THOSE MAGICAL LETTERS

When I was young,everyone wrote letters to each other.I have many handwritten letters that I treasure,and even though some of them have faded or got torn,the subtle memories they evoke are rich in vibrant resonance.The most treasured letters are naturally from my mother who has passed away,those which she wrote to me when I was in a foreign land for quite sometime.Not all the smses,emails and tweets that come my way these days can quite evoke the wonderous magic of those handwritten words.

I don't think we anticipated the letter's sudden demise.So,not many of us preserved the letters that we recieved.Luckily I did to some extent though I wish I had preserved some more of them.Today,when almost all communication is only verbal or virtual,one misses the tender intimacy of those handwritten words.Once in a while I stumble upon them searching for some old papers,I am amazed at the patience,the gentleness,the sincerity,the unspoken bonding of a time when people used to sit down and wrote their hearts away to their family,friends and lovers

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Letters,unlike blogs,were never meant for the perusal of multiple pairs of eyes.They were always one on one.And the letters closest to my heart are my mother's inland letters on almost every birthday of mine,different anecdotes about my birth,the mosquito net under which I used to sleep off to Never Never Land,riding my Dreamland Express,and how she used to cozyly tuck me away at night.

 I no longer sleep under mosquito nets.There is no one to tuck me away at night.My mother's memories are fading away these days,not because I love her any less but time has put a soothening balm over the pain of her absence.I speak to her in my thoughts.

There are no letters now,no words I have to decipher meanings from,nested in a somewhat impractical romanticism.In fact,all communications today is more obvious(and more guarded)and even though I respond to smses,emails,tweets I get from acquaintainces and friends,I can sense I am missing something out there.Now all I get on my birthday are scribbles,flowers,books,chocolates,CDs,aftershaves.Among my cherished gifts are still pens even though I write so rarely with them.But I still treasure the Wing Sung pen that a very special collegemate gifted to me on my 20th.birthday.I also preserve a couple of random poems that a very famous Bengali poet,a family acquaintance,scribbled on torn sheets of paper on a sunny April morning ,drunk out of his wits,as my 22nd.birthday gift.I preserve that manuscript much more dearly than the book of poems that later appeared.

The technology of communication has vastly improved with an ever-increasing acceleration.Smses cost a paisa now.Emails and tweets are free.So are FaceBook postings and DMs.But I miss the personal touch of the hand-written letter,the poem,the manuscript,the drawings,the music notations my friends would send me,when the art of writing was still alive.No flowers,no chocolates,no CDs can quite compensate for them.And I know for sure that they never will.