A letter arrives in Sumedha Sah’s postbox. Gauri, who has recently moved to Toronto, writes about leaving a place she loved and starting a new life in faraway Canada. Sumedha takes an A5 sheet and draws a cat with deep eyes, carrying the lightness and weight of each city Gauri has lived in, and mails it back to her.
“Such a situation arises in each of our lives many times, and being a woman, even more so, as we find ourselves packing our lives and following a father, husband or son, time and again. I could not find a better answer for her, than the wise words of Canadian poet Elizabeth Brewster: ‘People are made of places.’ Places they are born in, places they pass through, and places they desire to go to,” says Sumedha, showing me around her studio, where paintings of seagulls and boats abound.
A trained architect and self-taught artist, Sumedha sends original artworks to everybody who posts her a letter. She calls it the Snail Mail Project, an attempt at reviving the art of letter writing by hand.
In the past two years, she has created more than 60 paintings and illustrations, many in watercolour, and sent them to strangers. And her postbox has received over a hundred letters asking for artworks.
Vera, an Italian expat living in New Delhi, writes about how she feels a misfit in Indian society, and sends a postcard that shows the back of an elephant as it walks through a narrow Indian lane.
A doodle or a leaf
Sumedha sends her a collage “signifying how different she may feel from all of us, yet, she too has been coloured the same colour we are.” Born and bred in the forests in the hills of Nainital, Sumedha moved to hurly-burly Mumbai three years ago for an artist residency. That was when she yearned for a connect with people, a collaboration, and a creative environment around nature. She had always had a deep love for writing letters, and illustration came by chance when she was in Auroville working as an architect.
Also, the fact that nobody was writing letters anymore in today’s technology-driven world irked her. So, one day, she went on social media and invited everybody to send her letters; with a promise to respond with original pieces of art.
“The project is an exchange of words, ideas or even things. The Snail Mail Project is for everyone who shares this love for letter writing... Your letter may be about anything, a book you’re reading, places you’ve been or your ideas about the world. It can be anonymous or incognito. A paragraph or a page. A letter or a postcard. A doodle or a photograph.”
“A pressed flower or a broken leaf. A word you love or a phrase you hate. Really, send me anything (except the usual formal introduction letter, please!) that engulfs your imagination or anything that you feel is worth sharing with the world,” Sumedha wrote on Tumblr. The letters poured in not just from India but across the world — Poland, Singapore, Australia, Canada, the U.K., Turkey and Scotland. Telling travel tales, aspirations, sorrows, secrets and failures.
Looking inwards
Paintings and sketches from artists, and children as young as four, also trickled in. So did brownie recipes and dried flowers. Sumedha reads each letter at her own pace, and then creates an artwork, often with a fountain pen, inspired by the contents of the letter.
But how does it emotionally affect the painter, to create a piece of art for a stranger without any monetary compensation involved? “If I were to monetise it, then I declare that I am only an artist, and if you want my art, you have to pay for this. But this is a collaboration. It just makes me feel special that the other person also makes an equal effort in this project: he/ she sits down, reflects, and writes a letter by hand, travels all the way to the post office, buys a stamp and drops the letter inside the postbox.”
“Many people wrote letters for the first time since school. It’s amazing that so many people want to communicate with pen and paper, or even tangible objects. We are also supporting the Indian postal system in a tiny way,” Sumedha says.
She is, though, waiting for a letter in a language she doesn’t understand. “I want to know what it does to me emotionally, and how I respond to it. The project is open to everybody, including people who don’t know to read and write. Art expresses the non-verbal. To communicate, feel or understand human experiences, we don’t always need words. Art is meditative. It’s looking inwards. I express best through art,” she says.
A journalist based in Uttarakhand, the writer explores the lives of those who walk mountains.
