Dead letters brought alive!

By RAJBIR DESWAL

Any idea about the dead letters? Not many youngsters would know. Letters that did not the reach the addressee were directed and dumped to be retrieved when the address was found, in the Dead Letter Offices(DLO)—I can recall one that was located in Amritsar. Spirited letters that we wrote with so much of indulgence are dead now, thanks to emails, SMSs and other communication vehicles available on the internet .

There was always a suspense and an apprehension if at all a letter would reach its destination or not, unless you sent it with a paid ‘Acknowledgement Due,’ especially in a registered cover, that would cost you ten times more than the usual postage. The best way then to make a letter reach the (actual) hands of the addressee was to send it as ‘bearing’ which meant that the recipient had to pay double the postage. Most of the lower strata, especially labourers or workers class from other states, used this mode. A bearing letter could be written on an exercise book page, folded appropriately.

Best way to ensure that a letter wasn’t opened by anyone unauthorized, was ink-marked on folds, with straight lines that would appear not in line and’ tinkered’ with, if the fold had been scrap-opened. Hardcore  writers left their missives their ‘identity cum emotion cum physical clue cum mental condition stains’ in the form of symbols, tears, blood, lipstick or turmeric, as the situation warranted. A postcard torn on one edge sounded an alarm for it contained information about someone’s death.

Addresses were written in full measure, as if taking into account every lamp-post or a municipal water-tap, if one of these was a local landmark. The usual stereotype could be: “Mile Pandit Dinanath ji ko, Patanjali Yogacharya, Mandir ke peechhe, Kumharan Kuan, Nazdik Govt Boys School, Chungi ke pass, Court Road, Allahabad”. If the addressee had relocated himself, then his neighbour could provide the postman a new address, on which the letter could  be ‘redirected’ (superscribed with red pen)  without landing in the DLO or being paid extra postage.

A proper salutation in a letter to the addressee was a must. Care was taken to make it as respectful as possible but clichés like Poojay Pita Ji, Adarniya Bhai Sahab, Azeez-O-Mun, Barkhurdar were invariably there. Closing the letter one would sound a tad more submissive—Apka agyakari beta; or, Sirf tumhara! In some letters, the available space too was filled up, making the reader turn it in many ways to decipher the entire scribbling.

The more animated letter writers invariably put a couplet, either at the beginning or at the end. It could be anything like—By God’s grace we are all fine here and hope you are also sailing in the same boat; Atra kushlam tatra astoo; Aage motor peechhe car, badon ko Namaste chhoton ko pyar. And then there were cautions—Chitthi ko taar samajhna; Thode likhe ko zyada samajhna! There could be none in the family or circle of the addressee who would go unenquired about—Jeeja ji ki naurki lagi ke nahin?  Meena ke liye ladka dekha ki nahin ?Abki baar Pappu pass ho gya ki nahin?—all this would end with “Khabar dena!”

In the 1949 Ashok Kumar-Madhubala blockbuster ‘Mahal’, the DLO retrieved a letter written by one Ranajna, who committed suicide making it appear to be a murder by her husband, but confessed it in a letter that did not reach the right hands . When the suspense was known after the letter was handed over to the judge, Ashok Kumar was saved from the gallows. A human error led to a blunder; a human effort sorted matters out—in letter and spirit.