Writing it right

Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading and occasionally rewriting the Letters to the Editor column in the newspaper I work with. It has been, on the whole, an interesting and novel experience, a turnaround change from the usual beat of glamour and lifestyle that I have been part of for almost all my working life. And people have a lot to say, often about very little. There are also professional letter writers, who respond to any thought they may read of in almost any of the many papers they do read. And they never hesitate to write in, expressing themselves sometimes succinctly and in comprehensible English, other times in words that, put together, spell o-b-s-c-u-r-e. There are rants, too, railings against the state of the nation, the city, the community, the newspaper and, of course, the individual.

In all this, I wonder sometimes what happened to what people call the ‘art of letter writing’. It is, indeed, an art. Today very few people, grandpas ‘talking’ to their granddaughters away in America in college included, use a pen and paper to express themselves. We all just click into our email accounts and start zipping away or, even more easily, log into a chat programme or messenger and type away at a thousand thoughts per minute. Somewhere along the way we forgot how to write, metaphorically and literally. Today, in fact, I can barely sign my name on a check – ask me to write using a pen or pencil on paper, and my already-barely-legible scrawl degenerates into something a drunk ant wandering through an inkwell would refuse to acknowledge as writing.

Once upon a time I wrote long and often profound letters to various friends. In school, when we were asked to write an ‘autobiography’, having lived long and hard all the way to the age of 11 or 12, I did mine as a letter to someone, I forget whom. An even more articulate piece of fiction came later, when I was about 15, and wrote a fabulous epistle to my then-best friend in the USA; I told Judy, a wonderfully warm and funny person and, like me, a sinker rather than a floater in a swimming pool (another story, another blog, another day), how I went to school on an elephant and played with the tigers that lived in my back garden, avoiding the snake charmers and rope-trick magicians en route to the tent cinema on special days. I never did find out whether she had read that one with any degree of her usual good humour, but we did stay friends.

One of the more exciting letters I got was from my buddy of many years, of whom I have written in an earlier blog. She announced coyly from somewhere in the centre of rural India that she would soon be making an aunty of me. Immediately, a long note full of exclamation marks and lots of excited expostulations was sent off to her, with many exhortations to take care, don’t travel and come home immediately attached. It must have been the silliest and most incoherent letter I ever wrote, but one that expressed my feelings of the moment with no self-censorship or second thoughts.

I once collected letters, along with the enclosures they came with. From flowers to pieces of ribbon, chocolates to photographs, they all piled up first in an envelope, then in a manila folder, finally in a large plastic bag. But whenever I moved to a new country, with or without parents, a massive clean-up would be organised. When I first had to make this kind of transition, I read every letter before I tore it up and threw it away. Soon, I learned to keep only a very carefully selected few. The burdens of kilos of paper gave way to a ruthless practicality. And, I knew well, the memories can never be thrown away.