Sitiing in her living room that overlooks the Oval Maidan, Neelam Antulay pulls out a briefcase filled with ageing letters written in chaste Urdu. The words flow without a scratch-through, taking us back to a time when there was no mercy of a backspace. The unfiltered thoughts belong to her late father and former Maharashtra Chief Minister, Abdul Rehman Antulay. The bundles of passionate letters addressed to his wife, Nargis, were written through the late '50s and early '60s when the couple was in the early throes of their marriage. The correspondence is now part of a new book, Banaam Nargis, Baqalam AR Antulay, released last week in the presence of Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, NCP president Sharad Pawar and Ghulam Nabi Azad, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha.

"To be honest, my mother was against the idea of making the letters public," remembers Neelam, when we meet her at her Churchgate home. "Understandably so, because they were deeply personal, and meant for her eyes only." She undertook the exercise to transliterate the letters after her father's demise in 2014, when one morning, she saw her mother poring over the collection. Even as a little girl, Neelam was aware of the correspondence, but the gravity, and beauty, of it dawned on her much later. "Each one is a little piece of art. I didn't want to tamper with the language because it represented a warm routine that my parents shared," she says. While the book contains 70 letters, it's a miniscule part of the collection that the family owns. Each one has been laminated and preserved in its original form.