I was stepping out of my car in front of my home, and was getting ready to take my son out of his car seat, when my eyes caught a glimpse of a white rectangular envelope half sticking out from my mailbox. Even from a distance, I could figure that the address was handwritten with a blue ballpoint pen. An envelope with a handwritten address was a cheerful sight at the end of a tiring workday, because most likely it nestled a loving letter from someone back home in India. But this one didn’t have the look of an international mail that had traveled long, and I definitely didn’t recognize the jagged handwriting -- at least not from a distance.

‘It has to be from one of my friends in US’, I thought, as I started walking towards the mailbox, and by then, could see the US first class stamp at the top right corner of the envelope. But the handwriting still looked unfamiliar. Who could it be coming from?

The guessing game had started.

Another few steps, and the letter was now in my hand. It was not addressed to me or my husband. As a matter of fact, it was not addressed to anybody I recognize. It was intended for some Mr. Anthony Davis, though the address was our current address. As far as I knew, we were only the second owners of the house, and the original owner, a single lady who had been living there alone for 23 years before we bought the house, was certainly not named Anthony. But that was the lesser of the surprises. The real deal was the “from” address at the top left corner of the envelope —the letter came from one Mr. Jackson, whose address was the Federal Correctional Institution in Lisbon, Ohio!!

I knew right then that my adorable one-year-old son Gogol was going to have a little less-than-usual attention from mommy that afternoon, because mommy’s brain had started processing a slew of imaginary information revolving around the mysterious letter. When the guessing game triggers itself, I let myself go with the flow. Few things manage to amuse and entertain me more than going deep into a guessing game.

I reminded myself of my civic duties: if a letter does not belong to you, you are not supposed to open it. I tried to distract myself by getting busy --freshening Gogol up, and trying to feed him dinner. He was not hungry yet and wanted me to play with him instead. The white unopened envelope, which came all the way to me from a prison in Ohio, kept staring at me invitingly. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I obliged. I carefully opened the envelope.

 “What’s up Fool,” the letter started on a warm note, with the two O’s in the word ‘Fool’ decorated nicely to look like two twinkling eyes with curiously raised eyebrows. It looked like Anthony (he who was supposed to read the letter instead of me) and Jackson (he who wrote the letter) were pretty good friends. The letter went on describing how Jackson had been trying to cope with the unfortunate period of his life behind the bars on a one-day-at-a-time basis. I could tell that going got rough at times for Jackson. “I have been thinking of doing something wrong, and then again, why jeopardize my chances of coming home on time. I have already jacked enough of my good conduct time”, Jackson wrote.

‘What have you done wrong, Jackson?’, I was talking out loud –silently (I know, I know-- oxymoron). Hit-and-run? Drunk driving? Something of a bigger magnitude? Burglary at a 7-11 store? Robbing a bank? Would the letter serve up any clue?

Ah huh. It started to look like poor Jackson was involved in some kind of domestic violence of criminal proportion, as I proceeded to the second paragraph. Jackson was now fuming against his wife/girlfriend, his son’s mother. The language of the letter turned from philosophical to foul.

May be his wife/girlfriend had gotten a restraining order, and he violated that to end up in prison, I thought.

I kept reading, and the angry Jackson gradually transformed into a helpless father, who was missing his son badly. He wrote, “Tell [her] I am mad, because I don’t have no picture of the kid.” He pleaded to Anthony, “If you decide on coming at the end of the month, just bring my son.”

The letter ended with “Love you, Dogg”, and a very poignant postscript, “I still remain.”

I was picturing a thirty-five-ish stubbled man with a tormented, weary, but intense look in his eyes, writing the letter in his prison cell in his orange jumpsuit, at which point my son Gogol brought me back to reality by pulling on the hem of my dress. Gogol can’t speak yet, but I could clearly read in his eyes his utter confusion---he simply didn’t understand why the little piece of paper had mommy totally engrossed to ignore even his irresistible charm!

I apologetically put the letter down, and started playing with Gogol.

The next day, I carefully tucked the letter in, and resealed the envelope. I wrote in big bold letters on top of the envelope, ‘Anthony Davis does not live at this address’. I stuck the letter behind my mailbox so that the postman would take it away. The postman didn’t take it away that day, the next day, or the day after that, or ever.

So the guessing game continues. The letter is still lying on my dining table, and I don’t know what to do with it. Looking at Gogol, I still wonder, am I in some way responsible for crushing another desperate parent’s hope of seeing his child? Is it possible that Jackson wrote another letter and sent that to the right address, and got to see his children by now?

And then there is something else that keeps intriguing me. Is playing the guessing game hereditary? I think I have inherited from my mother at least some of my penchant for indulging my imagination for no practical reasons. My son Gogol is too small yet to show any signs. Has he inherited it from me?

What’s your guess?