On Writing Letters

Engineers and programmers of the internet have made modern Peace Corps volunteers lives much easier and much poorer.  Cell phones and computer based technology are so interwoven with our lives today that it seems strange when we are temporarily without them.  If you were a Peace Corps Volunteer in India in the 1960’s you were on your own.

 There wasn’t instant access to a super highway of information and entertainment or a cyber linked troop of family and friends that you could turn to for advice and support when the unruly flux of cross-cultural shock caused your “Reverse J Curve” to plummet.

The vast digital world of Facebook and Skype, of e-mails or streaming sports events or a film, were still science fiction. From Kolar airmail could take weeks both ways, sea mail months, and the nearest telephone was in Bangalore sixty miles away.

A friend gave me a pen as a going away present before I left for India, a Parker T-ball Jotter. It was a deluxe model in stainless steel that fit nicely in my hand and became my link to the world that lay beyond Kolar. He gave me good advice along with it. 

“Write a lot of letters, let people know what you feel and think, tell them about the everyday things and how your work is progressing. Let people see India through your eyes and they will see how it is changing you."

I took his advice and wrote droves. I bought stacks of prepaid aerograms, thin writing paper glued on the edges that when folded became its own envelope. I filled them with banalities, insights and reflections in a sloping longhand that invariably grew smaller as my letter progressed. After I had begun, I usually discovered that in my eagerness I had more to say than there was room for on that 6” x 12” page, and unlike a normal letter, I couldn’t add a few more sheets of paper and another stamp. 

Everything was new and I was wide-eyed and impressionable. I related everyday incidents and anecdotes about my work and tried to describe the time warp that I had fallen through. I wanted people to see India as I saw it with all its color and texture and describe the intricate canopy of past and present that shaded every aspect of village life.

There was an intimacy in what I wrote; I look back and see snapshots of the moment and my mood. I think of those texts now and see that I had a young man’s infatuation with India, and like anyone infatuated I saw and forgave every flaw and shortcoming.

In as much as village life just about came to a standstill at sundown, my evenings belonged to my imagination, to whatever book I was reading, or as I often did, to writing letters. I would sit and write about my day or sometimes come to terms with it if necessary, through an absolution that flowed from the tip of my pen or through the tangents of my borrowed typewriter, a scuffed black Royal from the 1940’s that weighed as much as my Jeep’s spare tire, and required a hammering blow to depress the keys. 

I sat under the dull glow of my room’s twenty-five watt lamp. The unshaded bulb hanging from a cord was a luxury that set me apart from my neighbors and most of the other villagers. The staccato tick-tack of metal striking paper that escaped through my open windows must have sounded mysterious and exotic in the still of the Kolar night.

The difference between hand written letters,writing on a typewriter or sending texts electronically was that with a typewriter or pen you had to get it right the first time. 

I wrote in a hasty longhand or plunked out my words on my vintage Royal with its faded ribbon and some of the letters sticking so that I had to stop and pull them back. Unlike letters written on a computer, there wasn’t the opportunity to alter my chronicles by letting my itchy fingers meddle with them, or letting the spelling and grammar check automatically correct them. 

My choice of words and phrases locked me in descriptions that were spontaneous, or the opposite, written with forethought and carried around in my head for a few days while they matured. I sometimes spoke my sentences out loud before I wrote them down in case I wanted to change or add something. 

If I wrote on letter paper and not on an aerogram, I bought stamps for the envelope at the little post office on the Bangalore Road, discussing them with the clerk as he showed me the colorful sheets depicting Gandhi or the flora and fauna of the country. I carefully chose motives that I thought were the most exotic so that they might add something of their own to my story.

My family and most of my friends weren’t prolific correspondents so I didn’t get many return letters, but I appreciated them when they came and they were a reminder that the life that I left behind continued without me. I waited for the postman every morning, hovering over the friendly, always cheerful man, on the chance that he had something for me. If he did, I’d sometimes tuck it away and savor it unopened for a while and read it after dinner. 

I was never homesick so it wasn’t so much what the letter said but the thought that someone took the time to write it and mail it. During my Peace Corps service I wrote three or four letters a week and forgot about them as quickly as I posted them, but my mother saved hers neatly filed in a shoe box in chronological order. After she passed away my brother sent me the box. 

The rubber bands that held them together broke as soon as I tried to undo them, fragile like the memories that they contained. Rereading them was like looking at the faded photos in an old album and wondering if that was really me staring into the camera.

My old letters were strewn with cross-outs and insertions, notes in the margins and written in a sometimes illegible hand. The carefully practiced mechanics of the Palmer Method that were drilled into me in the third grade, and that I never quite mastered, were all but forgotten in my enthusiasm to tell about the events that my day or week held.

Now for better or worse, the cursive script that those letters were written in has almost become as archaic as licking the glue on an envelope, and as longhand isn’t taught in school any longer, I’m afraid that my grandchildren when they go through my effects, will look at my idiosyncratic penmanship like I look at Sanskrit.

Once when I released the carriage and rolled in an aerogram and began writing the address on the front page, I saw two long filaments that waved back and forth every time I struck a key. In the dim light I thought that those silky threads were strands of someone’s hair that had fallen onto the tangent arms.

When I removed the cover to take them out, a cockroach the size of my thumb and with antennae as long as it’s glancing, brown-beige body crawled out and fell onto the floor and scurried away to find an undisturbed crack to squeeze into. I decided that there’s was no point in searching for it because there must be an army of them which means it’s time to spray the entire bungalow again.