THE LETTER WRITING PERIOD!

Fridays have always been significant ; the movies,weekend, end of another shitty week, to say that it’s a small slice of heaven wouldn’t be overrating it. However when I was a kid, Fridays meant something entirely different.  Friday was “letter-writing day”. Let me elaborate. When I was 8 years old, my parents suddenly decided that day schools were a horrible idea and so off was I sent to a boarding school. With telephones still being a little uncommon, letters were what kept us linked to home. So every Friday, there would be a letter written out on the blackboard and everyone would be scribbling out the same on their  letter pads. the letter writing period we called it.

 The contents were almost always be the same and by the end of an year, my mother had its contents memorized. Nevertheless, every  Friday,we still maintained the same schedule.  “Dear mummy/daddy, I am fine here by the grace of God  and hope and pray the same for you. My studies are going on in full swing. The weather here is chilly, how’s the weather at your place”, etc.  Some  special occasion, like a birthday,which needed to be mentioned, a card to be enclosed,would require the permission of the class teacher.

The whole idea was “to stay in touch”. When we entered senior school, it  became a little less of a compulsion; phones were allotted to each class on their specific days and “staying in touch” became more verbal. Letters, however,would still be written. The only change was in the recipients. With a boys’ school on a distance of less than a kilometer  and a headmistress who probably had the ability to sniff the presence of a male particle, letters  became a major source of communication.Seniors who were fortunate enough to have their classes in the boy’s section would be handed parchments folded together in the teeniest bit possible, and hence, letters would be passed on. There was even a time when proposals would be made through the holy sheets of paper, with guys sometimes forgetting that they lived only a block away and mentioning how surprisingly  sunny the weather was.

The minute I stepped out of school, the letter writing  stopped. And so today, when I get a letter out of the blue, it reminds me of the 8 year old me, jumping with excitement at the prospect of a letter having arrived from home, of reading my mother’s familiar and warm handwriting and re-reading it again and again ,happy that she had written to me, of sometimes being so thankful to the postal services; those men were saviors!

Today I might not write as many letters as I did when I was 8, but whenever I do, along with a smile ,an extremely familiar line creeps in;

 “ the weather here is fine, how’s the weather at your place? :D