IDHAR UDHAR KI BAAT 78- CHITHI - Brig PS Gothra (Retd)

"Afsaran di chitti laal rang di hundi hai (Officers letters are in red colour),” said this lady in our village when I asked as to how she identified our letter.  She was totally illiterate, yet a keeper of words. She had lost her husband after his retirement from the fauj but never lost her connection with it. Every day, she would eagerly wait for the postman, collecting letters meant for the fauji families, and then set off on her own little mission—distributing them with the precision of a seasoned clerk. She didn’t have a rank or a uniform, but she had something more—a genuine love for the joy those letters brought. It was almost like she lived for the moment a fauji's wife or mother’s face lit up upon receiving news from the border.

    She would come to our house first, handing me the bundle and making me mark them with symbols so she could deliver them accurately. One day, curiosity got the better of me.

  "Bibi, tussi saadi chitti kidan pehchande ho?" (How do you recognize our letter?) I asked.

To which she had replied about the red letters of officers.

    With the passage of time, I had forgotten her. I only recalled her last week while making the list of things which I thought were frustrating in my life.

     And right on top of the list was (a) my wife filling up the inland letter with her elongated cursive writing tactfully using big gaps among the words to only convey ‘mausam ka haal’ and (b) the task of censoring the letters written by my fauji brothers to their families.

     Franking letters wasn’t difficult, technically. The workload was light, as only the tradesmen and clerks’ letters written in Hindi had to be read. The real challenge was the moral dilemma—peeping into someone’s private emotions felt abominable. But ignoring them wasn’t an option either because if something classified or inappropriate got caught at the base censor, all hell would break loose.

      I remembered my Dadi (grandmother), who had been through this system as well. My Dada ji was a jawan during World War 2, so she knew firsthand what it was like to write letters under censorship.

     One day, out of curiosity, I asked her, “Dadi, did you ever write ‘I love you’ to Dadaji?”

     She scoffed. “Never.”

     I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

      With a chuckle, she said, “Because I didn’t know how to read and write, you fool.”

      Apparently, every letter she sent was dictated to some kind-hearted neighbour. “And just like that, your Dadaji also couldn’t write anything obscene because someone else would be reading it,” she added with a mischievous glint.

     “Dadi, you’re hiding something! Tell me the truth.”

     After much teasing, she finally revealed her ingenious solution—a code language for love.

    “Your Dadaji and I had an understanding. If I mentioned our buffalo—Majj—he would know I was expressing my love.”

     I burst out laughing. “You’re serious?” 

     “Yes!” she said proudly. “I would write things like Majj theek hai (Buffalo is healthy), Majj theek pathe khandi hai (Buffalo is eating well), Majj theek dudh de rahi hai (Buffalo is giving good milk), or Majj da katta bada shatan hai (Buffalo’s calf is very naughty).”

    I was still recovering from the absurdity of it when she sighed dramatically.

    “But then came the problem.”

    “What problem?”

    “Fifteen days after your Dadaji left on duty, our Majj died.”

    I almost choked. “What? Then what did you do?”

      “Well, I couldn't exactly ask the letter-writer to write about a buffalo that didn’t exist anymore. So, for the next seven months, every letter contained only one line—Majj di badi yaad andi hai (I miss the buffalo a lot).”

    I was howling with laughter, but she wasn’t done yet.

     “Soon, the whole village started gossiping about my ridiculous attachment to a dead buffalo!  I had to tell your Dadaji that we needed a new code.”

    I wiped my tears. “So what did you do?”

     She smiled. “The next time he came on leave, he taught me to write my own name. From then on, whenever he saw my name in a letter, he knew it meant ‘I love you.’” (A rough sketch of her signatures is given below)

    That simple, beautiful revelation sent me on a contemplation trip.

     How difficult it must have been back then—no instant messages, no calls, no emojis, just a slow, deliberate process of love. It all started with a request to someone going to town to get an inland letter, then waiting for a literate neighbor to help write it, then giving it to the postman—hoping it reached safely.

     And yet, it was all worth it.

     As she got up to leave, I asked, “But you never told me—how did Dadaji send love back to you?”

    She grinned mischievously.

    “Oh, he wrote about his pugree (turban)."”

   “What? His pugree?”

“Yes. If he wrote, ‘Today I washed my pugree,’ it meant he missed me. If he wrote, ‘Today my pugree is making me uncomfortable,’ it meant he was thinking of me. And if he wrote, ‘ I slept with my pugree on,’ it meant, 'he dreamt of  me."‘

     I sat there in awe, realizing that in those days, love wasn’t just spoken—it was hidden in buffaloes and pugrees, in ink and paper, in patience and waiting.

   And maybe, that made it all the more beautiful.

 

Note:-  Those days people exercised caution even to express love to one’s spouse in public. Today one Allahabadi makes  vulgar video and laughs. I wonder whether he is not worried that his own parents or siblings or spouse or children may get access to his video. Are we heading in the right direction?

 

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