My parents let me, as an 18-year-old from a typical south Indian family, study in Delhi on condition that I stayed on campus, in the hostel. The hostel housed about 300 girls and provided us all with three telephones. One on each floor. Any caller would have to try at least 25 times, relentlessly, to get through. The phones were a true test of patience. I was never much of a talker and discouraged friends and family from calling. I pushed them to write to me instead. The written word has more power than the spoken one. I have always believed that.
Oh the scent of a letter! I remember, my father would write to me every week. All his letters would have essentially the same content. One paragraph would tell me how important it is to study, and why a middle-class woman should be ambitious. Another would inquire after my health. One other paragraph will mention squabbles between my brother and mother. Yet another will recount other socially significant but always irrelevant conversations, such as on the weather.
Though I knew what his letter would say, I looked forward to it every week. Sometimes a small package would accompany the letter, some home-made goodies from mom. Even the hostel guard knew the letter from my dad’s handwriting and the smile it brought to my face. I say my dad’s handwriting: the only thing that would be recognisable on the envelope would be my room number and the PIN code. I received his letters because the postman could decipher dad’s numerical writing.
Friends from school would write too. Long-distance calls were expensive even 15 years ago. There were differential rates through the day, with calls getting cheaper after 11 p.m. Even after 11 p.m., there was no guarantee that anyone could get through to my hostel number.
I recognised friends from their handwriting on the envelope. Now, these letters would be full of gossip: who’s dating whom, who broke up with whom, who’s back-biting, and the usual dramas of high school. It seems hilarious now, but we thought it was important enough to be written down and sent across States. It was so important I would wait days and weeks to know what was happening in their lives. I even got proposals from former school crushes as letters. Who would have thought! It seemed every letter had its own character, every letter was a story, and every writer was a story-teller.
The letters would come in all shapes, sizes and colours. White A4 size paper, sheets torn off a book, ruled paper from school practice sessions, yellow-coloured paper torn from note pads, post cards, inland letters… There was no one-size-fits-all. Some letters would be four pages long, some just a couple of paragraphs.
All kinds of writing instruments were used: pencils, black pen, blue pen, ink pen, ball pen, even sketch pen. I remember a friend wrote a letter to me using all the colours in a colouring box. Each line was written in a different hue. How I laughed when I saw it. Another painted white sheets in different colours, let them dry overnight and wrote the contents on the painted sheets. It turned out the project took her about three days to complete.
The letters had created their own logistics wing within the hostel. There were suppliers and delivery boys. When I came back from class in the evening, the hostel watchman would stop me and say – behenji, aapka letter aaya hain (sister, a letter for you). Letters carried such significance that there was even a charge for room delivery: the postman would charge Rs. 20 a month. If you chose to collect the letters yourself, you could always pick them up from a heap lying in a bin.
The store in the hostel would always stock three things: instant noodles, envelopes and postal stamps. It would stay open till 10 p.m. There was even a student committee that was responsible for running the store. Good relations with the committee members meant you could get stuff anytime, including in the middle of the night.
No e-mail or WhatsApp text or Facebook update has ever brought me so much joy. There is no feeling quite like longing for a letter, the irritation of not receiving one, the curiosity while tearing an envelope open; just the range of emotions one experiences while reading a letter. I could always imagine the contents and characters in the letter playing their part in the privacy of my room. The magic would unfold word by word, sentence by sentence. And they would replay in my head over and over again, just like scenes from a movie.
I still have those letters, a trunk full of them. My mom says they are junk and best dispensed of to create more space for newer things. Dad, of course, is in full support of me keeping them. After all, he has his own trunk too. Every now and then I open my trunk to read a few letters. Parts of some letters look vintage, some are torn, some have smudged words.
I even have letters from my grandparents who are no longer with us. It feels like I have a part of them that no one has access to. No matter how many times I read those letters in the trunk, they still stir my heart in countless ways.
Can we have our beloved postman back, please?
priyas.apr@gmail.com
