Causing a great deal of dismay To Satyajit Ray. That letter is reproduced in the book Travails with the Alien, which is a time machine into an epistolary world of ruled yellow notepads and formal letterheads. Even the envelopes tell stories. Stanley Kubrick’s letter came in an envelope with a 2001: A Space Odyssey seal. Aerogramme memories A few years ago, while emptying out my storage locker in the U.S., I found boxes of letters that friends and family had sent in the days before email. My mother’s handwriting fills every possible inch of the aerogramme letters, eventually crawling si...