Beauty of handwriting

The era of  the computer, i-pad and i-phone has overtaken that of pen and paper, today.
When I was five, my parents left me with my mother’s parents, who had a spacious house in old Madras. My father had been transferred to a town in Andhra where a ‘convent school’ was not available.

I joined the primary school in Kilpauk and learnt my ‘a-b-c’ there, as well as my ‘a-aa-e-ee’. We played in the sand-pit; swung high and low, thumped on the seesaw while imbibing the rudiments of two languages and the third ‘r’ of arithmetic; sang hymns with Miss Bain tapping the piano keys.

When I came to Class V, my parents, now transferred to Thanjavur, reclaimed me, witching me from English to Tamil medium at high school. It was wartime: 1940, On the coast of Coromandel, British Raj was galvanized by air-raid sirens, underground shelters, rationing of rice, sugar, petrol, together with inflation.

I loved forming letters in copybooks. The pages were evenly ruled in three-line sets, like telegraph lines along the railway. Thathu was a stickler for neat handwriting. He had “copperplate” handwriting, inked by steel-pen fine-nibs, legible even after a hundred years, judging by his marginal comments.

Miss Devadas, my favourite teacher, rejected shoddy work; so we tried to write the letters fluently, in the cursive script, the capital letters and the linking to the lower case letters. Later, this habit became an obsession. I lost respect for those who wrote fast, but at the cost of legibility and clarity.

In middle age, I was aghast when I could not make out some earlier notes I myself had scribbled. Doctors’ prescriptions are known to drive dispensaries to distraction. Yoga apart, medical science is frustrated to remedy weakening motor coordination in middle-age. Literacy is a lifelong quest for me.

I had a decent hand, but my lettering sprawled over sheets like plump chicks with angular beaks. A Cambridge don once commended my handwriting, if not the content of my tutorial essay. The era of the typewriter and the computer, i-pad and i-phone has overtaken us.

Calligraphy is a decorative art which I admire from samples I saw in Europe, China and Japan. Graphology is an aspect of penmanship which may reveal the distinctness of each person from a scrutiny of the handwriting. Can it detect forgery? I will sooner give my x-ray to a lab than my writing to an expert in this discipline.

We have come a long way from papyrus and reed pens, stylus, rock-face and palm poet says: “The moving finger writes, and having writ/ Moves on..” Not half a line of it can be cancelled. (No ‘delete button’ there). I recall our native idiom about what is written on one’s forehead and the phrase about “the writing on the wall”.

Curious that the word ‘scripture’ refers to writing and that Calligraphy is an art exalted by clerics who copied sacred words in volumes we admire in museums. I still enjoy the feel of pen and paper, if the pen does not leak, the sheet is bond paper and my hand inscribes the letters as I want them to look. I mentally salute Thathu and Miss Devadas for guiding me to the treasury of script and letters.