When telegrams connected expats to loved ones

When the curtains came down on the 163-year-old telegram service in India on Sunday, it brought in its wake a rush of memories for several old-time Indian expatriates in the Kingdom.
Recalling the important role that telegrams had played in their early lives, old-timers said receiving a telegram was an event in itself, but that it was invariably opened with a sense of trepidation since it also brought bad tidings, particularly about the welfare of near and dear ones back home.
It was the fastest means of communication for expatriate workers who began flocking to the Kingdom, which was beginning to flourish. Making trunk calls was expensive and time-consuming and the postal mail normally took two months to arrive, making telegram the fastest means of communication.
For decades, Jeddah’s Central Telegraph Office downtown was one of the most visited places, with people sending and sharing news of momentous occasions in their lives, be it a celebration of birth or grief over death.
Recalling his experience in the 1950s, veteran Indian expatriate Rafi Fazalboy said: “Telegrams played an important role in the Kingdom in the early stages since there were no flights to South Asia, with only ships plying. I used to receive urgent information through telegrams up until the 1970s in Jeddah. It was a very useful service informing me about the impending arrival of friends and family members from India in the 1960s.”
Narrating an incident, Fazalboy said he missed his sister’s wedding in 1959 since the postal letter informing him about the marriage was delivered six months later. “Since then, my father always sent me telegrams for urgent and important matters from India.”
The veteran resident was all praise for the development that the Kingdom has achieved in the telecom sector. “I was in San Francisco in 1975, from where I had to make trunk calls to India through an operator, while the International Subscriber Dialing was already available in Saudi Arabia. I was surprised to find that a city in the USA was lagging behind Jeddah.”
Jamal Quadri, another Indian expatriate from Hyderabad, echoed similar views, saying that telegrams played an important role in the lives of Indian expatriates during their early days in the Kingdom.
Memories came back to Quadri as he recalled the early days in Saudi Arabia. “Once due to an error in a telegram sent from Jeddah to the Saudi Embassy in New Delhi, I was stuck in India for two-and-a-half months in 1976.”
Recalling another incident in the 1970s, he said: “Telegrams coming from India were short messages due to the word count and the rate charged. A colleague of mine received a telegram from India in 1975 with the terse message reading “wife is serious stop.” We couldn’t figure out whether she was serious but recovering or whether she was dead because of the use of the word ‘stop’ in the telegram,” he said.
The telegram has enjoyed a long and colorful history in the Asian subcontinent, where it is known as “taar.” It began in 1850, just six years after Samuel Morse sent the first such message to the US, when a young Irishman, William Brooke O’ Shaughnessy, was tasked by the East India Company to lay the first telegraph line.
The telegram has lost its relevance now with SMS, fax and e-mails transmitting information around the world in seconds.