I have been a lifelong fan of mystery novels. Secrecy, intrigue, romance, suspense—that’s the stuff mystery books are made of. And the coded message is often a critical ingredient. It has the power to ruin or preserve lives, loves, fortunes and kingdoms. As the hands of the clock move towards the zero hour, one question dominates. Will the hero succeed in cracking the code?
Not to be left behind, I press my little grey cells into action, hoping to outrace the hero and outwit the author with a crackle and snap of my neuronal circuits. Rather shamefacedly, I must admit it hasn’t happened yet. The burden of saving mankind by cracking the code has been left to sharper and more ingenious minds than mine.
Invisible ink and dancing men
My own tryst with secret messages started with Frederick (aka Fatty) of Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers fame. Inspired by him (and in a spirit of scientific study) we dismembered more than one perfectly useful fountain pen by filling them with lemon juice. Alas, the limes were sour, and our messages remained invisible to human eyes. So if you ever find yourself in captivity, ask for orange juice! Or onion juice, if your captors are niggardly. As did an ingenious gentleman who wrote his entire will with his meagre luncheon salad!
Then came Sherlock Holmes and his famous dancing men. And with it we learnt the use of logic to decipher mysterious codes and ciphers. The Caesar Cipher, involving a change in the order of the letters, was among the easiest and most popular. While I longed to bequeath a baffling mystery to posterity, my blameless life yielded no secrets worth encoding!
Hiding in plain sight
Next came Madame Defarge, who transformed the innocuous pastime of knitting into a sinister and bloodthirsty activity. Colour-coded patchwork quilts, elaborate embroidery and delicate lace were craftily transformed into traitorous dispatches, passionate pleas, or amorous epistles!!! No mosaic tile was left unturned and no tapestry left unwoven as the bearer of clandestine codes! And not just in fiction. Known as steganography, this form of sending secret messages in plain sight has been in use since ancient times! Historians are still struggling to crack the codes.
Neither was the human body exempt from being the bearer of secrets. In Ancient Greece, emissaries and spies literally kept their secrets under their hats. Messages were tattooed on their shaved scalps and the words were buried under the growing hair, the thicker the curls the better. (Needless to say, bald men need not apply!) A wash and shave at journey’s end and voilà, the secret was unlocked!!
Cracking the Morse code
No essay on secret codes would be complete without a mention of the Morse code. You may argue that a code so universally recognisable code couldn’t be much of a secret. Yet Jeremiah Denton, a PoW in the Vietnam War successfully sent a message on camera in full view of his captors. By simply blinking his eyelids in Morse code!
Keeping it in the family
Then there are the very personal coded messages, both verbal and non-verbal. My husband’s family had a ‘p’ language, used mainly to converse without the kids overhearing—specially useful during birthdays and Christmas.
Married couples usually evolve very effective non-verbal codes, which may range from the innocuous ‘Time to go home’ to the more murderous ‘Wait till we get home’!! But mum’s the word for the most efficient code-cracker in history—who but a mother can decode the babbling of a baby?
An encoded world
The search for the perfect code continues. Why are we so fascinated in creating one? Perhaps because we are encoded beings ourselves—a product of our own unique genetic code. We believed that cracking that code would free from our inborn frailties and imperfections; perhaps even from death. Ironically, while we celebrate free will and the freedom of choice, multimillion dollar industries write codes which influence and shape our lives and loves; our work, finances, leisure and play.
Preprogrammed at birth and moulded by social, moral, cultural codes of our own making we are but encoded beings in an increasingly encoded world.