Let us write letters

I was reading one of M’s usual group e-mails the other day and was absolutely amazed with the fact that I was delighted to receive it. It’s become a pleasant part of a fortnightly routine to read of her adventures (or mis-adventures, as it were) in college. Much more, it is delightful to read the sheer wonder and awe in her mind for her everyday (mundane, some would call it) life. There is, she writes, something grand and larger than life in sitting in a quiet, moldy, sinister library, working on plotting charts (because she doesn’t know Excel) or making half an hour presentations on some weird rural economics or some such (I doubt she knows Economics). I also learnt, recently enough on Facebook, that M’s name is actually A! How quaint.

However, the real reason for my pleasure in reading M’s mails is more of nostalgia than anything else. There was a time in the past, the deep past, more the Jurassic period of T’s life, when a close friend of mine, S, and his family (including his brother T/V, also a close friend), shifted to Mumbai from Bangalore. S used to call me Ruby, incidentally, don’t ask, won’t tell. S, bless his heart, is now in Stanford, doing some rather random research on God-knows-what. Well, S used to write me letters and I used to reply to them. I still have some saved up in my drawer at home and read them in those periods of sharp existential angst and those others, of quiet, unadulterated bliss. I usually go through all the things I’ve stocked up in my drawers during those times, probably trying to piece together my whole life, looking back at it like a slide reel, picking up moments that defined it. What patterns emerge, I wonder, by gazing at a marble collection of Milkys, Dooms, Semi-Dooms, Brandys, Chunts, Appys and the like; or the broken brake guards on my first cycle – a red Street Cat (Boom boom shaka laka Boom Boom shak, street cat’s going to knock you back); or the books that I won as prizes for excellent academic performance (!! All of you can get up and give up now) when I was in Nursery and Prep – which consist of a book on X and Y’s birthday party, another on a Billy goat’s birthday party and a Secret Seven (Kindergarten teachers are fascinated by birthday parties).

So, as I was saying before interrupting myself so rudely, S used to write me letters. He used to fill them up with anecdotes from his life, just as M does now; in addition, he would fill me in on how much he had progressed in the first adventure game we played – Skullduggery. (Time for another diversion). Skullduggery was a lovely text adventure game (or is) about a guy who goes to an ancient estate of a long lost family to find (three guesses), buried treasure. In the process, he encounters ghosts, uncovers skeletons in multiple closets (literally! You actually enter a closet to find a secret passage, with the usual skeleton) and visits hell and speaks to the Grim Reaper. We finally finished Skullduggery when S returned to Bangalore, in the meantime playing other great adventure games like King’s Quest (started with part 6 and eventually played most of the others) and the hilarious Monkey Island (I’m Guybrush Threepwood, a mighty pirate!)

S’ letters, focus. S would also include a riddle or two in his letters and once put in a whole puzzle about a man on an island looking for (2 guesses) buried treasure. One of the answers was Vibgyor, I remember.

So there, thanks M, you’ve brought back welcome memories. Do keep writing. There is something in your mails that still reminds me of the smell of ink and paper and makes me think of flowers pressed between pages of old notebooks and sheafs of old letters tied up in violet ribbons.

In other news, to end the post on a high note, my demon lover has finally left me. He’s just told me some rather exciting news about his life and left me wailing within the walls of misty Xanadu. For more details, contact the enigmatic one yourself.

Oh yes, on his post, I find his projections of the future interesting, albeit flawed; though the interpretation of the past is bang on. I doubt we will remain the same. I doubt things ever remain the same – someday, I’ll be the magician and he’ll turn into a knight or a rogue. Who knows.

C'est la vie, (to quote him)
T