Letters from yesterday

Email can’t replace the warmth of the brittle folds of paper

When I was recently reading Love, Groucho, an extraordinary collection of almost two hundred letters by the legendary actor and comic Groucho Marx, I found myself immersed in the world of handwritten and typed letters. Every letter is a fabulous insight into his persona — his genius, his wit, and his work. As I read on, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if Marx had only written emails and text messages instead of these typed-out and handwritten letters? Would they still be as delightful?

Well, the world of Marx was not very different from the times we were growing up in the seventies and eighties — a world without the internet, digital interfaces, and chat apps. Times when connections were forged through ink and paper, and when the arrival of a letter was a mini celebration. I fondly remember those evenings that held a special magic for us when we gathered around my aunt, who would read aloud letters from relatives written in Tamizh. When we heard our names read out from those letters, our joy was boundless. The letters held the weight of the world within their folds. Each of them, whether it be an appointment letter or a terse rejection, found its way home, carried by the faithful hands of the postman. Knowing that nothing was instantaneous, a quiet anticipation filled us as we eagerly awaited news of cousins coming over for the summer holidays. There was infinite charm in the waiting. 

In the world of physical letters, there was warm intimacy—a connection that transcended time and space. I recently found a letter written by a Supreme Court judge to my father congratulating him on completing fifty years of his law practice and fondly remembering their times together at the Bar. The unevenly typed lines on the judge’s letterhead with his smudged signature still throb with the affection that the friends shared, far beyond anything an email or a text message can ever convey. 

Post office trips were happy excursions, filled with the excitement of buying colourful stamps, dropping letters into post boxes, noting down the time of “next clearance,” and, not to forget, the lessons of the economy of buying a postcard over an envelope. We would eagerly await Deepawali and the New Year, not just for the festivities but also for the arrival of greeting cards, each one a precious token of affection to be collected. In times when our inboxes are choked with photos and images forwarded impersonally by just anyone—and forgotten instantly or even deleted unread—the cards and letters lying in my cupboard are sheer treasure. 

As I reflect on the days gone by, I am filled with a bitter-sweet longing for a time when handwritten words held weight, when ink and paper forged connections, and when the simple act of receiving a letter was a celebration. Though the world has moved on and technology has advanced, the warm spirit of those bygone times will live forever inside the brittle folds of the letters lying in my drawer.