I realized I was getting obsessed with checking for mail when I found myself dashing to the door every time the bell rang. Such behavior is just not acceptable off guests invited for dinner. By the time I realized I was at my aunt’s place, I was already by the door; and nothing I said could quite explain why I had spat out the soup, jumped off the table halfway through my meal, broke some of the china, brushed aside the host, and dashed to the front door at blazing speed, all in time to let the maid in.

In my defense, there wasn’t really a more socially acceptable way of being obsessed about one’s mail before the advent of emails. You couldn’t keep clicking the send-receive button furtively every two minutes, and still maintain the illusion that you were just catching up on the news or checking the weather forecast. There were no excel-sheets you could conveniently fling over your postal obsession.

As luck would have it, the awaited mail arrived just as I’d decided that I needed to curb my behaviour in the interest of my declining social acceptability as a dinner guest. It was an unassuming, brown envelope – the kind with a transparent window on top to show the recipient’s name and address. I couldn’t help feel it was a little anti-climactic. I wasn’t hoping for anything too elaborate, but a few flashing lights around the edges and a couple of midgets inside singing ‘Congratulations!’ wouldn’t have seemed out of place. Nevertheless, I was happy it was finally here. With the caution of a biologist holding the rarest specie of fern, I gently pinched the envelope on opposite corners, and escorted it to the living room table; once convinced that the atmospheric conditions were stable, I began my inspection. The bottom right hand corner of the envelope had a red and yellow logo. Beneath it, rather nonchalantly, appeared the words ‘Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.’ With a deep breath, I picked up the envelope, and tore off the right edge; out came an A4 sheet of paper, neatly folded in two sharp creases. It read:

—————

Dear Rishi,
It is with great pleasure that we invite you to join the Post Graduate Programme in Management in Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore for the session starting August 2006…’

—————

I remember the first time I’d ever received mail addressed to me. I was in class three, and it felt good to have my existence validated by someone other than my immediate family. After having admired seeing my name in print on the envelope for an hour or so, I opened it, and pulled out my very own copy of the Maggi Magic fun book. It was 20 pages of magic tricks, color –me sections and puzzles; and as if these weren’t enough to make an 8 year old deliriously happy, the book also included a 4 panel comic strip running along the bottom of each page. I felt set for the rest of my life; I might as well have told my parents how they need not worry about what their younger kid’s future anymore. However, after spending an entire day scanning each and every pixel, I had to admit I might have slightly over-estimated the mileage I could get out of my new possession. After joining dot 8 and 9 on page 17, I realized that I was staring at yet another Maggi logo; dots 10 to 42 seemed pretty redundant after that. Perhaps, if the watermark spelling out ‘MAGGI’ had not been repeated on every single page, and all the previous 36 quizzes, puzzles and crosswords had not had the same answer, they could have sneaked the illusion at least past dot 12. Suddenly, a pattern seemed to emerge and I decided to continue school for the time-being.

Compared to this, my relationship with art lasted much longer. I have always been good with aping stuff. In school, my handwriting was determined by who I sat next to. My hairstyle was ripped off from the latest movie poster. And sometimes, even my test scores matched perfectly with that of the person sitting next to me in the exam hall. While all this was acutely puzzling for everyone concerned, my elder brother, being the entrepreneur in the family, instantly recognized my rare talent, and volunteered to help me develop it; he regularly commissioned works of art designed specifically to hone my skills. It was only when Ma found me scribbling around twenty pages of ‘I shall do my homework on time’ and went ballistic that I sensed there might have been motivations other than brotherly love at play. Still, I rationalized that may be my talent was some family secret that was not to be practiced publicly yet; perhaps it was some kind of a super power that needed to be kept dormant until a certain age. But my theories on this issue became limited to a large extent when my brother came around after his session with Ma in the living room, and
landed a swift back-hand on my forehead.

‘You dim-wit. Why did you have to go and show her my assignment?’

My brother’s interest in my development sort of waned off after that. So, I decided to take matters in to my own hands. I took to copying anything my eyes could focus on for more than a couple of seconds. Each little square inch of anything that was capable of holding ink was used to religiously illustrate the latest cartoon character that I’d seen on TV. The furniture around the house started resembling props from Disneyworld, and the walls were like that of ancient Egyptian tombs, hieroglyphically illustrating such important events in history as ‘when Garfield met Phantom in the jungles of Bengala’, or the great ‘Cheese War between Lt Tom and Major Jerry’. Even my school textbooks started taking on the appearance of Da Vinci’s notebooks (i.e. the notebooks Da Vinci no doubt maintained during his fixation with Tintin and Asterix comics). A point was reached when even guests had to be politely asked to refrain from wearing white when visiting.

Read Chapter 1, Part 2: Postal Obsessions (Next)

Photograph Courtesy: © Chor Ip

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