My eyes misted as a long forgotten image popped up on the computer screen. To the left is Richardis, pointed chin, dancing eyes, short, straight hair framing a pretty face. And to the right, me, awkwardly wrapped in a sari I could barely carry.
What a journey that image had travelled in its physical form. Germany to Bombay, then Bombay to Germany, then again Germany to Bombay, in the days when each journey took a week. More than 50 years later, its soft counterpart races across continents into my computer without losing its capacity to surprise.
We were pen friends, Richardis and I, way back in the 60s—a laid-back world when people rarely travelled and yet made friends across oceans by what is now called ‘snail mail’. Pen-palling was a popular hobby and magazines would list page-long columns with addresses and hobbies of potential friends.
I had five pen pals—in England, Australia, Switzerland, Argentina, and Richardis from Germany. Of them, I have met only Ingo, from Argentina, who visited me in Bombay after spending a month in Sumatra. With him, as with others, letters were exchanged for a few years, then gradually tailed off. Only with Richardis did the correspondence continue. She was special, since I didn’t get to her from a magazine column but from a common friend.
It began when we were in the eighth or ninth grade. Nandi Rohner joined school and took her place on the desk next to mine. She was from Munich, the first German any of us had met. We asked a million questions about Germany and tasted our first Black Forest cake, which her mother had made—years before they became available in shops here.
Nandi had come armed with a long list of school friends wanting to make friends with Indian girls. Our classmates started corresponding with her German classmates. That sparked my first letter to Richardis.
Sari memories
Imagine my delight when two weeks later I came home from school to find a blue airmail envelope edged in red, leaning against our battered Philips radio, waiting for me. The handwriting was firm, circular and, if I remember right, tinged with hesitant enthusiasm. Wanting to know about India, about me, yet slightly diffident about communicating in her second language.
That was the beginning. Like all pen pals we exchanged photos, postcards of landmarks from our countries. I was fascinated by images of snow, skiing and glittering Christmas trees. She found the Gateway of India magnificent and was enchanted by the love story of the Taj Mahal in Agra. We spent hours making photo-albums of our families, of friends and the sights around our neighbourhoods.
Richardis surprised me one birthday by having our separate portraits printed as a single image, connecting us even though we were continents apart. That’s the photo that had returned to my computer screen. I was the envy of our class. Today, any teenager with Photoshop can splice and chop pictures in minutes. But in the ‘60s, it was a wonder.
Both of us had preserved that photograph even when we lost touch for almost 40 years. Looking at it, I sit seeped in nostalgia, giggling like a 15-year-old at my gawky appearance. I didn’t know how to wear a sari, but had wanted to introduce myself to Richardis in our national dress. I couldn’t drape it properly, so I had just wrapped myself in it, holding on to the pallu instead of letting it flow free. In my clumsiness, I had completely eroded the sari of its grace and elegance.
Another sari memory surfaced. Wearing one to get into my first ‘Adults Only’ film—Elvis Presley’s G.I. Blues after his two-year stint in the U.S. army. We 15-year-olds were outraged when the film was classified for adults. Adults? What did they have to do with Elvis? They didn’t even approve of him. We had a greater right to see him than those who critiqued his pelvic thrusts. We would not accept the censor’s verdict. We would and did see the film. But to get past the ushers I had to look grown up. So, I wore a sari.
Shot in Germany, G.I. Blues gave me my first moving images of Richardis’ country. The lasting memory is of Elvis crooning ‘Wooden Heart’ at a puppet show in a Frankfurt garden. Ironically, Frankfurt is the place from where I reached out for Richardis.
For several years, Richardis and I exchanged two or three letters every month. That was the pace of letter-writing in the pre-computer age. Each letter involved a trek to the local post office, getting the letter weighed, buying and sticking stamps, and then ensuring that the post office staff stamped these, so that no one would be tempted to un-glue and re-use them. We selected unusual, colourful stamps with flowers and birds, monuments and political leaders.
What did we write about? Our schools. The topics of debates. Parties. The latest dances—rock-n-roll, cha-cha-cha. And, of course, the latest Elvis songs that reached Germany before they reached us.
I was a die-hard Elvis fan, swooning over the radio during the Binaca Hit Parade as his fans did at concerts in America. Richardis sent me Elvis postcards, rare in the Bombay of those times. On one birthday, she gifted me a membership to an Elvis fan club and for the whole year I received glossy posters and photos and monthly updates on his life and performances. That made me the envy of our class. No one else’s pen pal had ever gifted anyone something so invaluable.
Years sped by. We moved from school to college. We lost touch, made new friends. Letters with Richardis continued, but their frequency dropped. She wrote about watching Max at ice-hockey matches, sent a photo of herself with Max in a small boat, then she married Max. I too got married and sent her photos. The children came. Families and preoccupations took over and our correspondence faded away.
Several years passed. My marriage ended. I became active in the emerging women’s movement, campaigning for a change in rape laws. A letter from Richardis arrived. I was delighted and replied at once. But now, as a single mother, struggling with a nascent career, time was a serious constraint. In a few months, the letters tailed off again.
I progressed from journalist to author. One short story featuring a German student working with street kids in Bombay got selected as required reading for German students. I was invited on a lecture tour of Germany. On my last day in Frankfurt, I asked my host Ulrike Ohl, a teacher at Heidelberg University, how I could Richardis Eitermoser from Ebersberg bei Munchen. Ulrike reacted at once, fishing out directories, thumbing through them, and in 20 minutes, she found a number.
I was delighted, but apprehensive. Was Richardis a common name in Germany? Would it be the same person? Would she remember me? Would she speak English?
Before I could say anything, Ulrike was on the phone, speaking in German. The voice at the other end was a man’s. He confirmed Richardis was his wife, and yes, she was Eitermoser. She could speak English as well as German. An excited Ulrike handed me the phone.
With a deep inward breath, I asked, “Hello, is that Richardis?”
“Ya, I am Richardis.”
“Do you remember someone from Bombay?” I asked.
“Meher!” she exclaimed immediately. “ Is it really you? Where are you?”
“In Frankfurt.”
“Why are you in Frankfurt? Come to Munich!”
“I have a plane to Bombay in four hours.”
“What are you doing in Germany?”
“I’m a writer. I’ve been on a lecture tour.”
“I’m also a writer!”
An incredulous gasp as the coincidence struck home. Two pen friends, continents apart, had both taken to writing.
“What do you write?” she asks cautiously.
“ I was a journalist, then I switched to fiction. I’ve published two books.”
“I’ve also published two books!”
“I’ll send you my new book. Send me yours.”
“Can you read German?”
“There’s no translation…?”
“I’m not that famous yet!”
We were hearing our voices and laughter for the first time. Her voice was as I might have imagined. Was mine what she expected? We exchanged email addresses. Our correspondence resumed, now quicker, in step with current times.
We catch up again. “I still wear the bracelet you sent me years ago,” writes Richardis, nudging a forgotten memory. A silver bracelet studded with turquoise, bought on a holiday in Shimla.
Parallel lives
Unknowingly, the long newsy letters of our early years had honed writing skills and helped make us what we are.
We both have two children. We are both grandmothers. Both have divorced our first husbands. Months later, both our first husbands die of cancer.
In a contemporary throwback to our photo albums, Richardis has sent me a CD introducing me to her home, her now large family, their dog, their village. “Village!’ exclaims Farah, my incredulous granddaughter, contrasting the spotless houses and the tractor plying down the street with the shanties, hens and kids playing in the mud lanes that comprise the villages she knows. “Too posh. Must be a town!”
But she is as delighted with the winter landscape as I was at her age. She has never seen real snow. How different our worlds are… yet we have identical hopes, desires, loves, pains.
Richardis spent two years in Hong Kong with her husband Rudolf, flying over India a dozen times without touching down. I made two trips to Germany, but connected with her only in the last hours of my last trip. Something remains unfinished. Parallels need to converge. After being friends for over 50 years, we still have to meet.
The writer likes to dabble in all genres—journalism, novels, plays, stories.
