Shashi Warrier | The Disappearing Post And The Generation Gap

Raghavan, my ex-professor friend, dropped in one morning on his way back to his hotel from a client meeting. With him was a colleague, a youngster in his late twenties, an accountant named Kuldeep, about a couple of decades younger than Raghavan himself. When I’d got them seated and got them tea, our dog Squark began to bark, signalling that there was someone at the gate. It was the postman with a registered parcel for me: he needed my signature. He knew I’m old and take my time reaching the gate, and waited patiently while I limped up to him.

“Do you know they’re stopping registered post from September 1?” asked Raghavan when I carried the parcel into the house.

“Why?” I asked.

“They’re merging it with the Speed Post service,” he replied.

“What’s registered post?” asked Kuldeep. “I’ve heard of it, but never used it.”

“It’s the government’s courier service,” explained Raghavan. “A little safer than regular post. You go to the post office and stand in line to get your letter or parcel or whatever registered, and if they happen to lose it, they send you a letter saying so.”

“No big loss,” said Kuldeep. “We have courier services collecting mail from our offices these days, so there’s no standing in line.”

“It’s got nostalgia value,” said Raghavan.

“People get nostalgic about standing in line?” asked Kuldeep.

Raghavan grinned. “You’re thinking of the wrong end,” he said. “People who used to receive registered mail will be nostalgic about it.” He paused for a reminiscent sip of tea, and his gaze turned inward. “I remember the registered letter saying I’d got admission to my college. Some years later, I got my first appointment letter by registered post. After I started work, we had to send lots of papers to government offices. We had to register those packets and keep the receipts as proof that we’d sent them when we did. In those days registered post used to take a day extra because of the extra care it got: they used to pack it in separate mail sacks at railway stations.”

My mind drifted backwards in time, to when I was a teenager, living in a college hostel far away from home. There were no direct cash transfers in those days, so we had to depend on cheques, drafts, and telegraphic money orders, or TMOs, which were abolished some years ago.

We had three degrees of being broke: Regular, urgent, and emergent, all involving the post office. The regular state involved monthly payments: Mess bills, settling accounts with shopkeepers, the replacement of worn-out footwear and clothing, and so on. Parents sent us monthly cheques to deal with these. We deposited these in the local bank, and had to wait up to a couple of weeks for them to clear. For a few days at the beginning of every month, all of us looked for the postman to ask for registered mail in our names, growing increasingly anxious until the cheque arrived.

The state of urgency called for demand drafts, which could be turned liquid without the need for clearing. If you happened to lose an expensive textbook, for instance, and had to replace it quickly, you asked your parents to send you a draft. This involved writing home, and a response from there, which took anything between three days and ten. People waiting for drafts got to the post office towards mid-morning, hoping to intercept the postman right there and pop into the bank next door to collect the cash.

Emergencies called for TMOs, and usually took less than a day to bear fruit. Paradoxically, people in real emergencies never ran short of money because everyone was willing to pitch in.

So, the postman carrying your registered post was a financial white knight. Our hostel’s regular postman, whom we called Maheshji, and respected more than some of the profs, knew student groups so well that whenever he got a letter for one of us, he’d tell our friends so we got the message sooner rather than later. I finished with college back in 1981, but Maheshji and his bag of letters, and the memory of him peering at the names on the envelopes and struggling to pronounce south Indian names remains clear in my mind all these years later.

I returned to the present. Our house is off the beaten path, and couriers have trouble finding their way to it. Delivery agents call and ask for directions and still get lost. Many give up and tell me to collect my packets from the office — and most couriers’ offices are in town, 15 or more kilometres away, with gridlocks on the bridge across the river nearby. We’ve never had trouble with the post, though. The postman knows where we live, and delivers without fuss. If we happen to be out, he calls to say I can collect the packet from the nearby post office. So I always tell people who send me material to avoid couriers and use registered post instead.

I came out of my reverie when Raghavan tapped me on the knee. “I thought you’d dropped off to sleep,” he said.

“I was drifting,” I said. “Thinking about postal services and how some of them have disappeared from our lives. Kuldeep doesn’t know much about the postal service: he’s hardly ever used it... I don’t know what he’ll be nostalgic about when he’s my age.”

“Neither do I,” said Raghavan. “But there’ll be a difference.”

“What?” I asked.

“He’ll have his nostalgia stored in pictures on social media to share with his grandchildren,” he said. “You and I, we’ve got only words.”