PENS, PENPALS AND THE MIGHTY SWORD.

The pen as you know was considered mightier than the sword, so my Pilot pen would be used to write interesting letters to Cuckoo. The ball pen had not yet become our instrument for writing, so the handwriting was usually neat and pretty. Did you notice I wrote the pen "was" considered mightier than the sword? Well, times are changing so fast that some proverbs are also becoming obsolete, just as the pen is fast being replaced by typing on the laptop or phone, and will soon be found only with real connoisseurs as collector's items.

Ranchi Women's College true to its name was exclusively an all women Institution where all teachers too were women. We had one "bada babu" who used to sit in the Office and accepted fees and attended to results and such administrative stuff. His name was Satya babu, and I remember that he had six fingers in his left hand. The Durban  too was of course a man. In those days women were supposed to be delicate darlings and one had not even heard of police women leave alone women bouncers. We were very well protected from the outside world and boarders could simply not venture out of the gate, without permission.

CUCKOO

Cuckoo and my innocuous letter writing became quite a ritual where a letter was exchanged every week. Those were the days of innocence and writing letters to a boy too was considered quite a bold step. In our letters no programmes were discussed, no meetings were even thought of. All my close friends would read all these letters.

Prisoners that we were, we boarders were once allowed to go and see a movie,"Milan" starring Sunil Dutt and Nutan.  The songs of the movie were very popular in those days. I mentioned about this programme in my letter to my pen-friend Cuckoo. We were going to the Shrivishnu Talkies off the Main Road of Ranchi and were going to watch the Matinee show. Incidentally Ranchi had three cinema halls that I can recall. Ratan Talkies, Shrivishnu talkies were close to each other and Plaza which screened only English movies was a little away. Cuckoo also decided to watch the movie at the same time. All of us movie goers were herded into the College bus like sheep, a Teacher stood at the door counting loudly as each one of us boarded the bus. Outside the picture hall too we were shepherded out, the teacher once again loudly counted the girls getting out of the bus to make sure that none of  the girls who had climbed onto the bus had vanished into thin air, but had reached the picture hall safe and sound. We were in the Dress Circle and sat down all together in one row. During the interval we were not allowed to go out  at all. The movie got over, the sheep boarded the bus and returned to their pen...errrr hostel, duly counted in. The only satisfaction that Cuckoo, who was in the Balcony and I got was that we watched the same movie at the same time in the same picture hall. Yes, those were the times of the 1960's. As I write this, I feel like a relic from the past...medieval times?

VARSHA, INDU, NILIMA

Cuckoo and I never discussed our holidays or plans for going to Delhi although he also had family in Delhi, so would go home to Delhi during vacations. Sometimes the dates of vacation coincided and sometimes the University would close on one date and the Birla Institute of Technology(BIT) would close on some other date. Once it so happened  that the University closed sine die, a much used term in those days as the Naxalite movement had started in Bihar and due to some problem or riots the University would close "sine die", as students were always involved in these agitations. As the College was to remain closed for an indefinite period of time, a friend Indu Bhardwaj who had to travel upto Allahabad and I left the hostel to catch the Hatia-Patna express en route to Delhi. As we were at the ticket window, who do we see but Cuckoo and another friend also buying tickets but they were headed for Calcutta.  On seeing us, Cuckoo changed his plans and decided to travel to Delhi. We boarded the train in the same compartment and my pen pal Cuckoo and Indu started a virtual match of reciting sher-o-shayari. In this department my knowledge was zilch. The problem was that I never indulged in Hindi or Urdu poetry. I used to like the Dohas which we studied in school and I thought Dohas were the epitome of good taste in the language. Dohas were so meaningful and spoke well about all sorts of values and morals! Sher-o-shayari for me was quite anathema. I thought  that it had no substance except to indulge in romantic and abstract thoughts. 

 In fact, in college we had two compulsory subjects besides the subjects one had opted to study. One was English and the other was Hindi. Those whose mother tongue was not Hindi could opt for Alternative English instead of Hindi. I being a Maharashtrian had the option, so I chose to study Alternative English. This meant that I had to learn simple Hindi and a classic of the English language. The classic was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and in Hindi we had a very simple collection of essays about the tiger land of the terai region, most probably it must have been about Jim Corbett and his shikar stories, another one was Essays on Opportunity or Avsar. I was actually quite proficient in Hindi but it sounded good to say that you studied Alternative English, so I availed of this opportunity quite happily.

So while Indu and Cuckoo exchanged shers, I almost fell asleep. Indu got off the train  at Allahabad as she had to go to Katni where her father was posted and Cuckoo and I went onwards to Delhi.The train journey was long, the weather was good as it was monsoon time and Cuckoo and I sat on the steps of the compartment, as it was much cooler and the view was beautiful. Our train traversed across the beautiful Ganga - Jamuna Terai region which is very fertile land. All the fields looked green and fresh as they were filled with paddy and water. 

These were two encounters of a different kind, unplanned and quite romantic by the standards of those days. Those were the days when Hindi cinema would only show the hero and heroine running around trees endlessly. Even the most romantic songs had the extremely handsome, debonair  and suave Dev Anand chasing the moon as well as the heroine in,"Dheere dheere chal chand gagan men", across grassy land. He could even woo Nutan on the stairs of the iconic Qutab Minar singing,"Dil ka bhanwar kare pukar". Yes, you guessed right, I was a huge fan of Dev Anand, and still am,

A year rolled by and the penpals remained penpals, with one slight change. Cuckoo had discovered that a daughter of a Professor of his College and resident of the BIT complex was a student of Ranchi Women's College. So one fine day Cuckoo- whose  first name still evaded me, sent me a letter through her asking if I could meet him at Casanova Restaurant on Main Road Ranchi for a cup of coffee. That was probably asking for the moon as we hostel girls were allowed to go to the market for shopping only on alternative Sunday's and then too four girls had to go together. Two girls would be senior girls and two would be juniors. It had  never been voiced but it implied that we were supposed to keep a watch over each other. We had to make an entry in the Going Out Register giving names of all four girls stating the time that we left the hostel. We would be let out by the durban, and from the gate we would hire two rickshaws and go to Firayalal chowk on the Main Road. Firayalal's was a departmental store and was at one end of the Main Road. We would get off there and complete our shopping and go back to the hostel together,  and mark the time of our return in the register.

Now with this coffee invitation at hand, I was in a fix, but then the adventurous streak came into play, and my room mate and I decided to accept the invitation. As we entered Casanova we noticed that the place was quite  dark, it was not at  all like our familiar Jalajog or Churuwala, the well lit bright and open mithai shops that we had sometimes been to, to buy mithai, mind you-never to eat there. Well, we both diffidently walked in, because this was a big bold step. We were really very scared because if someone had  seen us entering the restaurant, we would be in a soup. Nevertheless, we found Cuckoo sitting there with a friend. Coffee was swiftly ordered, we quickly finished the coffee and  left as soon as we could, there was no question of sharing the bill. That zamana was of chivalry, if you were invited you didn't offer to share the bill. In fact many many moons later, I had visited a restaurant where the lady was handed over a menu without the price list and the gentleman was handed over a menu with the prices marked. Sounds very archaic now, doesn't it? Those were the days!

I was almost like a nun in my habit(s), (pun intended), I did not drink tea, had never tasted coffee and never liked soft drinks. Coca cola in those days was quite a rage and when I had tasted it for the first time I couldn't understand why anyone would want to spend money to drink that horrendous stuff. So now coffee in a dark lit restaurant with the name Casanova was a mighty big step that Miss Varsha Uke had taken. My friends were quite amazed at my big adventure trip, which was discussed in hushed tones, because if the Hostel Superintendent came to know of it, all hell would break loose, and what do you know, I could even be rusticated.That is what we thought then.

We both were brilliant students and in spite of this distraction, Cuckoo managed to come first in his class in Engineering. Now, as letters could also come through a friend and were not censored by the Hostel Superintendent, once when vacations were starting, Cuckoo wrote to me that he was leaving for Delhi on a particular date, so I also decided to travel on the same date. This was the first time that we planned a rendezvous, and what happens next is quite out of the blue as my daddy makes an official visit to Ranchi and escorts me back with him to Delhi, in the first class compartment on the same date. All plans of travelling on the steps of the third class unreserved compartment, gets blown away with the wind and Cuckoo was left wondering why I never turned up at the station on the appointed date.
Do you now realise why communication and  language and the written word is so important? No wonder our ancestors discovered the art of writing, be it with drawings, strokes, hieroglyphic or the symbols of the Indus script which still needs to be deciphered.

PENS. PENPALS AND SOME MORE

 Writing is an important form of expression. Writing systems were created all over the world independent of each other. When exactly did writing start is a matter of serious discussion, which I will not indulge in right now. Suffice to say that as human beings began to live in communities, the need to record and manage information would have been felt. It is said that writing was developed 5000 years ago in Middle East. Around the same time different scripts were invented in India, Egypt, Mesoamerica and China. As writing developed independently in different places they had different rules, different styles and different characters. Writing was primarily a means of recording language, an important tool of communication, maintaining records and expressing oneself. Different types of early writing was cuneiform of the Sumerians, hieroglyphs of the Egyptians, logographs of the Chinese, Indus script of India, and the Maya script of Mesoamerica. ‎

When I was about four years old, I went to school in a place called Hirakud in Odisha. Hirakud was on the banks of the river Mahanadi and a massive dam was being built over it. My father was one of the Engineers building the dam. There was hardly any educational facility in Hirakud, so there I was going to school where I had to write on a takhti- a wooden board on which one had to put some sort of a white paste, dry it and then write with a khadi. When I was five, I insisted and moved over to St. Joseph's Convent School in Cuttack where I was a boarder and started learning to write on paper with a pencil. As time rolled on, from pencil I graduated to writing with a holder. We had to attach a nib to the holder. There would be an ink bottle on every desk and we had to dip the nib in the bottle, take measured amount of ink very carefully, write on the four lined notebook and then use the blotting paper. One had to be very precise in taking the ink otherwise the ink would spread and spoil our beautiful handwriting. In those days a lot of importance was given to write very neatly with perfect strokes. From the nib holder one graduated to a fountain pen. There was a lot of time spent on this humungous task of filling ink in the fountain pen. We used to have pens, which had space for filling the ink with a dropper. One had to keep a rag close at hand and inspite of careful handling and immense concentration, the fingers would always get stained with the Royal Blue ink. In those days, we used to get ink tablets which had to be dissolved in water or then there were  branded inks which were Sulekha and the more expensive Quink. Later on we got self filling fountain pens which did not have to be opened for filling ink. One just dipped the nib in the ink pot,  pulled a small lever and made sure that the ink was filled.

Let's move on in time to about half a century ago, to be very precise 1964, when I joined College. I was an early entrant to college as I was only fourteen years old when I passed out from Mount Carmel High School located at a small little sleepy town called Hazaribagh in Bihar then and Jharkhand now. The town was quite non descript, but its jail had housed Dr. Rajendra Prasad and Jai Prakash Narain during the Quit India Movement of 1942. Rai Bahadur Jadunath Mukhopadhyay a well known Government Pleader was an early settler here and had amongst his guests Rabindranath Tagore and Subhash Chandra Bose. Hazaribagh was a pretty place, had a cool climate and was close to the Hazaribagh National Park  and most importantly for me, had a lot of educational institutions run by Christians, The Mount Carmel High School for Girls, St. Xavier’s School for boys and St. Columba’s College which was coeducational. When I was studying at Hazaribagh my father was working with National Coal Development Corporation(NCDC) and  was posted at Bhurkunda Colliery and later Barkakana, both small little laid back places with negligible educational facilities.  

After school, I moved to Ranchi Women’s College as by now my father had got transferred to Ranchi. Ranchi was a relatively bigger city located at an altitude of 3000 feet so it made its way into the list of hill stations of India, although it figured only towards the end of the list. Ranchi had a couple of co- educational colleges, Ranchi College as well as St. Xavier’s College, but I joined Ranchi Women’s College. To begin with, I was a day scholar in College as we stayed in the Gandhi Nagar Colony of NCDC. I would take the NCDC bus to college. It was a pleasant journey and my school friend Jayashree Nair would hop onto the bus at Jawahar Nagar Colony also of NCDC.

I had taken Science subjects with Biology, as the aim was for me to become a Doctor. After one year of dissecting frogs, when it was time to dissect cockroaches, I discovered that I was not capable of carrying this any further and told my parents that I would like to pursue further studies in humanities. My mother was highly disappointed but tears and reason prevailed and it was agreed upon that I could take Arts for further studies, so it was Political science (Hon's) and Economics as a side subject. By now daddy had got transferred to an extremely backward place in Bastar called Bailadila. The nearest railway station was at Raipur which was about 374 kms away.

More about Bailadila and Bastar later, in some other post.

I was fifteen and pursuing my Arts degree with a lot of comfort and fun. I joined NCC which was an option which was  given to us. It meant daily march past parade practice during lunch time. I used to love it and come summer, rain or winter I was happily practicing and attending sessions and camps of NCC.

As time went by, my father got transferred to Delhi. During holidays I would have to take a train from Ranchi to Delhi. Those were the days of the steam engines and there were very few trains running across the country. Going from Ranchi one had to take the Patna- Hatia Express which had a specific designated compartment  for Delhi. This compartment would be detached from the Patna- Hatia Express at Patna Junction and would get attached to the train going from Patna to Old Delhi Railway station. 

On these journey's I often met a few other students travelling from Ranchi to Delhi, as near Ranchi there was a prestigious Engineering College, BIT Mesra, which had a number of students from Delhi. Holidays normally happened around the same time. We all travelled without reservation as we could not reserve a berth in the compartment.

On one of these journey's, while travelling from Delhi to Ranchi in March of 1966, I met a person who loved to write letters. He asked my name and the college that I studied in and lo and behold one fine day I got an inland letter  from a person who signed his name as  "Cuckoo". It was quite an innocuous letter, yet evoked much excitement and was much discussed by my friends. They goaded me to reply as they saw no harm in writing a letter. Those were the days when making pen pals was quite a rage. One would write to strangers and become pen pals. It was really very innocent and straight forward fun. Often in magazines for youngsters like the Junior Statesman which later became JS, names and addresses of those interested in making pen pals was published.  

Being in a Women's college hostel was quite akin to being in a sort of Concentration camp. There was a strict monitoring of every activity of the residents and letters were totally censored. The Hostel warden read each and every letter that came in. She would not allow letters from any stranger to reach the recipient. The inland letters that we were allowed to write were  posted in a wooden box kept for the purpose outside the Warden's room. The letter had to be kept open so that the warden could read it before closing the flap and sending it to the post office. So, under the hawk eyes of Parvati amma our Warden, this letter came through and I also replied very cautiously.

Thus started a long innings of letter writing. 

The postal department and Indian Railways played a major role in the story of these two characters who wrote and wrote and wrote. Right from 1966 to 1970.

 

1970

MUCH LATER

 Well so the story of writing letters will continue after a brief pause, first let me get some feed back from you. Do you want to know more?