Dear --,
i hope you are keeping well. im okay too. the job has been keeping me busy nights and weekends. (coffee is always a comfort though.) recently the boss gave us a couple of deadlines that 'you have to meet come what may'. one of them was quite mad -- 500 pages of single-spaced lines to type out in four days! that kept me at the office almost fifteen hours p.d. mon-thu . and the thing was quite hard to write too -- i get a headache just thinking about all those clauses and conjunctions and prepositions and what-nots. in fact, i'm writing this to you without capitalization and apostrophes partly as a reaction to the grammatical overload i've suffered in the past week (but already i'm finding it hard to resist putting in the missing punctuation.)
There (see? we're back to capitals again) is nothing here to see apart from the occasional play or two. The plays are in Kannada, which means that I don't understand most of what is being spoken. The actors are quite melodramatic though, so i can grasp most of what's happening simply from the context. usually love enters into it somewhere or the other, so i can always be on the look out for that pattern. just last week there was a play where these two men sitting on stools were talking about something for the longest time. the lighting was dim, so i could barely make out their faces (i actually have this problem with most plays, because i'm in the back rows and have to learn to recognize the character from his voice); shrill whistles from sections of the audience from time to time told me that they were discussing 'taboo' stuff. gradually i came to understand that they must be talking about a girl, and surmised that they were doing so in a not-so-proper way. eventually the object of their affections graced the stage with her beautiful presence (now, now, don't be jealous -- she isn't as beautiful as you are. No one is.) . Presumably she ended up with one of the men on the stool (the one on the right, i think) because she exited the stage with him. the other guy left by himself wearing a suitably defeated expression.
i haven't gotten to know anyone yet. there was pillai who joined our firm a few weeks ago, but couldn't keep up with the screaming pace of the days and just quit. the boss used to treat him like filth too; give him a hard time whenever he showed up even a little late, berate him for being a 'kaamchor', ask him how the wife could tolerate his ugly face in the mornings. he was a funny guy, though. one day he showed up without wearing the suede shoes that the boss always insists on as part of the dress code (why do stenographers need dress codes anyway?). he predicted the exact time that boss would come out for the inspection (yes, yes, he examines our attire), down to the very second (this only on his first week at office, mind) and waited outside the door to greet him. Picture the boss, with his plate-like face and that pinned-on looking nose, opening the great oak door that separates his stately office from our glass cubicles, and picture pillai, standing in front of him and saying "Do you wandsome dea zurr?" You had to be there.
These empty weekends are suffocating. i can't go out anywhere, because everything in the town closes by 7, and can't stay at home, because there's nothing to do. i end up taking these small walks close to the pg, but everything's just so deserted i begin feeling depressed almost immediately. if i'm lucky the wholesale guy a few streets away has his shop open for business. bala (i don't know his full name) is always squatting between his huge sacks of rice, and always willing to talk to me. he knows his english too. yesterday he surprised me by quoting shakespeare -"To be aar not to be, no?" in his thick kannada accent. and this was when we were talking about the plays too. i immediately asked him where he'd heard that, and he told me that his daughter is doing an MA (!) in literature in mysore university. she actually asks him to read lawrence and flaubert and all that. i was quite astonished. He's definitely a guy i'd want to meet more often during my walks.
anyway. i'm off to put this in the mail before the post-office closes. you fill my silences.
--
1 comment:
You made me realize why it is that letters have always meant something special to me. They are like photographs or rather like short films where you are allowed to see the mind of the (letter) writer. This is rare because the same effect cannot be reproduced if the conversation was verbal and not even if the person being addressed was in the company of the writer.
Letters allows the writer to reveal more than he otherwise would in any other circumstance since they are a result of time, clarity of retrospect and introspect and the unawareness of any external response that influences nothing beyond the self. But the true magic of letters is that they can become intensely personal without carrying any personal information, as exemplified by your letter. There is nothing in the letter that is not open information to any one who cares to observe things. There are very few opinions; the whole letter being almost filled with observations. Then what is it that makes it so personal? Maybe it is the not so much about what is being said but the fact that the writer had opened himself to communicate, and it is probably this act of communication within which the magic lies.
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