Monday, January 7, 2019

The Art and Power of the Letter

I love letters. I love writing them and of course, I love receiving them in any format. Letter-writing may be my favourite writing genre.

***

I have written letters all my life.

My great grandfather's postcards, we like to say, kept the family together across the distances they traveled once they moved from Burma. Anna would write to every household on an open postcard or inland letter form--nothing more ostentatious--and share news of every other part of the family. The news could be that the little child in one had been admitted to school or that another household had vacationing guests or that an in-law's family was about to have a wedding. There would be birthday greetings (often poems) and reminders. In the absence of even telephones and certainly incomes that would have made calling possible, the little card kept every one in the family informed about everyone else's joys, sorrows and struggles, creating a support network ("Come, stay with me and look for a job") or a prayer circle, whatever each could offer with love.

Anna's letters were precious, and now fifty years after his death, finding one that mentions you warrants celebration.

When Anna came to stay, children were encouraged to draw or write a line in his letters. We were encouraged to write to each other. And our parents initially sat with us and showed us where to write, where to draw and where the address went.

Some of us (I'm thinking of you and me, Supriya!) took to letter-writing like fish to water. We wrote to each other every week. Initially, these were simple letters, often listing queries about the whole family like a list--something that we learnt from Anna. As we grew older, they listed other things--books and songs, for instance--and began to include school news and of course, secrets. The envelopes got thicker and were marked 'Confidential.' They were despatched with such regularity that stores selling pretty stationery did brisk business with us. A twenty-sheet quarter-sized pad was basically two letters!

In 1975, Supriya's family came on a holiday to Bombay. Her father saw my interest in international politics and suggested, perhaps partly in jest, that I write to heads of state expressing my views. Children did these things and were encouraged to in those days, and I would say it was a bigger deal because there was no ready Internet directory where you could get an address or an email, and no ready amplifying social media. One purchased aerogrammes, and hand wrote the letters, and wrote an approximate address and sent them off.

With Sab's help, I drafted several such letters and shot them off that summer. I do not remember what I wrote--there were no draft files or copies--but the letters expressed a hope for peace and e international friendship and asked for a penfriend from that country, usually. There was some hits and misses, but I will be eternally grateful to Sab for giving an 11 year old a sense of agency in world politics. Long after this batch, I continued to feel free to share my views with heads of state and government. In the era before blue ticks for this and that, you wrote in the spirit of the Gita--it was what you had to do, and whether someone read or acknowledged your letter was not your problem.

Anyway, the best outcome of these letters was that within three years, I had about 13 penfriends from around the world. Can you imagine how many letters I got to write and received in a month? My parents subsidised all this world peace work without ever looking for an 80G tax discount! More than forty years later, I am so grateful I still have three of these people in my life. As for the others, some lasted a few letters, some a few years. Two, I still wonder about: Martine from Marseilles who wrote poetry and Scott from Birmingham. I sometimes Google them but with no luck.

After my first stint in the US, where I lived in the International Living Center at Syracuse University, I came home with an even larger circle of international friends. I started that American practice of holiday letters. But soon it became too expensive--too many people in too many parts of the world. Too many letters to xerox and too much to post. The letters eventually stopped when I went to graduate school again.

By this time, we were beginning to use email. Between the workload in graduate school, penury and email, anyone who was offline somehow just went off the radar. One thought of people but it got harder and harder to write a letter and post it. I still list people I want to get back in touch with--like Masumi, my closest friend from the ILC--but decades, not years, have passed since our last exchange and I wonder where I will find her.

Many years after his death, I started writing postcards to the whole family like Anna did, but after a couple of years, I stopped because I moved away for graduate school. I started the same practice over email but times had changed--no one replied, but everyone expected to receive a letter with news of others but without giving away their own updates (privacy!) and when I complained, I was scolded, "Don't you do this for your pleasure? You cannot have expectations of others!" True enough, but the one-sided correspondence wasn't giving me pleasure so I stopped.

I write email messages everyday. They are letters but one composes them so quickly and tersely, that they share information and instructions but rarely, thoughts. Some people still write long, thoughtful email messages and when they do, I appreciate that but sometimes, it stresses me out because I think I will not have the time and bandwidth to respond in a similar way. I postpone the reply and finally forget about it. With WhatsApp, I find the communication with my cousins is easier but even less literary than an email!

In recent months, I have been thinking a great deal about the art of the letter and also, its power as a medium for thought and action.

***

I have always liked to write letters and just as much, to read them. I was fortunate to stumble upon some amazing examples in my formative years. I borrowed the Holmes-Laski letters from the British Council Library in Bombay, and while I may now understand some of the content better than when I was an undergraduate, I devoured them anyway, copying down passages here and there (where is that notebook now?!) to preserve. During my Diplome Superieure course at the Alliance Francaise, we read Madame de Sevigne's letters, including the brilliant "Lettre des epithetes." In school, we read many of Nehru's letters to his daughter, and later, I read Nehru's letters to Chief Ministers and Congress leaders. I gravitated towards collections of letters all the time because people wrote so much in their letters to each other.

They discussed ideas and thoughts. They used the letters to explore feelings. The letter was not just an instrument but a medium most versatile.

In recent months, I have been reading Rajmohan Gandhi's collection of essays on the relevance of Gandhi. As I have read them, I have reflected on how I can relate personally to his life and ideas. But I have also marveled at how prolific Gandhi was. To start with, I am awestruck by how much he fitted into a single day and at his disciplined lifestyle. He took care of himself and others around him; he fitted routine activities like spinning and the prayer meeting into the day, never letting them be derailed; he met people and discussed truly important things; and he wrote.... articles for various publications including his own, journal entries and letters. We have a library full of his words because he wrote honestly, thoughtfully, extensively and substantively. We see the evolution of his thinking transparently because he wrote with candour.

As 2019, I am looking to write more and the worldly advice I am getting is that one should be paid for one's writing. I agree. One should be paid. But my heart, if truth be told, is drawn to Gandhi's way. Where the words are the journey, and you share them here and there, as you can. No doubt, he would have liked to make money for his writing too, but not doing so did not stop him. Every opportunity to write was an opportunity to think and express, and therefore a step on an inner (and therefore, outer) journey.

None of this other stuff matters. In the simple, humble everyday act of letter-writing, far greater people have found a platform with so much potential--and so much power. Maybe I should re-learn something from them.

I looked for a closing quotation for this blogpost and found this, by Haruki Murakami:
“How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.” 
How wonderful, indeed! 








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