From you

“I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as it connects. I go online. My breath catches in my chest as I hear three little words, ‘You've got mail.’ I hear nothing, not even a sound on the streets of New York. Just the beat of my own heart. I have mail...from you.”

As I sit down wrapped warmly in what my mother calls ‘granny’s blessings’…the steam from a hot cup o’tea fogging my brain…Sunday is sadly coming to an end. I don’t quite know why, but I am reminded of a song by Freddie (Fred E.) Ahlert….

I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
And make believe it came from you

I'm gonna write words oh so sweet
They're gonna knock me off my feet
A lotta kisses on the bottom
I'll be glad I got 'em
I'm gonna smile and say

I hope you're feeling better

I'll close with love the way you do
I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter

And I'm gonna make believe it came from you

This takes me back to late night shows of “You’ve Got Mail” and talks about bo-tt-om-dwellers and The Godfather, of butterflies off to buy hats and celebrating the fall with ‘bouquets of sharpened pencils’…

And I find myself wishing for someone who would write me a letter. A long winded, leisurely one. One that talks of everything under the sun and yet nothing in particular. One that I can read under the spray of yellow light from my bedside lamp and then stow away underneath my pillow. A charm for good dreams.

I like letters. I like writing them. I love receiving them, even more. There is nothing that quite compares with the sheer thrill of getting mail….and I’ll make some space here to include the “e” versions as well…

And now as I try to recollect my experiences of the postal kind….a certain blue inland letter from Nanaji comes knocking...

*For the less-informed (ignorant would be a rude way of addressing a potential reader, no?!)…an ‘Inland Letter’ otherwise also known as an aerogramme is a sheet of postal stationery where the letter sheet doubles up as an envelope. Refer to Fig.1.2/exhibit A…(whatever!)

Nanaji wrote the most meticulously worded letters possible. They were mostly addressed to ma, w/o pa. The opening paragraph would be a polite enquiry about the ‘pinkness’ of all our healths. Followed by news he wished to exchange. Neatly divided, every matter that he wished to discuss had a para each devoted to it…and he never ever wasted any available space…not even the folds.

It was always the most interesting of games…trying to piece together a letter from the fragments scattered across in all manner (inside, outside, vertically, horizontally…) till we found the last piece of the puzzle… affection and love…Nanaji.

Most of the times, these letters would carry a line or two where he’d address me and my sis, indirectly. But sometimes, like a gift out of a Christmas stocking, would pop out little letters addressed solely to us! Oh what fun…an entire letter written to me! I’d carry it around for the next few days…reading and re-reading it till I had it by-heart….love and affection.

Not much has changed…except Nanaji. He’s gone. And so have those blue letters. But I still cherish a well written mail.

One of my longest standing correspondents…invoked on a winter eve in panic…we’ve talked across each other…like two parallel lines….on and off…erratic to the level of surreality…and surreal to the level of eccentricity. He would (still does) send me little rhetorical pieces…and I’d immediately proceed to comment, squiggle, squirm or shout in reaction…

The most memorable mail…one whimsically titled You didn't reply to my mail! :((
This restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos...
signed…P

Now that I think of it…Brilliant poking tactics…really!! He must have chuckled every time I launched into an ear-piercing “Aaargghhh” mail…

Unfortunately, the closest of friends have persistently refused to display their skills at penmanship.
One of my greatest lament has been regarding the reluctance on part of my friends, when it comes to writing mails…thirsty summers would pass in different cities with only a two-liner go-between …Of course I will have to make an exception for the summer of 2004, when D decided we must discuss the virtues (or rather the vices) of the then newly elected government, led by Sonia…erm no…Manmohan Singh. The air went thick with virulent and excited mails…going back and forth…D to D…till we called truce and let Manmohan go in peace.

But the best of our mail conversation went something like this…
D: make a yahoo messenger id...fast
D: Maybe......someday
D: ohh....you want to keep me waiting
…………………………………………………………………….


Then of late…some two years back, to be precise…I developed a habit of making ‘virtual’ friends…one for every year. We (they and I) would exchange mails…even chat…till talk dwindled to the level of ho-hmms and lols! and I ran for cover (and for anybody who wishes to contradict me…or say something about freak proposals…I don’t know you!)… Yes, we did begin by professing we were in search of experiences of the cerebral kind (gegege)…then we got derailed. The year petered out, so did our conversations …

Till of course, one day, when I got hooked…….mails that just wouldn’t go away!
They came in the guise of friendly missives, songs, scientific exhortations, human lamentation and most memorably, chapters from Sandman…capriciously innocent, A wrote me a treasure in words….mails under the most cryptically Delphian titles. Sample - Various…On God…of herbs and stewed rabbits…Preludes and Nocturnes…X and Y….olive greens...fiddlers green ....inquisitions and nightmares…..Mail from Digenes....Endless Nights….Ironies…Diamonds and Rust….edelweiss…. Fables and Reflections…Hmmm…Usual…nothing at all…

I may or may not have replied to all or some of these…as and when the whim-struck fingers have permitted. All the same, I am convinced that written correspondence, wins out over every other form of communication….especially telephonic. For instance, A and I can find little to talk of beyond our three meals; or when P calls, more often than not, we resort to talking in silences. Letters possess the quality of an "emotion recollected in tranquillity", to borrow words from Wordsworth. It is not just witty riposte..and it seeps over and beyond daily banal converse...the spell of unspoken words that work their way to possess the reader somehow. I swear its black-magic! And I'm a willing victim....There might be those, anyhow, who’ll argue in favour of more ‘spontaneous’ discourse…but I think I’ll sit this one out… and wait for a mail…that just won’t come…not now at any rate


Affection and love