As someone who loves to travel at the slightest opportunity, I love bringing back souvenirs to remind myself of the good times from each place I have visited. Over the years, I have created a laundry list of items to be brought back whenever I visit a new place. This list includes staple items such as fridge magnets, T-shirts with my destination printed in bold, coffee mugs to start my days with fond memories, and shot glasses as cute little accessories for our humble family bar, in addition to local items that one may not be able to find elsewhere.
But on a recent visit to Sri Lanka to celebrate the New Year, I added another “souvenir” to this ritual-like list of mine — sending postcards to my friends and family. And while I do not receive these postcards myself, the joy that I got while sending them was more than the excitement that I have got gathering all my other souvenirs over the years.
As a child, I received letters and postcards from some of my closest friends when they moved abroad. I ended up with a nifty little collection from Syracuse, Dubai, and Kenya, but seldom replied to any of them. I found it absolutely outlandish that for a few rupees, my letters could actually travel such great distances. But when my sister sent her friend a postcard from a trip to Cancun in Mexico, I realised there could not be a better souvenir than a postcard!
For, in spite of being open for the world to read, postcards are just so intimate — capturing the ethos of a locale and the sender’s raw excitement in its tiny little space. The words that can be expressed on a postcard might be few, but they are purer than anything else. With this, a postcard becomes much more than a regular souvenir like a fridge magnet; it becomes a treasure not just for the recipient, but also for the sender, with value to be treasured for a lifetime.
Picture perfect
And so, after posting multiple pictures of Sri Lanka’s beautiful landscapes on Instagram with the caption “Postcard Perfect”, I decided it was finally time for me to send out some real postcards. Armed with this new aim, I spent an entire afternoon in the quaint little town of Ella in Sri Lanka’s central highlands selecting some vintage postcards and sending them out from a 100-year-old post office. In this digital age, however, I had to resort to asking my friends for their postal addresses on WhatsApp, and the irony was not lost on me. But the fact that I could share iconic works of art by some of Sri Lanka’s most famous artists with my friends all over the world in the form of postcards was exciting. I met another group of people from India at a popular bar and when they learnt of my idea to send back postcards, they were so taken with the idea that I bumped into them at the post office the next day.
My trip to Sri Lanka did not end with my return to India. For, I waited eagerly to hear news of my postcards being received by their intended recipients. I got a chance to relive precious moments from my trip almost every day as my excited friends sent me pictures of themselves with their postcards, again, on WhatsApp.
Some of the postcards ended up being crumpled in transit, but I believe that it added another charm of authenticity to them; there’s even excitement in wondering how many hands each postcard would have changed en route. With the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus taking us towards a new peak, I wonder when I will get a chance to travel again. Till then, I shall continue to relive my fondest memories from Sri Lanka through the anticipation of my postcards to be delivered, for two of my friends are yet to receive them.
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