The Pen Pal Club

© 𝕾𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖍 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖗𝖆

(What I Did During My Summer Vacation, originally posted Jan 2022)

 

The recent discussions here about the benefit of certain UNESCO recognized “best, most historic personal letters” to certain cricketers and other Indophiles brought back some long-forgotten memories. Yes, dear readers, it does seem like much of my childhood trauma memories involve Sr. Carmella, she of the Jesuit order of Benevolent Ruthlessness… 😂

I don’t know if others had this experience in their childhood as well, but the joyful, seemingly endless summer vacation was preceded by “morning school” for a few weeks. “Morning school” was a curious mix of sullen, sleepy kids and cranky, sleepy teachers. And of course, Sr. Carmella, filled with angst and dreading the summer of kids filled with fun and frolic and… forgotten textbooks. My neighbor and partner in crime, Babul, and I would park our brains ignoring anything resembling “learning” during those two months. Although we went to different schools, we had the same common experience as probably many of our generation. At my school, Sr. Carmella often wagged her fingers in dismay, disappointment, and distaste upon the resumption of the “day school” after summer. She rightly feared a large majority would regress during the detested break. I think she detested the very thought of summer. No one, students, parents or other teachers had the guts to say otherwise since, after the summer vacay, the classroom resembled a wiggling can of mutinous worms during the first few days. We were more interested in sharing details of our exotic train journeys, boundless fun at grandparents’ homes, shared homemade goodies, carefully shielded from Sr. Carmella’s watchful gaze. One or two unlucky, foolish ones would get caught, alas, and their plight was enough to re-establish Sr. Carmella’s authority. We learnt quickly before any tiny or mass rebellion could ensue.

One year is particularly etched in my memory. I suspect that the evil plans were hatched with the involvement of some of the parents including mine. One fine “morning school” class close to the start of the Summer vacation, Sr. Carmella announced… the “Pen Pal Club”. During the regular year, we had learned the structure of writing formal letters to local dignitary, a skill that she thought would prepare us to become proper gentlemen and ladies later in life. If you all went through similar torture, you would recall that the letter was supposed to start with Honorable Sir or Madam So’n’so and end with Respectfully, Humbly, I Remain, Yours Truly. In between The Beginning and The End was the bulk of the word sandwich. It was supposed to be at least one full page, complete sentences, in cursive handwriting, single spaced, above the line except for certain lower-case letters, no repetition of words, I mean, no repetition of phrases, no repetition, none, period). No run-on sentences. It would start with Very Proper and Polite Introduction, Meaty (or Veggie?) Middle Fluff and Dutifully, Humbly, etc. ending phrases. 

 

No horrible word-stretching with ‘-ish’ suffix, no late-ish evenings, no cool-ish night. Sr. Carmella was quite horrified when I challenged this fool-ish ban by submitting my homework as “Engl” paper. That earned me a note to my parents and a quiet chuckle from my father, so I think I was OK with that tiny rebellion.

For the Pen Pal Club - we were to compose a few proper missives using good style, choose effective words and elegant prose – a minimum of five letters with varied Middle Fluff, about our school, our lives, etc. We were to bring it to school after the summer. Once approved by Sr. Carmella, the school would help us find one or more pen-pals in distant lands, and our parents were to help foot the bill for airmail stamps and encourage a continuing and brilliant dialog with the resulting learning of other cultures, lifestyles, language, art, society, history, geography, and suchlike things.

 

Babul went to a different school as I mentioned before and should have escaped my summer ordeal except that mashi ma, his mom, found out about my enforced summer learning adventure from my mom. He was pretty much sentenced to do the same as well under my mom’s watchful eye alongside me. I, a budding philatelist, was crazy about the thought of receiving phoren stamps from the pen pals. I embraced the idea with gusto and probably composed 10 or so letters over the summer. Not only the content was superb (about my school, about my puppy, about mango orchard at my grandparents’, about my expertise at carrom and marbles and about hot weather, all the things that someone in distant land might find fascinating). I think my penmanship was excellent – not like a “spider dipped in the inkwell, crawling on paper”, as Sr. Carmella had often described. Those were the days of quill pens; no fountain pens were allowed at our age. Ball-point pens were considered the devil’s instrument designed to make your fingers crooked and your handwriting illegible for life. Sr. Carmella had confiscated several such rude, crude and socially unacceptable writing instruments. And my letters were (mostly) free of smudges from the ink-well for the quill-pen.

 

Babul, of course, was a ton smarter than me and managed to produce the minimum required five such “pen pal” letters quickly by copying several of mine. As far as I know, once completed, his were never read by anyone at all and he resumed his usual summer fun of no-brains-required activities. mashi ma deposited his pen pal letters carefully with the old newspapers pile at his place, to be sold to the raddiwala during his next visit.

 

Mine were reviewed by Sr. Carmella at the end of that summer who surprisingly found several quite acceptable. My classmates, however, detested me and my prolific pile of letters. I had to share some extra goodies to win back some friends. I proudly took the approved one’s home with addresses to some pen pals in distant lands that Sr. Carmella had procured from somewhere. My parents, when they found several such letters to be air-mailed to phoren lands, immediately figured out the total cost of such mailing over the course of the future interactions and asked tactfully to choose only one. the very best one of them. That letter was mailed duly at a cost of some unheard of rupees in an airmail envelope carefully sealed with extra glue. The rest of the missives, after a respectable period of restful preservation on my mom’s pile of correspondence, were consigned to the raddiwala heap at my home for his next visit. Incidentally, I never did get a reply from a Master D Markham, Someplace, UK. So, Mr. Dennis M, Someplace, UK (in the late 1960s) – you owe me a response, my pen-pal, for this letter about my remarkable string of Carrom-board victories over my friend and archenemy, Babul. I remain, Yours Truly in anticipation. BTW, in his pen-pal letters, Babul was the victor, and I was the loser during that summer tournament of Carrom champions.

So here we are… does anyone know how many pen-pal letters were sent leading up to the 75th Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsava – no issues with cost of airmail stamps here, I assume. From media reports, some of pen-pals have started responding, unlike my sad experience. The benefit, you ask? Maybe this was a winter-break exercise set by Sr. Carmella and the über-achiever responded by maybe sending out 75 such letters. And… all of us are now mystified, distracted, not asking… as the song goes “What have you done for me lately, ooh, ooh, ooh, yeah?” And repeat after me, Swiftly, “Haters are gonna hate, hate, hate”.

© 𝕾𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖍 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖗𝖆