Keeping in Touch

"Have you finished your homework, Jessie and Jimmy?"

- Elizabeth Philip

"Yes, Granny!" shouted Jimmy, stuffing his books inside his school bag. "Now, I can go and play cricket."

"English homework left. I have to write a letter to a friend," sighed Jessie.

"Did you write letters when you were in school, Granny?"

"Yes, I did, but real letters," she laughed.

"Not in my school notebooks."

Jimmy was curious. "Who did you write to, Granny?"

"The first letter I wrote was to Archana, the first friend I ever made. We were in the first standard. It was during the winter holidays. I can never forget that. She stayed in the school hostel and had gone to her hometown."

"My sister and I would write to our relatives too. Sending and receiving birthday and Christmas cards was something we looked forward to. I wrote to my parents too when I was studying in college."

"You liked writing letters?" Jessie asked.

"Yes, it was the only way of keeping in touch. Very few people had telephones. Phone calls were quite expensive too. An outstation call had to be booked through an operator before we started adding STD codes to landline numbers and making the calls ourselves. We didn't have mobile phones those days, you know, to make a call whenever we pleased."

"We used to be so excited when we received letters in the college hostel," reminisced Granny. "My friend Radha used to gather a bunch of friends and read out letters from her grandmother every week, which used to have all the village news written in an amusing way. Their neighbour's daughter Ammu had a goat which reached the school one day. I still remember the letter in which she described its antics."

"A goat in the school? Then what happened, Granny?" Jimmy interrupted.