As girls, they sent letters across the globe. 15 years later, they found each other in India

The letter arrived on a day like any other.

Brynn MacDougall saw her friends at school, went to soccer practice, finished her homework.

Except that waiting for her at home was this envelope, postmarked from India.

"Hello!" the letter read, in neat, precise cursive. "I am your new friend from Ladakh."

Brynn was 8 and had never heard of such a place. She'd rarely left the secluded Pine Barrens town where she lived, much less the country. Everyone around her in Shamong was white. Except, that is, for her neighbors, a couple from Calcutta, whom her family had become friends with.

It was that neighbor, Krishna Ghosh, who had made the connection to Brynn's new friend. Ghosh — Brynn affectionately called her mashi,  a term for "auntie" — knew an English teacher in the northern Indian region of Ladakh who was looking for a pen pal for one of her most promising students. Why not Brynn?

In that first letter, composed on pastel pink stationery bordered with flowers and butterflies, Brynn's pen pal, who was also 8, wrote of her "cold and mountainous place" where it snowed a lot in the winter. She liked making snowmen. Her name was Stanzin Dolma.

And so they started exchanging letters, usually going months without writing, and just when it seemed as if another letter would never come, there it was — with an apology, of course.

In the mountains near Tibet, Stanzin would dream of how her letters were traveling across the ocean, always wondering whether they would actually reach Brynn. Meanwhile, in the Pine Barrens, Brynn held the letters as souvenirs from a place she knew only through her friend's photographs and words: Stanzin wearing a native Ladakhi wool robe and cap for a special occasion, a postcard of the dramatic Himalayas and Buddhist monasteries.

They carried on like this for seven years, until the last letter, in 2010, in which Stanzin raved about Twilight, Robert Pattinson, and Beyoncé, and asked, conspiratorially, if Brynn had a boyfriend.

"Yr long lost friend," she signed it, "Stanzin." And: "(P.S. Do reply A.S.A.P.!!)"

This winter, eight years later, in an era when it's no big deal that a girl from New Jersey would have a friend on the other side of the world, Brynn, now 23 and at her first job out of college, found out she'd be heading for work to Mumbai.

She reached out to Stanzin on social media — Brynn can't recall whether it was Facebook or Instagram —  asking where her old pen pal was in India and whether it might  be possible to meet up.

It turns out that Stanzin was living in Mumbai, studying clinical psychology, at the same school that Brynn's nonprofit was partnering with to run a women's leadership program. It felt, to Stanzin, like magic.

The afternoon they were scheduled to meet, Stanzin showed up late, clutching a bouquet of red and white daisies, flustered and apologetic: She had wanted to get flowers for Brynn but the closest shop was more than an hour away. And Stanzin was surprised to see that Brynn wasn't as tall as she thought she was: Weren't all Americans super tall?

Brynn laughed. I'm taller than you! she said.

Even though they had never met before, it felt to each like picking up with an old friend. They talked about their families, about boyfriends, about social justice. Stanzin was surprised to hear there was so much inequality in the United States. Brynn was insistent on setting her straight: America was not this beacon of equality, she told her; don't believe what you see in the media.

At the end of Brynn's  short trip, Stanzin left  her with a parting gift — two kurtas, or tunics, broad enough to fit Brynn's Western build — and a sense of wistfulness.

Seeing Brynn reminded her that people don't really write letters anymore. They don't take that kind of time for each other.

So maybe, she thought, she would start up their correspondence again. Maybe it would take months or years for them to write back to each other, maybe the letters would get lost. But they had found each other once before.