Last weekend, I pulled out my collection of memorabilia, secured in a faded, discoloured shoebox. I started scanning through old pictures and postcards among newspaper clippings from family archives, old bottle caps saved from holidays with friends, and memos of dinner dates with old lovers. The exercise was long as I read postcard after postcard, collected over the years usually for reasons other than their literary qualities. As I placed them back where they belonged, I realised how letters and postcards are becoming a thing of the past and will become just as extinct as typewriters and vinyls.
We have often come across people in souvenir shops or cafés at tourist spots, sitting alone and discernibly struggling with what to write on the postcard that they had just bought. Well, they are the last of a species to send snail mails and are almost certainly middle-aged or elderly. They toy with a picture postcard of precariously perched boulders of Hampi or the legendary Manganiyars of Rajasthan or the humble 50 paisa yellow postcard, thinking about the message that might be interesting to the reader sitting in another State or across several time zones. Once they have carefully penned down the address, they happily trot down the street trying to spot a mailbox, ready to deliver a part of themselves.
Unforgettable episodesI will never forget the times as a child when my mother made me sit at the dining table and write postcards to cousins or holiday greetings to friends. I would write about the things I had been doing, the food I ate, the places I saw, the people I met and the books I read. What had started as an early habit, morphed into love for handwritten letters, especially postcards. There is something so thrilling about receiving letters from people far away. Every such letter in the mailbox goes through the elaborate ritual of ceremonially looking at the colours and patterns of the stamp, noticing the postmark and date and running fingers across the handwriting on the front panel. As I begin to work on the flap, I look for a knife resisting the urge to tear the envelope open. I curl up in my bed with coffee and read and re-read the carefully arranged words.
Free from the distractions of job, weekend grocery trips and monthly utility bills, going back to school has given me more time for simpler things in life: I make long weekend calls back home, I take long walks around the campus, and I write letters to people I love and miss. Unlike the faux intimacy offered by a myriad of digital correspondence channels available, letter writing is slow and personal. Not only does it require poised thoughts but also meticulous fixing of ingredients: pen, paper, envelopes and stamps. And, there are tough decisions to make such as the ones about “borrowing” your office supplies against walking down to the post office for envelopes. Blue ink or black ink? Ornate paper or a page torn from the back of a journal? It takes some good, old-fashioned mental elbow grease if one is writing a postcard as the limited space requires succinct expression.
My parents often chose letter-writing as the means of communication when my father’s job took him usually a thousand miles away. They tell me how they put their heart out, and waited to see if the words had been received. There was raw vulnerability in this organic, romantic process In a hyper-connected world of ours, what will we leave our grandchildren? The user name and password of our e-mail accounts?
baid.megha@gmail.com
