The Par Avion Friends

It was 1968 when they became pen friends. Continents apart, they are the closest of friends, but with no real desire to meet.

The Japanese Wife is one of the few of Aparna Sen’s films to open to a mixed reception, both from critics and the masses. Admittedly, the slow pace has not helped matters much, along with the seemingly incomprehensible nature of the relationship between the Bengali school teacher and his Japanese pen friend-wife. But then, in today’s world of tweeting and Facebook, the magic of pen friendship has been forgotten to all but a few ardent enthusiasts.

Scouring pen pal columns in magazines, waiting interminably for the postman to bring a reply, and experiencing the slow growth of friendship with someone you have never met is something few have experienced today, especially since the time the internet took over our lives. But aren’t e-friendships with strangers the same, you may well ask? Sadly, the answer is no. The immediacy of communication and the instantaneous viewing of photos take away all the charm. In fact, the current generation is so networked with every past acquaintance from play school onwards that the very idea makes them shrug in incredulity. “You’ve had a pen friend for the last 40 years?” my daughter’s friends ask me. “Yes, I do and if we live long enough, we may even make it to the Guinness Book of World Records,” is my reply.

Today, I am 57 years old. My pen friend, Jennifer, and I started writing to each other when we were 15, in the year 1968. At that time, I lived in Calcutta, and she, of Chinese origin, lived in Singapore. Initially exchanging news about school, friends and the pop idol of the moment, the correspondence, and the sharing of our lives, continued through college, career, marriage and our kids studying and growing up. Eventually, she emigrated to the US, and I, too, did my fair share of travelling, moving all over the country.

All through these years, I have maintained that Jenn is the closest friend I have, and that we share everything. But the truth is there are slight shifts in reality. In fact, it is the distance as well as the closeness that makes a pen friendship so attractive. As a result, the desire to meet in these days of shrinking distances and airfares is tepid at best. An actual meeting would lift her out of the realm of semi-fantasy that she has occupied for so long. In a sense, she has always been my Jo of Little Women or Anne of Green Gables.

Then, there is the fact that some things are just hard to explain to a person far removed from your cultural milieu. How do you explain something as archaic, obscure and just plain ‘uncool’ as arranged marriages in the swinging Eighties? I pondered this in 1981 when I got married, about two years after she did. I settled for the simple ‘I am marrying a boy next door’. This is as far as I can recall. I have box files of her letters, but have to dredge my memory for snatches of my letters to her. It was different in those days when we did not lay out our lives on Facebook.

I am more aware of these nuances now that we see each other’s postings on Facebook and know how different our preoccupations are. Jenn’s lie with her church (she works for their administrative office) and church-based social activities. I, the ex-banker and French teacher/translator, have varied interests and friends.

There was a period when we lost touch. My parents had moved to Brazzaville in Africa for five years and me to a students’ hostel. Jenn went to Manila for her college studies. This was in the year 1972—no letters, no replies and it seemed to be over. It even seemed inevitable somehow. The rediscovery in 1979 was by the merest chance, though looking back, it does seem fated. My mother was to travel through Singapore, where she would spend a day, en route to the US to visit my brother. My sister and I looked hard for someone in Singapore to help my none-too-healthy mother. The best we could come up with was a long-lost pen friend who seemed then to have a caring, helpful nature. We couldn’t make contact, but my mother did make her journey without mishap. Two months later, the most unexpected letter of my life arrived, accompanied by wedding photos. Jenn’s relatives, who now lived in their old house in Singapore, had passed on my letter to her in California. What joy! What a pleasure to recapture six years of our lives in long letters. We were once more Mary and Jenn, friends forever.

Jenn often wrote of her Vietnamese pen friend, never heard of after the fall/liberation of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh city and of how ‘bad and sad she felt’. She resurfaced in Jenn’s life a couple of decades later, married to a French man and settled in France. These are some of the unexpected thrills of pen friendship.

Did we switch to email, you might well ask? Of course we did, but continued in the same style of occasional long letters with no abbreviations. No ‘r u ok, lol!’. Absolutely not. It is still a pen friendship via email. Only the long envelopes, edged in red and blue, marked Par Avion are missing. And so is the varied letter paper, with beautiful floral or scenic or just cute designs along the margins. They will, I tell my children, some day be collectors’ items. In both eras, we exchanged photos, recipes but never gifts. In this age of frenetic gift-giving, of evaluating the cost of a gift so that one can return in kind, of even recycling gifts, this is so blissfully uncomplicated.

Jenn lives with her husband and children in California. My bureaucrat husband and I have lived in many places and now live in Delhi. In the long cold winters of Jammu & Kashmir, especially of Ladakh, her letters would momentarily lift me, like a hot cup of Ladakhi butter tea, from the soporific state to which the cold reduces me. This is before cable TV and the net made boredom an obsolete concept, when we thought nothing of sitting in a train for more than two days to reach Kerala.

Being born in the same year, 1953, is a bonus. We still love to exchange scanned old photographs in flowered bell-bottoms, our brothers sporting those enormous sideburns. We wonder what to do with old gramophone records. When Clinton was elected in 1992, she wrote, ‘Bill Clinton seems a likeable chap. He seems so much like us, not an old man, you know.’ I try to shift her political leanings from Republican to Democrat, but fail. There are boundaries even in penfriendship.

My children, like Jenn’s, are in their twenties. They have grown up knowing about Jennifer Aunty and Mary. She bemoans the casualness of American youth and being called Jenn by her kids’ friends. But we never tried to foist them on to each other as pen friends. The idea is more alien to them than the lives of the aliens they so love!

In the year 2000, I had a severe bout of typhoid. I had few visitors and my days were enlivened by a daily email from her. We know about each other’s extended families, friends and foibles. There’s the added advantage of knowing that no titbit will accidentally reach a grapevine and cause havoc.

Are we coincidentally alike or did we influence each other? I can’t say, but the following description of herself could well be one of me. ‘My husband tells me I have a pathological need for friends. I guess he is right. I just love people. He tells me I sometimes embarrass him cos I talk to everybody like the cashier or people we meet on our walks etc. I actually used to be shy but no one believes that any more.’

In Sen’s movie, the Japanese wife comes for her husband’s funeral. How will it end for us? On Facebook, of course. I do not deny the indispensability of the net in disseminating information. I only express a lingering regret for the world we are losing—of hobby clubs, guest speakers and board games. How we filled our days before TV and the internet took over the function of entertaining us.

Mary Verghese left banking after 23 years in search of new worlds. She was involved with Alliance Francaise in Thiruvananthapuram for the next five years, completing her diploma and then teaching and handling translation work at Alliance Francaise. She continues in this field in Delhi.

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