One of the worst mornings in quite a while, and as soon as I stepped into office, the receptionist handed me a little green envelope, and it’s been so long that I took a moment to register – I had mail 🙂
It’s strange that any kind of electronic communication is christened ‘mail’. To me, those hold a very different place. Mail is real genuine mails, written by hand, posted into a post box and delivered by the postman (#Refer to previous posts wherein I am a self confessed fossil from some archaic era, in my head). From when I was a child, growing up in Muscat, I remember these letters being such a source of joy to the family – and the act was imprinted in my mind. I used to write to my grandparents, first in broken Bengali, and then to my grandfather in English and he would read them out to my grandmother (I am told that my written Bengali classes were brought to a stop when I wrote Bengali in a Hindi assessment in school 😀 ). The letters we received were stored very carefully in a old, emptied cardboard box and was treasured more than!
Years went by, and I was still in the habit of doing so – on birthdays, anniversaries, occassions and sometimes without any purpose, I used to sit down with my letter pad and my ink pen and wrote my heart out – to Ma and Baba, to my brother, to friends and my diary with addresses grew year on year.
Today, when I reminisce, I recollect that I haven’t written a letter in forever. Maybe there’s nobody else interested to read them, maybe I just cannot find reason enough to write or maybe no one has ever written back, hence I’ve lost interest. But today, I received an inland letter card from Pondicherry! My parents were visiting, and they wrote me a few lines and I couldnt stop smiling at how happy it made me. And Baba also put in the date in the right corner, just like I have learnt from him to do – put dates on everything!
Hence, I will start writing to people I care about, and I will hope that one person will write back and make my day because I will have gotten mail 😀