Columnists

In Anticipation

T. SHER SINGH

Friday afternoons had been put aside for letter-writing.

Miss Morris explained it to the Grade Four class at the beginning of the year. Every Friday, right after we’d come back from lunch, we would be given two sheets of lined letter-writing paper and an envelope.

We were to write to our parents and let them know weekly how we were faring in boarding school.

On the first day, Miss Morris laid out the basics on the black-board.

The name of the school and the address would go at the top left of the page, followed by the date. Skip a few lines and then begin with the salutation, “Dear … “

Tell them what you’ve been doing during the week. Ask them how everyone is at home. Let them know if you need anything, etc.

And then end with farewell words and your name.

I had seen my father’s correspondence while hanging out in his store: copies of letters he had sent out, and the replies he had received. I had made a mental note of words and phrases I had liked in them, stored away for future usage.

So, in Miss Morris’ class, I rose to the occasion.

I remember the look on her face when she inspected my very first creation -- she wanted to review the letters before we folded them neatly, inserted them in the envelopes and wrote our home address on it.

My inaugural missive began:

“My Dearest Father and Mother …”

She nodded her head in approval.

“I am fine. I hope you are all well …”

Very good, she whispered.

“How are Davinder and Sunder? Hope they are well too …”

She pored over the page while hovering over me and made a few corrections to the grammar and punctuation; told me to break the paragraphs at a couple of places … and then stopped.

“Thanking you in anticipation,” read the final line, followed by “I remain, Yours Faithfully”. Punctuated by a well-flourished signature I had been practising for months on my own, ever since I had seen my father affix his on his letters.

I looked up at her, barely able to contain my pride. These were words I had meticulously memorized, and had ever since been dying to use them somewhere.

Tackling the multi-syllabic “anticipation” had been a systematic affair. I had broken it into its five components, and repeated them slowly, loudly; then closed my eyes and mouthed each syllable, then spelled it out, audibly, in sequence.

The method would hold me in good stead years later when confronted with other exotica … ‘Hathepshut’ or “Coriolanus,” for example.

I looked up at Miss Morris. “Impressive, isn’t it?” enquired my eyes hungrily.

She suggested a couple of variations: ‘Your loving son,’ for example. And she wanted to know where I had picked up ’anticipation’. I shrugged my shoulders, not surprised - but immensely pleased with myself - that it had caught her attention.

She simply shook her head, rolled her eyes, and moved on to the next desk.

Still new to body language, I read that as a distinct sign of approval. I had impressed her.

All my letters home thereafter, for a long, long time, began and ended in those formulaic words.

Pen-friends were a growing rage in those days. So, before long, as soon as I felt I had become deft in my letter-writing skills, I acquired a correspondent of my own.

The first one I chose at random from a pen-friend club listing. He turned out to be a Professor of Geography in the University of Colombo in Ceylon.

He was a kind man who never tired of the fact that I was a mere eight-year-old. Nor did he ever comment on my opening greeting: “My Dear Dr Ariyadasa Chandradeva” or my closing words: “Thanking you in anticipation, I remain, Yours Faithfully …”  

He told me he was Buddhist. So I regaled him with tidbits from our trips to nearby Rajgir, Nalanda, Bodh Gaya and Sarnath … all virtually equivalent of Mecca and Jerusalem for his Faith.

The fact that he and I were separated by three decades in age didn’t seem to be an impediment. Though we never met, we became and remained friends for years.

I connected with another pen-friend. A fellow in Djakarta, Indonesia. A university student who turned out to be, as our correspondence developed, an activist who opposed the country’s President, Sukarno -- he referred to him as a ‘dictator’, and then explained to me what it meant when I asked him -- and was heavily involved with the underground opposition.

He would send me pages and pages of tirades against his country’s oppressors. And complained bitterly about the suppression of news in Indonesia. He wanted me to ferret out any and all references to Indonesia I could find in our own newspapers and magazines, and to mail him the clippings. He gave me a lengthy protocol of how to do it -- that is, how to wrap them in double sheets of paper, not too many to an envelope, and to mail them to a third-party address, etc.

I was too young to fully understand the import of what he was up to and what I was helping him do. But he kept me loyal by feeding me the most extraordinary stamps and matchbox labels for my collection!

A few years later, suddenly all communication ceased from him. I never learnt what happened to him.

I had begun to enjoy the back-and-forth of long-distance friendships. I particularly liked the fact that you slipped an envelope in the mail-box one day and, in a couple of weeks, the mail-man brought you another one … with your name on it. With red and blue stripes, emblazoned “Par Avion” … and adorned with colourful stamps. Loaded with tales from faraway lands. Padded with goodies within.

Walter Beutler of Bremerhaven, West Germany, was the next one to become part of my secret life. Both he and his wife were school teachers. He said he liked exchanging letters with me because it gave him a chance to practise his English language skills. And he had the students in his class do projects on Sikhs and learn all about where I lived, and would report to me of all the goings-on in his class-room and ask me questions when they were stuck or if something didn’t make sense.

It never hit me until years later that as my list of pen-friends grew, by far the majority of them were full-fledged adults, many with jobs and careers, even families of their own.      

Initially, the number of pen-friends I had was limited by my weekly pocket-money allowance. After all, letters to foreign countries required entire rows of postage stamps.

So, I pressed my parents for increases, citing periodic hunger pangs.

In a few years, it was no longer a secret I could keep buried. Over the summer holidays, the postman would bring a separate stash of mail for ME, sometimes bigger than that for the rest of the family put together.

My mother was the soft target at home. I was able to impress on her that what I was doing was educational and legit, and she would slip me all the money I needed to feed my habit.

By the time I was in Grade 10, I had an active list of 74 pen-friends, some who wrote once a month, others less frequently. They were spread out across the globe. Like the Pilgrims discovering the New World, we too exchanged mutually beneficial gifts: stamps, coins, match-box labels, first-day-covers, home-made handicrafts …

I hungered for knowledge about how they lived, about their stories of joy and sorrow. And I gave them mine. I picked up turns of phrases from them or new ideas, fresh words.

But for one exception -- a Thai Buddhist monk -- I never met any of them.

The thread broke with them all only when we moved to Canada, and my address book was in one of the boxes that never arrived at our new destination.

But as I progressed from Grade Five, year after year, an hour had to be allotted everyday to writing letters. Our mail-service consisted of two deliveries daily, five days a week. On the sixth, Saturday, there was only one.

I learnt my own version of the adage “As you sow, so shall you reap.” It translated into: “If you send a letter, it’ll bring forth a response.” I had got so addicted to receiving missives from exotic lands that it became disconcerting if the mailman arrived and there was nothing for me. “Are you sure?“ I would ask, making him check his satchel again and again.

And then there was my first battle for rights.

One day my father decided it was time he did his parental duty by checking on exactly what I was up to in the hyperactivity surrounding the daily comings and goings of a large amount of mail with my name.

I was still 12 or so when I came home one summer day and found that my mail had been opened. I enquired and my father explained he had gone through the correspondence.

“Why?” I demanded, outraged by the intrusion.

“Because …” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t have the heart to tell me to my face that he was checking up on me.

I asked him not to do it again.

He asked why. Did I have something to hide … something I didn’t want him to see or know about.

No, I said, but even if I did, it was MY mail with MY name on it. It was out-of-bounds for him. And for everyone in the world.

I knew he meant well. But I knew I couldn’t give in on this …

I pressed, but he would not give me an assurance that he would never do it again.

It was a stand-off.

I fretted over it day and night. I knew I couldn’t win if I took him on headlong. I had to find an oblique way out. And I did.

The GPO - General Post Office - was but a kilometer away. And it was from there that the postmen would emerge on their daily rounds. I knew the timings of their daily visits.

So I simply walked a block and met the postman en route twice a day. They knew me well; they simply handed me my personal mail.

It took a few days for my father to realize what I was up to. He never said a word. He realized, I think, that it was time to let this one go.

It was the first battle I had against him. There would be many more between father and son, as is the way of the world.

I was growing up.

Little did I know then, nor did he, how timely it was that I had sorted out then the issue of privacy.

The letters with pen-friends would continue. But a new correspondent would soon join the stream.

I was in love.

And all of my epistolary skills were about to be tested.

February 2, 2013

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