Margin of Distinction

Dadu in Chaibasa

I was in Dadu’s room in Calcutta, maybe sixteen, when I handed him a letter I’d laid out on the computer — full justification, tidy kerning, the works.

He glanced at it, nodded, and smiled at the polish.

Then he told me how, back in the late ’50s-early ’60s, he was a young upstart trying to get noticed. Everyone wrote letters to the “big men,” but he wanted his to stand out.

So he invented his own hack: line by line, he would hit the space bar just enough times to push the words into perfect alignment. No word processor, no back-space key—one slip and the whole page had to be re-typed.

It was painstaking, almost ridiculous. But to him, the letter’s look was an extension of its message: I care, and you should too.

Decades later, a single justified paragraph could still make him beam.

– Prateek