Letter From-
by Elliot Alpern
Hello, dear friends.
Today is Gauraa’s birthday.
She would have been twenty-nine, and if you wouldn’t mind, as a personal favor, please — I’d like you to take a moment today to think about her. And wish her an earnest Happy Birthday. If you’re reading this at a later date, I don’t think she’d particularly mind the belated wishes either.
I truly appreciate it.
For those who might not be aware, Gauraa Shekhar was the love of my life, was and is forever the Editor-in-Chief of No Contact. She passed away, quite unexpectedly, in 2022, and one thing I can tell you about Gauraa is that she loved to celebrate her birthday. Looked forward to it for months, looked forward to celebrating with her friends.
And she was, so much fun to celebrate with.
I worry she’d be embarrassed for me to tell you this — looking forward to one’s birthday has become a bit gauche, I fear.
But she hasn’t been able to celebrate the last couple.
So, please, do a little celebrating for her.
—
Hello.
Thank you for dropping by around Closing Time.
Thank you to Natty and Suzanne, who worked incredibly hard to put this issue together. To our talented staff as well, our readers, columnists, editors.
I apologize if this last Letter From seems a bit scrambled.
I’m used to writing them with a partner.
I don’t know if there’s any version of this Letter that isn’t about Gauraa. You see, the secret is that No Contact has been Gauraa all along. Not to say it isn’t everyone else, too — we have been profoundly lucky to work with some extraordinary people.
But No Contact is Gauraa, at the end of the day.
Always has been.
And I think few would disagree with that.
I used to scoff at movies and shows when we’d see a character, recently-bereaved, not dealing with it particularly well, maybe a cigarette perched between shaky fingers, and then suddenly — next frame — we see the lost person they’re remembering. Cannot help but remember, hopelessly, in-scene, and now we’re watching the memory.
Certainly it didn’t work like that?
And if it did, how would anyone get anything done?
I am two years removed from learning, knowing better. And full of wisdom I don’t particularly want.
It is 3 AM and our sweet dachshund Tanner stares out the window, searching for the skunk that sometimes frequents the neighbor’s lawn, and I have finished art for another Closing Time piece, I set the laptop down on the coffee table and
Gauraa points at the screen, “I don’t know, can you change the colors?”
I’m frustrated.
“Change them how?”
“The colors don’t look right,” Gauraa says.
“Okay, but change them how, though?”
She leans in close to me, points at a complicated section.
“This part, can you smooth it?”
I set the laptop down on the coffee table.
“I don’t know what that means,” I’m saying,
But I’m not.
Because Gauraa isn’t here.
I look over at Tanner, who looks back at me, with the window curtain draped across his ears.
And she’s right, of course.
She was always right about the art.
I finalize the illustration and send it to Natty and in the morning I text him that I don’t think the colors are right. I’ll take another crack at it, but I’m uncomfortable trying to decide what exactly Gauraa would say about it.
Lately I have become the Arbiter of What Gauraa Would Want in her stead, doling out verdicts that are nearly always: Yes, She Would. She Would Love That.
But,
I don’t really know.
And the nagging feeling, even when I’m fairly confident, that it’s still just me deciding. I lived with Gauraa for three years, spent nearly twenty-four hours a day together, and still.
I loved how Gauraa could surprise you.
I love how Gauraa could surprise you.
It’s 2019 and we’re at the Columbia Journal issue release party, probably a year before Covid and No Contact and we freshmen readers are in our own little gravitational clusters around the edge, nervous because there are real people at this thing.
“That’s Jenny Holzer,” says Gauraa.
“I’m not sure I know who that is,” I say.
Gauraa explains, then goes to introduce herself. The two begin a long conversation. Gauraa returns, beaming.
I don’t remember what Jenny said to her.
I really wish I still did.
Later we recruit friends to slip away, to a bar around the corner, where it’s karaoke night.
Gauraa sings Amy Winehouse in a sparkling sequined dress, gold and glittering, “You Know I’m No Good”, and she’s, just,
“Wow, she’s, really good,” says someone in the darkness of a nearby table. And Gauraa won’t believe me when I tell her later. And Gauraa trained with the guy who trained Michael Jackson — no, really — and she still won’t believe me.
“I keep re-writing the Letter From,” I tell Natty. “Right now it’s called, ‘The Death of an Author’.”
“Well that makes sense,” says Natty.
“Yeah. But I’m thinking of starting over again.”
“Sure,” says Natty.
I’m indecisive.
Who gives a fuck about Barthes.
This is supposed to be about No Contact, isn’t it.
Closing Time and all.
But,
But I already told you the secret.
I think so much of what No Contact became over the years is due to the simple fact that Gauraa was — among many, many things in her membership of the Magnificent 27 Club — a magnet of unique shape, of beautiful, unique attraction.
And by no means was this limited to friends or relationships.
Gauraa studies music business at Syracuse, goes to a tattoo shop, sits down next to Pete Wentz, also getting a tattoo. Gauraa leaves a show late one night in Bushwick, lights an Am-Spi on the steps outside. Is tapped on the shoulder by Kendrick Lamar’s bodyguard — can Kendrick bum one?
One whiskeyed evening at Columbia we play a dumb game to leave 3 AM voicemails for the weirdest, most interesting of our phone’s contacts. Gauraa offers: Sting? We lose. Nobody else has someone like Sting in their contacts. (Quick shoutout: Fuck you, Sting).
Gauraa opens up a book about The Beatles by the editor of Rolling Stone some months later — her name appears in the acknowledgements. We bump into him, the editor, later at the Midtown Hard Rock by happenstance, after Gauraa and I have gotten married; I pretend to know which Pavement songs are best. I’d never heard of Pavement before I met Gauraa.
I again witness Gauraa’s magnetism firsthand when we decide, one summer Morningside day, to visit a Leonard Cohen exhibit on the East Side, no particular rhyme or reason, and happen to brush past Nicole Richie (looking rather perturbed) on the steps as we’re leaving.
Once, when I was seven, I saw Ben Affleck at a strip-mall Chinese buffet in Pittsburgh, while he was in town shooting Dogma. The memory is thin and surreal enough to presume I made it up.
I’m not sure I mentioned this Ben Affleck story to Gauraa. Even with Ben as our mascot here at NC — it probably didn’t compare.
I think that I only became friends with Gauraa because of this force of attraction in the first place, because I was pulled into her orbit of fascinating, far-cooler-than-I people, and was lucky enough to stay caught up. Was lucky enough to catch the best seat in the apartment: by the fire escape, next to her, ranking 90s punk bands over a gummy deck of cards.
I’m looking at our contributors list for Closing Time and it’s 2022 again; we’re unpacking at the hotel for AWP, which will end up being the last good time, the last full-throated, all-happies era. We have plans to get coffee with so and so, plans to meet up at the bar after the book fair with these folks, and I simply can’t fathom how lucky I am. You might understand if you’re married to a much cooler person — everything takes on this new, exhilarating color. Even the nights in; especially the nights out.
Toward the end of the week we find a hip little karaoke bar in downtown Philly with private rooms, vodka plugged with lit fireworks and so many brilliant writers, editors, drunk and singing together.
All because Gauraa thought it would be fun.
I remember singing “Wagon Wheel” (boo, whatever).
I think I remember Gauraa singing “Flagpole Sitta”. And again, what else, I only wish I remembered better.
And eventually we all stumble back to our hotels.
I’ve come to find that some few just have that force in them, are born with a special magic that everyone wants to get close to, a glow to bask in, even just for a little while.
Like Gauraa.
I can’t describe to you all these moments that tell you how Gauraa really was, as much as I want to. It’s 2020, lockdown, Manhattan, we’re wearing the robes we got each other for Christmas, but you don’t know the dreamy overheated air of that first-floor apartment, how she jumps giddy with this new journal idea. Jots names for it in an Animal Crossing notebook with an arsenal of gel pen colors. It’s 2021, I wake to find Gauraa in the office, Tanner in her lap, she’s finally cracked the new site design, but you can’t possibly picture all her stacked books, her Tintin figurines, the check from her first story sold, paper-clipped to stringlights. Her smile, her laugh. Not like it really was.
If you were lucky, a little bit of her glow rubbed off on you.
In a classroom, an email, a breezy night smoking outside some elevatorless walk-up. And if not, you might imagine it, now, a version that’s pretty close, even.
But Gauraa as she was? An exceptional magic born into the world, the briefest chance to bask.
“You know,” Natty says at the Lion’s Head outside campus, “however she writes, it’s just some kind of magic. I mean, I can kind of understand how you write what you’ve written, how S writes what she’s written. Like I can see how you both think, and how you both get there. But Gauraa, I have no idea. She just does magic and then her writing is brilliant.”
Bear with me for one last thought.
The old saying goes that a person dies three times: the first, when they do, actually, die, and then again when they go to the ground or the fire, and then, finally, some unknown date, when their name is last uttered aloud, and never again.
And maybe it’s just Ozymandias, or simply hopeful, wistful. But I have to believe that a writer dies a fourth, very writerly death, when the words they’ve written are last read.
I wish, I wish, I wish we had more of Gauraa’s work to read. Because she was only just beginning, really. Had barely just begun.
But we can still read the words we have left.
Her book, her stories.
And keep her alive for a while longer.
Please don’t miss your chance.
Thank you, all, for being a part of her life.
Thank you for being a part of ours.
We have a fantastic last issue for you —BEN AFFLECK IS HERE!! — so folks please stick around. But in all seriousness, I am really proud of the work here in Closing Time. A last allsorts offering of talented standbys, longtime friends, up-and-coming voices. Everything we always wanted No Contact to be.
And I truly believe Gauraa would be proud, too.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
It’s been such a pleasure.
See you around.
-Elliot
After the glow, the scene, the stage, the sad
talk becomes slow, but there's one thing you'll never forget
Hey you gotta pay your dues
Before you pay the rent
-Pavement, “Range Life”