And then I got down to it. Mine was a transferable job and every four years or so one was mandated to move on a new place of posting. What it meant was that all our belongings had to be repacked to be lugged to a new destination which understandably led to a deep churn.
Old unseen items emerged from never-opened boxes and evoked fond memories. This time our daughter grudgingly agreed to give a helping hand in this painstaking exercise and was promptly tasked to pack books, documents and sundry stationary.
She brought a piece of paper that had fallen off one of my document folders and inquisitively inquired about a strange rectangular card that was stamped with a smudgy black blotch and carried some fading text.
She was about to admonish me for preserving such flotsam when I gently told her that it was a letter her grandfather had written to me some thirty seven years ago. This was the first letter in August of 1983 that I had received from my father on joining college.
She eyed it suspiciously and wanted to see its envelope too. She was gob smacked when I told her that those days you just wrote and posted, and yes even without a stamp or a cover. Intrigued and fascinated, she said “Dad, Why don’t you a write a letter to me, like grandpa would do to you”. I agreed without much thought.
And then I got down to it.
I once was an ardent letter-writer in the halcyon days of communication, a habit I acquired from my father whose principles on prompt correspondence were rather stringent. But I hadn’t handwritten a letter for a quarter of a century and prospect of writing one appeared daunting. Anyway, I acquired a neat ruled sheet, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, sat late after peace had begun to reign and switched on my table lamp after an aeon.
Writing, they say, makes a complete man. I realised, they had a point. When you type, it is the computer that is responsible. But when you write in hand the degree of personal responsibility grows many a notch. Computers observe the page margins unflinchingly even if the writer is asleep, while in your own hand it is an onerous standard to achieve. The salutations, beginnings of paragraphs and subsequent rows must fall in a straight line but have an inexplicable habit of going irritatingly wayward.
Spellings are another contemporary epochal challenge. Spellchecks and auto-corrects have reduced us to a species that now remembers only the first three letters of any word that has more than four. A few among us are losing those first three letters too.
Culminating in much agony
So, when I “enquired” about her “convenience” in her current “appointment” having being “anointed” in a “Supervisory Commitment”, I had, as I had “apprehended” run out of “Propriety and Patience”. The “sequential” order of an I and an e in “achieving” correct spellings is the “chief” cause for an “embarrassment” when what you “perceive” to be right “deceives” you invariably to culminate in much agony.
Now, computers erase and erase effortlessly without a stain or a blotch. Hand-written word in ink affords no such luxury. In an impeccable work of exquisite calligraphy this devious i-e doctrine can inflict a smudgy error. I am convinced that this i-e ambiguity has been deliberately fashioned in English language to forestall any human endeavour in the direction of error-free letter-writing.
However, after a dogged effort of over two days and seven agonising revisions, I did manage to achieve a closure on this enterprise. I made it a point to stamp it and post it in a letter box, the good old way. I wanted her to have the real “feel”, you see.
Dr Rakesh Maggon is a Dubai-based specialist ophthalmologist with an interest in literature
