Lounge
The unbeatable warmth of love letters
Summary
Texts, emails and DMs have made it easy to send a message to a beloved, but few things can beat the thrill of getting an old-fashioned, handwritten letter from a loved one
More than two decades ago when she was in college in Nagpur, Kusum Rohra, now 44 and mother to a nine-year-old living in Bengaluru, wrote letters to her then boyfriend every day. It was a difficult year for her, away from her parents in Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra. “There were no mobile phones and STD calls cost a bomb. Since I wasn’t into watching TV and didn’t have many friends in the new place, every evening I wrote letters until dinner, and sometimes late into the night," she says.
Usually, she wrote about her days—a song she’d enjoyed listening to, a book she’d read. “It was almost like a journal," Rohra remembers. “There was one particularly long letter I wrote in which I summarised Erich Segals’ Love Story." The postman came in four-five times every week, carrying words back and forth. “When I left Nagpur, my cousins, with whom I was living, joked that the postman must think that the owners of the house have changed," she says.
It wasn’t hearts and roses all the way. One day someone opened one of her letters and everything tumbled out in the open. But young love usually finds a way. “So, we began to write to each other in pig Latin," Rohra says. It involved a somewhat complicated rule of moving around and adding letters to each word, but what’s a little wordsmithing when you are in your 20s and in love?
A couple of decades before, journalist and writer Gita Aravamudan, now 77 and also based in Bengaluru, was defusing a crisis in her love life. It was the late 1960s and she had just met her to-be husband R. Aravamudan, the late space scientist and engineer best known for his work at the ISRO Satellite Centre. Her parents had mediated their meeting but her future husband’s family were not too happy with the prospect of the couple getting married—later they changed their mind. So, the couple started writing letters to each other.
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“The question was how do we do it?" Aravamudan recalls. “The times were different. My grandfather would open every letter delivered to us, no matter who it was addressed to." But there was one way of getting around the lack of privacy. “I asked him to write to my work address, at The Indian Express newspaper," she says.
Soon enough, almost every day, Aravamudan had a letter waiting for her at the office. In the beginning, her colleagues were suspicious about the frequency of the mail. But it didn’t take them long to figure out what was up and move on to jokes and some good-natured ribbing.
Half a century later, digitally savvy Gen Zs and Alphas have a better chance of escaping the iron hold of parental surveillance, thanks to the ingenuity of new-age tech. But if we zoom out a little, say, half a century on, how do you think the young of today would look back on their heady days of romance?
Unlike their parents and grandparents, they are unlikely to have yellowing sheets of paper, scribbled over with giddy confessions and sweet nothings, to remind them of the time when someone made a dead earnest effort to woo them. Apart from a trail of DMs on dating apps and texts, it’s unlikely there will be much to act as a repository of private but priceless emotion. In this deluge of messages sent, photographs shared, updates posted, and comments aired on social media platforms, it is unlikely for anyone to have the will to trawl through the digital debris to remind themselves of an elusive love, a moment of aching tenderness, or sleepless nights of longing.
“A love letter carries the actual imprint of your lover’s hand. It makes you think of the pen or even the ink they had chosen to compose it," says Yashraj Goswami, 35, a teacher and writer who lives between Delhi and Jaipur. “A letter has dimension, a thickness, a materiality."
A letter can become a window into a personality, with all its peculiarities, that a text can never be.
Keepers of memory
In the 1960s, when Aravamudan left for college in Bengaluru, her parents would write to her every week from Kolar Gold Fields, where they lived. “My mother’s letters were long and filled with news from home, written in her beautiful handwriting," she says. “My father had terrible handwriting and sent me a few lines scrawled in an inland letter filled with his unique sense of humour." The letters reflected the characters of the writers.
While texts and emails can, and often do, convey a flavour of the hand that wrote them, nothing compares to the endearing details that handwritten letters hold. Neha Garg, a 37-year-old brand strategist, podcaster and young mother living in the National Capital Region, remembers the “once in a blue moon" letter that her then-boyfriend, now-husband wrote to propose to her .
“The moment my father handed me the envelope, I knew his handwriting," Garg says. “It was a letter running for three-four pages, written in all caps, in his dirty handwriting, but the cutest thing in the world." At the end of each sheet, he had helpfully put “PTO" (short for “please turn over"). “I had to later tell him that you don’t put such things in a love letter!" Garg laughs.
In another era, writing letters, especially love letters, was a fine art. The intense letters between poet Amrita Pritam and her lover painter Imroz, or painter Amrita Sher-Gil and her physician husband Victor Egan, are testimonies to the power of love letters. Of course, the French took it to another level, with the billet doux becoming a more exalted cousin to the humble “love letter" in English. It took time, effort and patience to compose a letter, send it, and wait for several days for a response. No blue ticks to alert the sender that their missive has been read, no indication that the recipient was “typing…" a response.
“A letter isn’t a shortcut. Back in the day, we sometimes wrote a letter over three-four days with different inks, and sent photographs along with them," says Satinder Kaur, 61, a business consultant from Mumbai. “If you had a new dress, visited a new place, someone had a child—all news were sent via a letter." In the last instance, the infant was often taken to a studio and photographed, which was then sent with the letter with “so-and-so’s son/daughter, born on so-and-so date" inscribed on the back of the print.
“The beauty of those days was we remembered everything differently," Kaur says. “Today, if you want to recall what you did two years ago, you’d have to go back into your phone and trawl through photographs to check if there is a record." How likely is any of us to take that trouble? But flipping through a family album with our loved ones about a vanished past? There is a certain charm in the idea—a sense of connection and discovery that only those who have known life beyond the grip of digital communication will be able to appreciate.
For Kaur’s family, who were forced to move from Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, to Pune during Partition, letters were a vital link to an irretrievable past. “Our family didn’t have anything to look back on, no ‘native place’ to return," she says. “For us, letters are a way of going back in time."
Time travel
For Kishi Arora, a 43-year-old pastry chef and food consultant from Delhi, travelling and letter writing go hand in hand. “I still send postcards to friends and family wherever I am," she says. Recently, she found the letters she’d written to her late grandfather when she was a student in the US, carefully saved by him, the ink starting to fade, but the words still glow with affection. “I keep messages left on sticky notes by friends on my fridge because that way I am reminded of them every time I walk by," Arora says. “It takes time to write by hand. There is no autocorrect, you have to slow down and think."
Plus, “You can’t undo a letter dashed off in a fit of rage," Aravamudan warns. No disappearing messages to save your skin.
Above all, handwritten letters can be curiously cathartic when you need to navigate the sharps edges of a relationship. Deepa D., a 45-year-old architect from Bengaluru, remembers writing a letter each day to someone she loved during a trek to Kashmir. “It became a habit, just talking about the trip and what I was doing, but also a way of reflecting on the future of our relationship," she says. “I gave them the whole set of letters when I returned."
In a similar spirit, Rekha Raghunathan, 48, a Bengaluru-based consultant in the social-impact sector keeps, a notebook where she writes letters to her teenage children. “Sometimes they respond, sometimes they don’t," she says. “Recently I was in Canada to drop off my daughter at college and I wrote her a letter before coming back." Mother-daughter could have had a conversation but then, bonding over the physicality of the letter as a memento is incomparable. As is Raghunathan’s memory of writing five different long letters to friends and family when she herself, as a college student abroad, first saw snow.
Back in 2017, Garg put out a form on Twitter (now X) asking strangers if they would like to receive a handwritten letter from her. An overwhelming number got back. “With boundless enthusiasm, I went to the post office, bought stamps, got a custom letterhead made and posted nearly 150 letters," she says. A few wrote back to her, too.
Will Gen Z and Alpha enjoy pen and paper letters? “Kids don’t talk to one another—they are always texting and DMing," says Raghunathan. “Mine handwrite a birthday card for me every year, though." When she was young, her grandmother had taught her to write the word “safe" on the final fold of an inland letter, so that the recipient would know, even before they had read it fully, that the sender was doing fine. That’s a tip that could have only come from a human heart. Bots cannot come anywhere near its ingenuity and warmth.
