Those Snailmail days

When is the last time you put pen to paper and wrote someone a letter? Me for one hardly puts plume to paper and can't even sign my name the way my bank of 20 years remembers it...so much so, all my checks bounce and the only way I make payment is thro cash...ofcourse it helps you withdraw money thro ATMs..My keyboard does the writing for me all the time so my juvenile handwriting is not an embarrassment anymore.
But recently , as my daughter was leafing thro my giant dictionary I bequeathed her, she came across a piece of paper with some writing and a big Snoopy ( Peanuts being her favourite comic series ) at the end of it.." Where do you get this kind of paper, mama?" she asked. It was a letter from my brother written to me during our college years.. I explained to her the concept of letter writing in days long ago and how we spiced up our letters with papers to suit our personalities and moods. (She made a mental note to ask her favourite uncle for any of the Snoopy papers he may have left ) .. As she checked the dictionary for more treasures, she came across a coral coloured handmade letter paper...yet another letter this one was from Chitra , a dear friend from my journalism college days..Reading thro it , I was swept by that wave of nostalgia..How exciting it was those days to check your mail box..Almost every week it brought these treasures, long letters from friends, brother, cousins... how much of our lives we recorded..recently a friend I connected with after a very very long time, said she still has my letters I wrote her once we finished our course together...It was hilarious, she said and recalled what mad antics we were up to those days.
Do they ever sell letter papers these days? I havent checked...In this age of the web, we email each other and FB ..but how much of that special individual bond do we share ? I hate opening my inboxes in the morn everyday becoz they are clogged with sundry forwards...Those rare personal mail I immediately write back...But still it isn't six pages long like the letters we used to write! I don't have an impressive list of friends on FB but in that public space how much can you connect to a person on a for-your-eyes only kind of way..Granted I use the personal message box more often but it isnt the same..
There was a time when one had penfriends..do people have such friends anymore?.I guess in today's cyber age, it's chat friends ! I recall I had a Bengali penfriend , who loved to educate me on lofty ideals, literature, culture and photography, a serious kind of chap ..At some point he accused me of being "too happy" and not serious enough (excuse me, since when did people decide they can slot people into categories they want? ) I promptly cut off the communication thenceforth. Maybe our Bengali babu was dissappointed I wasn't a kindred spirit.
Those were the days angst defined a writer. If you didnt have that wretched feeling you couldnt be a true writer.Believe me , I have had those days but all I could do was put my leg up on the wall and lie in a darkened room and think unhappy blank thoughts...read up Scott F's Crack up essays and Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar at that point but writing never came out of me..All was dark, blank and burning... Look at today's successful writers- Chetan Bhagat ( Aamir gave him some angst all right but that was ages after his books became best sellers) , Shobha De, Amitabh Ghosh ( very talented writer and compelling books but all meticulously researched and planned ...no angst whatsoever )..Salman Rushdie ( does he appear angst ridden? Ask his ex and current girl friends!)
Anyway I'm digressing..we are discussing the dead art of letterwritng here...After all this soul searching, I 'm yet to go out and post a handwritten letter to someone..Brevity defines us..texting, telephones and emails have corrupted us or are we all internalising our lives without giving out much to our loved ones who live far away? Btw, does anyone know how much it costs to post an envelope these days?..just curious!!!

So long, Thatha

The Thatha who lives across our apartment has passed away. I think it happened while we were not here but I noticed a small crowd in his modest balcony the other day. While he was alive, we had never noticed visitors..It was just Thatha and his wife. Thatha would sit out on the balcony reading the papers early at dawn and later on the evenings he would be there looking out into the open road and enjoying the breeze from the nearby sea. Ofcourse we don't claim to know him, my daughter and I , but we watched out for him with an abstract affection you feel sometimes for someone you see but don't know..It's a little like watching a movie and growing to like/emphathise with a character. Thatha would've been in his late eighties by the looks of it. He seemed a gentle, amiable soul watching the world passing by. My little girl had her own script for him everyday. "Look at poor Thatha, Paati has given him a restraining order today. She has locked that grill door to the balcony and he is prisoner, look, he 's behind the bars!!! " she would say. "Thatha is out early today and it's not even a working day!" I would have to remind her that for Thatha everyday was a holiday now. Whatever it was, we liked that comfort of Thatha across in the opposite apartment. He kept us company , albeit unknowingly on lazy summer evenings as we watched the stars rise in the skies. We miss him now, our Thatha. My daughter does not want to believe he is actually gone. 'Check the papers, I haven't seen any obits ' she tells me. I don't check, because he must have passed away before we got back.And I don't want to go through back issues for a fact I already know. "Maybe he has gone on a trip , to vist his children perhaps'' she says wistfully. But then what are all those people doing in his house and those homams that's going on?
A week has gone by now , the crowds have disappeared .Yesterday I saw the Paati come out onto the balcony in the morning. She sat there for a while in Thatha's usual place. She didn't read the newspaper ,instead stared vacantly down the road. I could feel a large lump rising in my throat. If Rudraa was awake she would have said to me" Mama, see Paati looking out for Thatha , he has gone out to buy the milk..".I haven't told her yet. Let her believe her Thatha has gone to visit his kids.Where ever you are Thatha, we miss you...god bless....

Fish fry? My bheja fries..

Those you who 'know' my past , will recall my distaste for fish and its ( for me) nauseating smell. Friends from college days even now recall how I 'd wait for them to finish their lunch and open the 'fish- moleculed' taps in the washroom . Later on, living in New Delhi folks were shocked." A fish phobic Mallu? Are you for real ?" Strange that they didn't stereotype my Totally Carnivore Tam Bram husband! This man has eaten everything including frogs legs and cow's entrails!
Well, coming to my story, fish was not in my scheme of things until the day the father convinced the daughter that fried fish was the most exotic dish in the world. My child who is not easily convinced actually was bought over just like that ! Must mention the fish was Red Snapper and my Waterloo was, where else, God's Own Country. So it came to pass , two fish lovers in the house. Soon we moved city to coastal Chennai. Fish was served in our Bengali friend's house , in completely different avtar , yet the child was like Mowgli mesmerised by Nag.
My nemesis came a while later during our trip to Andamans (I'm not going to do another travelogue , so those of you who wish to read Andaman chronicles pl go to my brother's blog!!!) It was a real off beat trip , not your regular holiday ( never meant to be as it was a research trip for my better half ) .We went on a day trip out in the sea on a donghie ( a kind of small boat with a little canopy and fitted with a motor ) to explore some virgin islands. It turned out to be really lucky day for the boat men as their fishing lines yielded great catches ..They caught four huge Kukari fish each weighing 8 kilos or more...It was high excitement for all of us as the boat would tilt precariously when it would be a tug- of- war of sorts by fish and man. Our friends who took us on the trip said this was an unusually lucky day ( luck and us?????) and they'd never had such a haul in so short a time . Later on in the evening , we had a bonfire and one of the ensnared fish was cooked .The fish was truly delicious and out of this world said all the tired and hungry co voyagers of mine. My daughter and nephew would wolf down hot and piping fried fish straight off the tawa as they were stragetically positioned right next to the chef -in -making young Aman, their friend, guide and 'life guard' ( as my nephew put it! ) Being fresh sea fish, there wasn't any odour and as usual with my brother and husband, they were goading me to have some. These guys never stop trying! To make matters worse,there was present a lady who was a self-professed vegan . Suddenly , taking even her husband of zillion years by surprise, she partook of the said fish saying it had no smell what so ever! As if on cue , S pounces on that chance and urges me to do likewise..It's like chicken, try it...Like hell I will... (.Later on further investigation, I found out the lady in question had been vegan only for the last 15 years !!! )So it was not conversion but reversion, I noted with disdain. Anyway Kukari became an elixir for lots of people in my family that day. So much so that on his next trip my husband made sans us, daughter dearest asks for Kukari! Bring back the fish to mainland he did, all the way to Chennai on flight .Enough to last two weeks ! Me , what choice do I have but cook the fella every single day, smell or no smell..So I'm on phone to friends and relatives to get various Fish recipes..It's Kerala fried fish one day, A bengali one next, a fish curry the day after, it goes on and on and on...I 'm stoic and detached Buddha like when I approach the Kukari..Let those who want eat it..After all I know the merits of a fish diet...But eat I shall not.No ,I refuse to believe I'm missing out on anything.