Hey, good day and a big hurray to you, dear reader, who has, unimaginably, and once again, arrived at my little corner of the Internet. How have you been? I’m sure you must be exhausted after what was, shall I say, an eventful and excruciating year. Fear not, this year shall be wondrous! And joyful! And hopefully productive? Let’s not get our hopes up too high.
I like letters. Not just the fancy symbols that comprise the written language as we see it, but the long ones, the heartfelt ones, the loopy/scraggly handwritten ones. On a different note, there seem to be flour residues on my laptop keyboard. Must be a side effect of my eating freshly-baked bread add odd hours of the night whilst finishing programming assignments, but oh well. The bread was worth it. Mum baked it.
My earliest memories of writing to people involve Mum making me write to my grandparents. You see, we live many many miles away from them. Country-jumps, to give a scale of measurement. And back in the day, the most accepted way of writing to one’s grandparents was via snail mail. Slow and steady, the envelope says – as long as it doesn’t fall into the sea or gets mixed up and thrown away at the post office. Paper letters gave way to typing out Wordpad documents and sending them as email attachments.
When I was at boarding school, we were required to send out a weekly letter to our parents. Of course, these letters were highly supervised and edited for grammatical error, and as a kid, I had no sense of what to include in letters so I ended up writing the first paragraph asking my parents after the health and status of our many many dogs, mentioning them by name. My letters home were always accompanied by drawings. Boarding school was an entire time epoch away from the modern electronic world, even though these were the early 2010s.
Receiving letters was a different game altogether. I didn’t get too many letters, except for around my birthday, when my family would send birthday cards, and occasionally, a few long letters from back home. Mailing is an expensive operation, did you know? I was most excited when my best friend at the time, who had left the school after a year, sent letters or cards to me and our other best friend.
Stamps used to be fun. The mail I got from my grandparents would usually have stamps with images of vases or flowers or birds or butterflies. The mail from Mum and Dad would have Gandhi or Nehru or some other Indian persona. Sometimes Mum and I would sit on the floor cutting out stamps that had been glued on very firmly, and then she would preserve them in some treasured box whose whereabouts I am currently unaware of.
As we grew older, e-mails replaced letters, and then messages. I’d always been a fan of writing long e-mails and long messages, but soon realised that not everybody actually wanted to read them. Disappointment. To this day, it brings me great joy to receive a long , thoughtful message or an email or even a letter. My school juniors made me a few charts and a letter or so. Mum wrote me a letter for my 16th birthday( upon my suggestion, unfortunately *sheepish chuckle*). My best friends from school wrote me a few notes in this tiny notepad ( and I did the same for them). We bought greeting cards for each other, on Friendship Day and on birthdays, personalized to the person we were giving them to. It was a fun time.
Come college, letters are rarer. My grandparents still send letters occasionally, putting in the effort to transport this thin, small sheet of paper over the sea. They don’t contain doodles or fancy explanations. They contain trivialities – the weather, the vegetable harvest, how the political clime is affecting the commonfolk ( indirectly, of course, without any direct references), and how our other relatives are doing. Occasionally are enclosed photographs – the ones printed out on photographic paper, to be put into albums and preserved for posterity, so that I, when bored, can take them out and flip through them for hours and hours at a time ( that is a post for another day ).
The written word is beautiful. It shows heartfelt effort, thoughtfulness and creative power. Speech can be eloquent, showing off modulation in voice, spontaneity, perhaps with added gesticulation for dramatic effect. But writing – writing is calm. It is pouring your heart out into ink. It is organisation, but it is also madness. Words have the power to hurt; they have the power to heal, and to comfort. The last few years have shown me as much.
This brings me back to books, which possess a life of their own, and which gently tug you into their realms, until you’re not just walking along the page-lines, but tumbling, hurtling headfirst into a cosmic chaos, caught up in the currents of imagination and fatal, fatal dismemberment of your sane, rational functions ; until you lose yourself so much in the world you’re reading about, that you wish you never return, that the story never ends.
And when you read a letter from somebody, especially if it’s someone you know, someone you talk to, or have talked to before, you could, perhaps, see into their head, if they let you. You can trace out the penmarks and feel the tangibility of the paper between your fingertips. Coffee stains, tea spots, teardrops, ink blots – they’re there, and they’re proof of existence, written on diary pages, A4 sheets, notebook-leaf bits, fancy stationery.
And if the letter is from someone you love, or who loves you, in whatever way, I hope you find yourself enveloped in the words that they send, and that you see this warmth and earnestness reflected in their actions, a necessity to be in your life, like that letter now is. I hope the words they write serve as a reminder that you have people who care about you. And more importantly, I hope you write, whether in physical form, or just sending messages of air into the void, because writing is therapy, and writing is hope; it’s a beauty that you bring into the world, for you never know how much a simple note can elevate the mind of another.
Stay happy, humans, and don’t forget to think of yourself too, every once in a while.
Sincerely,
The Nerdy Snickerdoodle.
My Literary Fantasia 