My Experiment With Snail Mail

I recently wrote a letter in the good old manner – using pen and paper and dropped it in a post office letter box. It was like taking a horse-coach for travel, in this era of high-speed trains and flights. The experience was a bit surreal. 

Since I had to write to a friend who is based abroad, I went to the post office and asked whether they still sold aerogrammes.

My tone was cautiously apologetic as I was expecting some in-your-face smirks and sarcastic responses. But the clerk was kind enough to tell me with a straight face that they no longer sold aerogrammes. He suggested that I can send my letter using a normal envelope. 

Then he asked the country where I intend to send and after a few taps on his computer told me the postal charges. 

I came home and did a search for A4 sheets and thankfully some blank pages, the leftovers after my daughter finished college, were available. 

The idea of writing a letter came as a whim. I had forwarded to my friend a newspaper story of a guy who still used post cards to send messages. 

Soon the conversation veered around the letters we used to exchange nearly two decades ago when emails were unheard of. We both lamented that we had lost those letters while shifting houses and moving cities. 

I then told my friend that I wish to restart writing letters. It hardly got registered in her mind. I then had to reiterate my intent and told her to share her postal address.

She obliged out of politeness, but with little expectation. This topic never figured in our later WhatsApp exchanges. 

So here I was, plonked on a chair with a blank sheet of A4 sized paper placed on my folded laptop. I decided to begin the letter by narrating about my enquiries about aerogrammes. 

But writing was a tough act. During my revision, I realized that even for commonplace words I was missing out certain letters. The absence of a spell-checker was sorely felt. 

The hand-mind coordination was patchy with the pen going astray. Every second sentence I had an inverted V symbol to accommodate the missed-out articles and prepositions. 

However, on the plus side there were no distractions. I could focus well while writing. There were no push notifications from YouTube or Facebook, or the 5-10 tabs open on the laptop browser to distract me.

Then I went to the post office and approached the same clerk who directed me to another person selling stamps. 

During the pre-email days, they were the busiest people, selling stamps, envelope, inland letters and other stationeries, and they had to handle the long queues. Quite often heated arguments used to break out over loose change.

Now there was no one. She gave me the stamps and after affixing them I went about looking for the letter box.

These cylindrical metallic structures with a military hard hat top were once ubiquitous at every street corner. They were the ‘broadbands’ of the pre-internet era. From the central business districts of metro cities to the far-flung hinterlands, they stood steadfastly braving harsh summers and winters.

Once the internet and mobile phones became well entrenched, they discreetly retreated from our street corners with no one realizing it. 

At the post office, I found a small wall-mounted version of the letter box near the entrance. It was placed so inconspicuously that anyone would have missed it. 

I then inserted my envelope into the box and it became apparent that it was empty. I could hear the thud when the envelope hit the bottom. 

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