Short, un-sweet?

Today the world speaks a new language — the language of instant messaging, which is quicker, and more advanced, for some, than even e-mail. Must we exult afresh over this new idiom, asks ANURADHA ROY, looking back at an earlier age where when slowness was not uncool, retrograde and inefficient, letters were a literary space all could lay equal claim to.

``C U 2NITE'', the billboard said, glowing with a meaning I could not decode. A traffic light or two later, there was another luminous red board: ``gd 4 u'', it exclaimed encouragingly, congratulating me on working out the preceding one. This, the advertisements informed passers-by (if they were still capable of reading normal English), was a new language, the language of instant messaging. If metaphysical poetry is much exclaimed over for yoking opposites, might we not exult afresh over this new idiom? It unites alphabets and numbers to make up sentences one must mull over to make sense of — much as in poetry. Except that at the end of all this mulling, there is only nonsense.

There has never been a time so full of communication and so empty of it. There was a couple at a restaurant the other day. Each had a cellphone. The mellow tinkling from the direction of the restaurant pianist was shouted down by the shrill confidence of the electronic "Fur Elise'' from their phones. They talked all through lunch — but to absent people. To these absentees they were saying, ``yes, I am eating lunch ... oh it's prawn dim sum ... so nice if you could be here ... next time let's come together, yaar.''

I am no Luddite. I too have been seduced by the simplicity and speed of e-mail, abandoning all but some business letters for them. In my e-mail box one morning was a brief message from a friend in America instructing me to get an instant messaging service on my cell phone.

She assumed I had a cell phone. I didn't. Further discussion on the topic was strictly theoretical, but still, given that I was before keyboard, screen and mouse, I asked her why one needed instant messaging anyway: was not e-mail quick enough for the kind of exchanges we had? But no, she argued impatiently (in her instant reply that I only read three hours later), if you have messaging on a cell phone you will know I am thinking of you the moment I think of you. In short the moment a thought blip with my face on it appeared on her mental screen, my cell phone, if I had one, would beep correspondingly.

In an earlier age, when slowness was not uncool, retrograde and inefficient, letters were something of an informal genre, a literary space all could lay equal claim to. Famous letters — between Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, between Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, between Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra — have been preserved and read with pleasure by people unconnected to writer or recipient. Novels, from those by Samuel Richardson to the popular American classic Daddy Long Legs could be structured entirely around letters between the characters. M. Krishnan enclosed sketches of animals in letters to people he liked. Composers exchanged snatches of scores, and children scrawled drawings to their grandparents. Between the dropping of a letter into a pillar box and a reply to it, no one knew its whereabouts. Sometimes they never reached at all. It would be hard to explain to the cyber-addicted the complex pleasures of waiting for a letter, then the thrill of seeing it slide under the door or pop out from a post box.

I miss letters. Last month, in what seemed like a rite of passage, I finally began emptying out my cupboard at my mother's house, having actually left home over 10 years ago. The safe would not open: I had lost the key. I had no idea what was in the safe, and finally had it broken into. There were many brown paper packets inside. All these packets had letters spilling out of them.

Childish scrawls from fellow 10 year olds, crowded pages filled with overcharged adolescent longings, parental injunctions posted to blithely unconcerned offspring oceans away, curiously folded, neat, formal epistles from a forgotten penfriend in Hong Kong, love letters, letters from which bits of string, photographs, feathers and dried leaves slid out. They made up my autobiography as if written on a splintered mirror, not by my hand but those of many others, much like those games at story-telling we played, with each person in the circle supplying a few lines.

The difference between those letters and the e-mails I receive now lie in their re-readability. A letter is more effort, especially if written by hand. The right paper must be found for it. (I came upon a deeply depressed letter from a friend who had nevertheless retained his sense of irony. It was written on flowery sheets of pink paper, at the base which ran the cursive printed legend, ``Man only lives in Hope''.) A pen, an envelope, stamps of the right value, and then a pillar-box must also be found for it. Given the effort, and the materiality of letters — they will actually be opened and handled at the other end — they warrant more mulling over. An e-mail, normally dashed off in lower case and without much punctuation, is more an interruption than an interlude, a piece of communication whose resonance is lost the moment it is read. The writer knows as does the reader that every e-mail is destined to be deleted.

There are some e-mails that ought to be printed out and preserved to be savoured again and again. Such e-mails are actually letters in disguise. I realised this when a friend died and her letters to me died with her because I had deleted most of her e-mails once I had answered them. ``I have taken so long to get back to you, I'm anxious to send off this note quickly,'' she wrote in one hurried letter masquerading as an e-mail. ``Take it as an interim letter, Govt. style.'' In e-mails like hers the absence — a profound one — is the physicality of handwriting and the feel of paper. But in every other way, their writing can speak across the years. Fake e-mailers like her begin with the antideluvian ``Dear X ----- '' and write complete sentences and paragraphs, resisting the temptation to save 20 seconds by typing ``u no'' rather than the infinitely longer ``You know''; they might even end with a ``much love'' rather than a ``cu''.

To such people the expression ``LOL'', the American way of letting you know when to Laugh Out Loud, would make no sense. It's the electronic equivalent of the canned laughter in sitcoms that instruct the dim-witted how to react. These are the people who invented commercial cards for all occasions, even death and divorce, to provide ready-made wit and eloquence to the verbally challenged. The same lot have now devised the even more time- saving electronic card, to be zapped from one screen to another: you click and the card begins trilling some nauseating jingle about your birthday or anniversary. Having finished trilling it asks you, the recipient of the card, if you'd like to send a similar one back. The people who thought up these conveniences, if we must call Americans people, also invented the circular letter. ``Dear Friends,'' these letters begin, at once showing you your place: picture yourself, jostling at the door of the sender's affections along with many other dear friends, who are then given a recap of the whole year's events if the circular letter is going out at New Year.

These sham letters are often written in third person as if an anonymous town crier were telling the stories of a family's annual accomplishments for all to hear: this way Mummy, Daddy, Junior 1, Junior 2 and Dog all tell their tales and have time over to achieve more achievements.

I am not the first to mourn the demise of letters. In 1922, Emily Post, that epitome of the well-mannered woman, was writing equally cantankerously: `If you have a mind that is entirely bromidic, if you are lacking in humor, all power of observation, and facility for expression, you had best join the ever-growing class of people who frankly confess, ``I can't write letters to save my life!'' and confine your literary efforts to picture post-cards with the engaging captions ``X is my room,'' or ``Beautiful weather, wish you were here.'' '

James Joyce, surely the last man at a loss for words, confessed in a letter to his lover Nora: ``I have been half an hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won't sign anything at all because I don't know what to sign myself.''

Today he wouldn't have thought so hard. Nora's cell-tel would have beeped and flashed: ``c u l8tr alig8tor, J''.

If you've worked that one out, you're in the Now generation.

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