The other day, on a Marie kondo mission in the attic, I rummaged through a collection of old letters and documents and found a few hand-written letters I had preserved as memories of the correspondence between me, as a teenager, and my father whose job kept him away from the family for long periods of time. Letters written years ago, not on the usual lines of personal or family correspondence, instead resembling distance education, aimed at developing linguistic proficiency and communication skills, and imbuing values of culture and tradition. It was also an exercise at developing a good handwriting and at its best, helped to make up for the absence of a personal interaction between a father and a daughter.
I reminisced at how I used to diligently write down new words and idioms and phrases that I came across, and some of them would be introduced in my subsequent letters to my father, to flaunt my linguistic prowess and occasionally get reprimanded and corrected for any inappropriate usage of them.
Years later, after reading Letters from a Father to His Daughter, the collection of letters Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Indira Gandhi from prison, when I told my father how I found it amusing to resonate with the spirit of the famous duo, he enjoyed it with the bashful enthusiasm of a child.
Periodic writing of letters to our kith and kin was an integral part of life and though telephones were slowly making headway into the communication arena, people living in the interiors depended solely on the postal form of communication. If letters didn’t arrive from their near and dear ones after the usual lapse of time, it was an anxious wait and if a few family members happened to be abroad, anxiety over their well-being became a permanent feature since overseas letters took nearly a month to arrive.
There were certain unwritten rules for writing letters. Formal and routine letters were written on postcards, and inland covers were reserved for matters of a confidential nature. Inland covers cost only a little more than postcards, but judicious use of precious money was the top priority. Pleasantries over the welfare of all and conveying of respects and enquiries to all (a collective reference was not well-taken, instead each and everyone should find mention either by relationship or name), were all obviously perfunctory practices, but still followed as part of maintaining a mutually contributing caring and sharing attitude among the family members.
There were moments of fun too. I had an aunt whose world of communication revolved around only postcards. She had the uncanny ability to utilise the entire space on the postcard (the bottomline was to get maximum output with minimum input). Titbits of information would be squeezed all over and the postcard would have to be tilted in all angles to decipher the information. The masterpiece was her unique habit of continuing onto a second postcard sometimes, ending the first one abruptly and while we would remain baffled, a second postcard would arrive immediately afterwards or sometimes the next day, carrying the rest of the details. There were hilarious moments when the second postcard would arrive first and the first one the next day.
There was this uncle who had a beautiful handwriting, but his drawback was writing without punctuations ... a continuous running text and it was often given to me by my father to “read and punctuate”.
The clearance and delivery times of letters at local post offices were treated as deadlines for sending and receiving important information and the arrival of the postman was the most awaited event of the day. Letters arriving when rituals, festivals and other auspicious occasions were being conducted, were not to be opened as any inauspicious news in them would obstruct the ongoing events. It should wait till the events were over.
In every house, there would be a steel wire with a noose that hung it from a hook, which was used to keep all letters stacked one on top of the other, for later reference.
Letter writing holds no more charm and has become history and rightly so, as a rapid and instant mode of communication becomes absolutely essential for a globe-trotting diaspora.
A new era cannot grow on the archaic and obsolete practices of the bygone era, but still, the buzzwords, abbreviations, and cryptic notes we send to our near and dear ones through various modes of rapid communication, lack the aura of authenticity, intimacy and depth of the hand-written letters.
newshara@yahoo.com
