‘W’, He Wrote.

The present is stranger than the future, the truth is stranger than fiction.

It was the future. The future so distant that we had long moved from beeping cellphones and text messaging. We had conquered the computer, we had seen what social media had to offer, we had seen the dawn of instant sharing, we had been through online dating and relationship algorithms. We bought houses online, we had coffee and toast delivered to our doorstep with online money. We had been transacting cashless for so long that ‘currency’ was a concept we didn’t understand. We no longer knew that we could do math without an electronic device, and we no longer knew that we did not need a computer to communicate; we longer knew that we did not need to type to write.

For V, it was a Saturday afternoon that sparked the change. He had already begun making little changes in his life.  he had given up his hand-computer for a larger one that he placed on a desk, for one. He had started thinking, planning mentally instead of digitally. That afternoon, he was sitting at this desk, staring at the W in his screen welcoming him.

A distant memory was triggered, a walk with his grandfather when they had come across a signboard. ‘Welcome’ read the board, and something about this board had struck him. Unlike the straight lines that he had always seen, this W had curved lines. He had stared at the board, transfixed.

This was when his grandfather had let him into a secret, had shown him a family heirloom. He had taken him back to his house, where everything was stored in clinical precision. As his room detected their arrival and turned on the lights and and reminded him of his evening duties, his grandfather opened a closet where he kept his clothes and took out a little case.

Inside the case, among memory banks and data cards, was a longish paper with a flap that opened. Physical sheets were not common, and hard to come by. V looked at it fascinated, as his grandfather took out sheets from it.

On the sheets were sentences, paragraphs, but words and letters unlike what he had ever seen. “This is a hand-written letter,” Grandfather told him, turning the pages of ancient script. The letters were uneven, and V saw with shock that each letter was unlike each other: even when two “f”s were side by side, they were not identical.

“How did they do this?” he asked Grandfather.

Grandfather explained that people used to write by hand, formed letters by holding instruments in their fingers, and that children learnt the alphabet by physically writing them. And further, several generations before, this had been the only way that one could communicate, other than speech.

V stared at the sheet for a while, looking at some letters which had loopy rings and dots. Some words were struck out, some were underlined. He tried reading the script but the letters were all joined together, making it difficult for him to decipher the word. “It belonged to my grandmother’s father,” Grandfather told him. “He used to write these letters to his daughter who was at school. They did not have video calls or text messages, so they would write such letters once a week with the entire week’s news.”

V was unable to digest that people had to write a whole week’s worth of news to each other. At school, V and his friends were used to sharing updates online throughout the day, and everyone – his parents, his teachers and people who could access his time table knew exactly what activities he did at school, what he learnt from them and his feelings on the subject. He could not imagine not telling everyone how he was feeling for even one whole day. “But how did they share pictures with each other,” he asked.

“They didn’t. They couldn’t, they only saw each other on term breaks.”

V was bewildered. How could you communicate with someone just by writing for entire months? “How did these papers reach the recipient?” he asked Grandfather.

“By a system that was called the postal service. The letters would be collected from letterboxes and sent to the recipient, by a train or an aeroplane. Then a postman would deliver them to the house of the recipient.” Grandfather smiled at the wonder on V’s face.

“You mean physically? Delivered to each house?” The concept was too surreal for V to comprehend. “Wouldn’t that take hours?”

“It took days. Sometimes a week, in the earlier days even more.”

“So the person could read a message a whole week after it was sent? But so much could have happened in the meantime. Could the letter be automatically updated on the way?” V inquired.

This time, Grandfather let out a big laugh and patted his grandson on the head. “Never mind, it is difficult for you to understand these things, I had a hard enough time understanding it from my grandfather. Don’t worry about it.” And V soon forgot the incident, daily (digital) life had taken over.

But today, the incident came back to him like it were yesterday. What triggered it? The monotony of messages transmitted wirelessly? The fact that every W always looked like every other W? He didn’t know. Quickly, he walked to the room upstairs where some of Grandfather’s belongings still lay. They were sparse – most of his possessions were electronic, and all of his data was stored in devices. There could not be too many places where a rarity like a paper was hidden – soon enough, V found what he was looking for.

Smoothening the cover, he opened the flap. The letter was yellowing, the ink even more faded than the last time he saw it, but visible. The paper was creased, some of the edges were already torn. V carefully took it to his room and sat at his desk, squinting at it.

Over the next few days, he deciphered the string of writing into letters. Sometimes he assumed the words when the letters were too complex and the curvy print didn’t seem to resemble any of the letters in his keyboard. He vaguely remembered reading somewhere that in the old days, the alphabet did not begin with QWE but instead with ABC.

At the end of a week, he was able to read the letter in its entirety.

My dear Rose,

I hope this letter finds you in the very best of health and spirits. By the time this reaches you, me and mother will be on the ship, on the way to your sister’s house. Isn’t it exciting?

V read on for pages, about the writer’s plans for the trip, the details of the travel arrangements, his daily routine. He read with wonder the detail with which the writer had written about changes made in the house. We have painted our room a sea green colour, and got matching curtains. We have also got a new wooden dresser for the room, and plan to get a new mirror for it. He could not imagine a colour on a wall without a photograph, or how a mirror on a table would look. Actually, he did know how to imagine.

He read and re-read the letter, going over the enquiries about Rose’s lessons and friends and activities, amused that a conversation could go on for pages without replies. He wondered how Rose would reply to each of the questions in a similar long message, how she would picture what he was describing without being able to see it. He saw how the words were formed in the letter, words that were scratched out, spellings that were corrected.

Soon, he was obsessed with the letter. He secretly typed the entire message out and compared the two, he studied the formation of alphabets, he tried tracing the patterns. One day, after a lot of browsing and searches, he found a person who could supply him with a real pen. He practiced holding it, tried various techniques, drew lines and dots. He did it in secret. Finally, one day, he was ready.

He sat at the desk with a sheet of paper and the pen held between his thumb and forefinger. The sheet was empty. He bent down.

‘W’, he wrote.

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