyboy chair. i leave my guesses pencilled in next to the clues but he never sees them. mostly i wait until he’s filled in enough answers that i just have to think of words that fit the letter combinations, what could have an s dash h?, and then we backform a justification. sometimes there are words i know: ersatz, groschen, threnody. he asks me how i know cretonne is a kind of fabric. i say, georgette heyer?

ii.
i took the wool (pink) from a circular drum and the needles (number 9, or number 6?) from a slim wooden box whose lid slides off—both from my grandmother. knitting for me is doing the same thing over and over again until i do it wrong, and then undoing it and starting over. i haven’t even learnt part two, the purl, yet. i am where sisyphus meets ariadne. thirteen stitches and four lines before i have to start again. every time i gather the wool i think, woolgathering. or i think, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. i am sleeping better but i don’t think it’s because of the knitting, and i don’t feel particularly ravelled.

iii.
from my window a new birdcall: a short, sharp cry which begins as a sort of purr. i think it’s a kite. in delhi when the kites swoop they shriek like the predators they are, but in chennai their tones are modulated, almost pleasant. my mother goes upstairs with her camera and says she thinks it’s a baby. the proper term for a baby bird is a juvenile.

iv.
crazy means anagram, casting on means beginning, rufous means red. crosswords, knitting, birds: everything has a language.

love,
t