Letters

I want to send letters. I want to write letters. On paper. Instead of looking at pictures of friends on facebook, I want them to write to me describing their life. When you write a letter, you create a story, a narrative, about yourself, and everyone around you. Letters have a physical existence, which cannot be snuffed out by pressing the delete button. Sure, you can burn them or lose them, but they can also be around for really long.  I've read letters sent to my mother from my father, from my grandmother to my father, from my great-grandmother to her daughter. All these letters are anything but bland descriptions of life. They include heartfelt emotions, philosophical ruminations, and hilarious anecdotes. These were the days before instant communication, and they are not so long back. From 1999 to 2001, my dad was posted in Kashmir, and he lived in an area where decent phones were non-existent. Talking to him was only possible on a garbled Army phone line where only one of us could talk at the same time. Therefore the conversation usually went like this, I’d say, “Hello, Dad. Over.”( In the manner of a radio operator, telling the other person that I have finished speaking)  My dad would reply, “Hi, son. Over.” Such conversations were finished with an ‘Over and Out’. Having such conversations was just a sort of reassuring exercise where we would have heard the other's voice. 

The only way to have a conversation about the details in our life was writing letters. Those letters to my father when he lived away from us were the only letters I ever wrote. I bought a letter pad and wrote letters 1 or 2 pages long telling him what I did at school, who my friends were and the wonderful food that Mom was making. He'd write back, describing the mountains, the bunker he lived in, fishing for trout in the freshwater lake they lived near, when he's coming back home, and there'd be photographs of him standing in the snow attached. I never wrote any letters after that, I think, except one to my grandfather many years ago.

Sure, phones improved, the next time Dad got posted to Kashmir, we could talk, and then came email, then Orkut, and Facebook, and smartphones and BBM, and now wherever anyone I know is, I can talk to, or send a message instantly. It is a good thing you know, but is my communication with people on the internet a record or reflection of me. I don't send any long, personal emails to my friends or family, people I haven't met for years are online at the same time as me, but I, and they, don’t care. People chat with me online, asking, “How's life?” and I reply with a banal, one line answer. Then they reply with their own banal, one line answer. I send impersonal birthday greetings to people on facebook, and they send them to me. 

In contrast with this, someone's sent and received letters are a reflection of their life because they're inherently more personal, more confessional and more detailed. Letters tell us a lot about a person. Famous people's letters are published, because we want to know more about them, their correspondence is a record of their life.  To write a letter is to pause, to stop, and think and then to have the freedom to go on and on. The emotions just seem truer. Letters expressing love can be dramatic, filmy or even lame, but the ordinary correspondence of two people separated by time and space expressing that emotion can be rather beautiful too. There are still boxes full of letters sent by my parents to each other before they got married. Today, two people like that would probably Skype.

I want to feel the paper under my hand, as I write a letter, in longhand. The only writing I do physically is in exams. I want to write, for pleasure, and then fold the page I wrote on, put it an envelope, put stamps on it, and post it. Then I want you to do the same for me.