STORYBOARD

The postman always rings twice, the second time with vegetables

ARUN RAM  25.05.2020

When was the last time you saw a postman? If you live in a city, you may find it difficult to remember, unless you recently received your passport. I felt happy that I may be able to see my postman soon as the Tamil Nadu horticulture department has tied up with India Post to deliver vegetables and fruits.

For the not-so-young like me, that will be bringing home some evergreen memories too. The postman is probably the one character who has found a special place in literature, cinema of all languages and cultures. In ‘Il Postino’ (1994), the postman’s only client is Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet of love and despair.

‘Postman Pat’, the 1980s British stopmotion animated television series was meant for pre-school children, but Pat Clifton endeared himself more to adults, taking legions of them on a veritable nostalgia trip.

In Hindi movies, the postman cycled into villages, not just delivering letters but reading them out to the addressees and writing reply letters on their behalf. Rajesh Khanna as the postman in ‘Palkon Ki Chhaon Mein’ made the “Dakiya daak laya” song immortal. Tamil actor-director Bhagyaraj is known as much for his cameo as a postman in ‘Vidhi’ (1984) as for his bigger movies.

For those born before the 1980s, the postman was the harbinger of happiness (not when he came with a telegram in the dead of night), the messenger of love. I knew the postman of my childhood hometown as much as I knew my neighbours. As a teenager, I waited for his arrival during summer holidays as I exchanged letters with a girl in my tuition class.

We wrote so feverishly that descriptions of the crow in my backyard and the prattle of her young niece filled as many sheets of paper as the 50-paise post cover could hold. The postman would deliver her letter a little after noon, and I would write an express reply so that it could go into the red letterbox before the postman cleared it at 1.15pm, so she got the reply the next day.

Later, working in Hyderabad, I overcame homesickness writing to my sister in Thiruvananthapuram, filling foolscap papers with a thousand words each and sketches of the sights I saw in the city of minars. Every time I posted a letter, I would visualise our postman in that khaki shirt with frayed collars and smiling eyes delivering it to my sister. And sometime in 1996, it stopped. I had just got a Hotmail account.

Email has left postal services across the globe virtually obsolete. The 500-year-old British Royal Mail is surviving on parcels, but its future remains uncertain. The United States Postal Service, which is less than half as old and is the third largest civilian employer (633,188 workers) after the federal government and Walmart, too, is in a crisis.

Historian Philip F Rubio wrote in The Atlantic last month that USPS, which delivers 48% of the world’s mails to 60 million homes, has shrunk its delivery by one-third after the novel coronavirus started its devastating march. USPS is expected to lose $22 billion in the next 18 months. It may not have much to write home about, especially with a president who believes “the post office is a joke”.

India Post is the biggest loss-making PSU in the country, with a revenue deficit of more than ₹15,000 crore. It has tried everything from merchandise to doorstep banking, but to no avail. The postman with vegetables is not a business proposition, it’s a service with nostalgia. When my postman delivers carrots, his mask may hide his smile. But then, postmen have smiling eyes, don’t they?

arun.ram@timesgroup.com