I still remember those handwriting notebooks.
Each page had four lines.
The capital letters had to reach the top line.
The small letters stayed within the middle space.
The tails of the g's and y's dipped below.
The t's had to be crossed correctly.
The i's dotted neatly.
We spent years learning cursive handwriting.
Some people say you can tell a lot about a person's character from their handwriting.
I don't know if that is true.
What I do know is that there was something beautiful about a page filled with good cursive writing.
It felt orderly.
Thoughtful.
Complete.
Not everyone had beautiful handwriting, of course.
Which is why we also learned to type.
Not on computers.
On typewriters.
For a while, both skills lived side by side.
We wrote by hand.
We typed when necessary.
When I was younger, I wrote a lot of letters.
Long letters.
Many of them were written on onion paper,
a thin paper that weighed very little.
It was so thin that you placed a lined sheet underneath it
and could see the lines through the page.
That way your writing stayed straight.
The paper was light enough that I could write page after page
without worrying too much about postage costs.
Somewhere, folded away after all these years,
are pages written by a much younger version of me.
Then the world changed.
My boys learned cursive in school, just as I had.
But by the time they grew older, computers had taken over.
Kabir was only four or five when he went to computer classes.
Their generation learned to think on screens.
Mine learned to think on paper.
Today, most of us type.
Tomorrow, perhaps our grandchildren will simply talk to AI and let it do the writing.
I do not know whether any of these changes are good or bad.
The future arrives whether we are ready for it or not.
What I do know is that there is something special about handwriting.
I discovered that many years ago when I came across something written by my mother.
The moment I saw her handwriting, she became more alive.
I could hear her voice.
I could see her.
A few lines written in ink somehow carried far more than words.
They carried a person.
Perhaps that is why I did something that everyone found slightly ridiculous.
I bought recipe cards.
Notebooks would have been easier.
Printing recipes from the internet would have been easier still.
Beautiful recipes already existed online,
complete with photographs and detailed instructions.
But I bought recipe cards anyway.
I carefully copied recipes onto them in my own handwriting.
Then I slipped them into protective sleeves so they would not get stained or damaged.
Everyone laughed.
Why spend all that time writing recipes that could be downloaded in seconds?
The answer had very little to do with recipes.
Fifty years from now,
my children and perhaps even my grandchildren will be able to find those cards.
They may be standing in a kitchen, trying to make one of those dishes.
They will pull out a recipe card and see my handwriting.
And something curious will happen.
They will not simply read the instructions.
They will hear them.
A little more salt.
Wait until the onions turn golden.
Taste it now.
The handwriting will become the voice.
The recipe will become the person.
I know this because that is exactly what happens when I see my mother's handwriting.
For a few moments, she is no longer a memory.
She is there.
Perhaps photographs preserve faces.
Perhaps recordings preserve voices.
Handwriting preserves something else.
Something harder to explain.
A trace of the person behind the words.
And maybe that is why those recipe cards matter so much to me.
One day they may help my children cook a meal.
But more importantly, they may help them find their way back to me.