To, Dated: 07.07.2020
Mr. Anthony Parakal,
301, Primrose Holy Cross Road,
IC Colony, Borivali (W),
Mumbai – 103, Maharashtra
Hello Anthony,
Apologies for this delayed response. It took us a while to gather our thoughts. Maybe you were never really expecting a response, as you had stopped writing to us for more than a decade now. This, however, is not a response to a letter you sent us, but to one you did not. The one you might not even have typed out. We write this as we grapple with your legacy. Your death last month went unnoticed. Nobody wrote to us. A brief obituary, tucked away in the obit pages, was all the information we had. You were as nondescript in death, as in life. With your self-effacing ways you would have been a misfit in today’s self-aggrandizing world. Hence, we thought of doing this the old-fashioned way. Sending you this note penned on a refurbished Godrej Prima. We brought out the older Remington from our warehouse, but like you, it died on us, without much fanfare.
You stopped writing to us in 2005, hoping to devote more time in picking arguments with your wife Lissie. Residents of IC Colony in Borivali West cannot recall having heard many quarrels. You badgered us with your queries, complaints, and clairvoyance for more than 50 years, through 5000-odd letters. In your final note fifteen years ago, you had written of having lost your “vision and memory,” and how it made you feel like “a used matchstick”. The analogy was not lost on us. We are all like safety matches with enough potassium chlorate to spark the resistance and speak truth to power, but we needed an Anthony to ignite it for us. Without your constant prodding we would have never lit the match, questioned fearlessly and become the voice of the people (for whatever brief period), for fear of self-combustion – losing privileges, earned through years of access journalism, in a world of widespread disparity. Your letters were our daily dose of moral rectitude and reckoning.
I am sure, Anthony, that in your final years you would have been dejected with the “letters to the editor” column having become a syndicated space. Letter writers like yourself were always supposed to have been the voice of the common man, outside the milieu of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai or Kolkata’s fashionable elites. But we failed. I am sure you came up with the excuse of lost vision and failing memory to wash your hands of the media establishment.
Faced with the failure of liberalism brought about by our own machinations, we realise how lone voices like yours have been the real proprietors of the fourth estate. We had called you our “Knight of Conscience” but failed to live up to our own. As we live through our own ruination, I sometimes wonder what made you keep going back to the People’s Library at Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus? Was it simply to read and hone your language skills, so that we would publish your angst, or to show us how it is done? Do people even visit public libraries anymore unless they are preparing for exams? Was it your way of showing us, before you began writing, that we should not be making news but reporting on what is out there? Could this have been the final letter you had been meaning to write before you called it a day? Maybe I am reading too much into it. Nobody plans their life, so far in advance.
Even though you seemed battle weary in your last letter, hopefully your final years were as rebellious, with drafts of unwritten letters circulating in your head.
Goodbye!
From a long-forgotten Editor,
who still has time for readers’ letters
Rohit Dutta Roy
Rohit Dutta Roy is a Doctoral scholar at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He began his doctoral research at Cambridge after completing an MPhil in Modern History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Rohit has First Class BA and MA degrees in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, and a First Class Master’s in History from the University of Delhi. His stories on politics and policy have appeared in The Wire, Newslaundry and The Citizen. Rohit writes on the everyday political, policy history, identity formation and governmentality.
