Missing those letters

Illustration/Uday Mohite

AH letters! In our family cookbook that I mostly wrote from watching Amma cook during my college days, the recipe for Vegetable Pulao includes the line: "As soon as the oil gets hot, put crushed cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, then immediately add chopped onions - no Popemen peeking, by Jove!" This phrase is insider slang that only the Shedde family will know. It comes from Amma's habit of going to the kitchen window every now and then to see if the postman had come; "Popemen" ("po-pay-men") she would call him, in kiddie slang. The pulao recipe needed quick action; there was no time to hang around waiting for letters to arrive. Imagine, letters were once such a big part of our lives, they even seeped into our family recipe book.

I have generally been a big letter buff. Somewhere in the loft is a large box of letters I've received over the years - from friends, pen-friends, Papa, and a smaller package of love letters. Far from being wrapped in pink satin ribbon, the love letters are saved in an especially grubby envelope, with insurance policy renewal notice vibes, to put off prying eyes.

It was my German friend Marc Loehrer, from whom I learnt that letters could be a joyous adventure. He works in Stage Design and more at the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, Germany. But ours is a very ‘Lunchbox'-style friendship: I've known him for nearly 30 years now, and mostly through writing each other long letters over the years; I've met him only briefly through the decades. He would write me these long, exciting, 10-page letters that were full of drawings, xeroxes, photos and postcards. He once mentioned Unter den Linden (Under the Linden trees, a major Berlin boulevard) and because I didn't know then what a linden tree looked like, he schlepped across town (he then lived in the charming town of Würzburg), to the Linden tree behind the cathedral, pocketed a leaf, and sent me a Xerox copy of the leaf.

Then he delightfully rambled on about how Wilhelm Muller wrote a poem Der Lindenbaum (The Linden Tree) and how Schubert set it to music… uff! Hum bhi kisise kam nahin, and aspiring to his high letter standards, I would initially write my letters to him in a ‘rough book,' then I'd copy it in curlicued writing with a calligraphic pen, on beautiful, textured Chimanlal's letter paper. They would look so lovely, that I would Xerox all my letters before posting them. That's how I have a record of my own life, thanks to Marc. Then I have postcards I got during the one year I worked as a journalist based in Paris in 1995-96, reporting from eight nations. There was a shy chap, let's call him Laurent, who was a bit lattu over me, but was too tongue-tied to talk. He lived two floors above in the Maison de l'Inde in Cite Universitaire, where we lived, and almost every day he would drop a beautiful, affectionate post card in my postbox.

Somewhere in that lot of letters is one that Papa wrote Akku (Sarayu Kamat, my older sister), Amma and I when we went to spend May holidays at Amma's maika at Dharwar, Karnataka. I may have been six or so. What was lovely was that he wrote exactly as he spoke to us, in kiddie language, writing about what he made for breakfast, how his day went, and how he was missing us, all smattered with a hundred ways in which you can say darling in Konkani. He wrote in tiny handwriting - muyye pai (ant's legs) in Konkani - so he could cram in more - his writing going around all over the three flaps of the blue ‘inland letter,' leaving only the gluey-licky flap alone. It's years since I wrote or received a proper letter - and all these letters are among my richest treasures. Marie Kondo, excusez-moi.

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com