By: Ganesh Saili
In flagrante delicto – caught in the act of writing a letter – I can see the look of disbelief writ large on her face. ‘Who writes letters these days?’ whispers my granddaughter tiptoeing away. ‘You heard of WhatsApp?’
How does one explain that handwritten letters are more personal because as my friend Norman Van Rooy puts it so well: ‘They have bits of our DNA embedded in them.’ Sadly, no matter how you look at it, the romance of letter-writing is all but over.
‘Every day for three long years, I wrote to her!’ moaned Ravi Singh, my neighbour as he shook his head in futility. When he came back from his assignment in the Gulf, he found his lady love had eloped with the postman.
Among my papers, lies proof that as early as 1827, Capt. Young, Commandant of the Convalescent Depot of Landour pleaded with the Directors of the East India Company to start a Post Office. With foresight, he wrote: ‘Letters will work like charms or talismans for the invalids of the Convalescent Depot.’ Two hundred years later, we almost fell into the abyss by abandoning five of our Sub Post offices. The ‘why’ of my being so hot under the collar is that anyone would consider the closure of a post office.
It’s also about history or whatever little there is left of it. On 1 October, 1837, the Post Office Act XVII came into force and the Landour Post Office operated from the Chowk. One must remember that from 1850 to 1862, Jim Corbett’s father, Christopher William Corbett, was our postmaster at the GPO, which moved location five times, before settling on Rolleston House in 1909.
Life in our hill station once revolved around these sub-post offices in Landour, Library, Charleville, Barlowganj, and Jharipani. Initially, the mail totaled less than a hundred articles a week, which by June 1935 peaked to 1,31,562 pieces, all of this was ably managed by just one postmaster and his two assistants. My favourite tale is about a Jolly Old Colonel who gets a new orderly, whom he gives him instructions to drop the mail ‘into the hole in the red box’ at the Post Office. That is exactly what the orderly does. However, after six long weeks passed some important official letters remained unanswered. The Jolly Old Colonel is not amused and grows anxious dragging the orderly by the ear (I guess one could do that in those good old days!) and that is how the two arrive at the Post Office.
Next to the office was the Post Master’s drawing room, neat, clean, and with a fireplace three-quarters draped in the summer months with a red curtain. Of course, the letters had been posted, there. There they lay – behind the curtain – all seventeen of them behind what to the orderly appeared to be the hole.
Never ceases to amaze me how we take our postman for granted, regardless of the fact that he without fuss delivers mail to ninety percent of the countryside, just like he did a hundred years ago, when mail running was, at best, a risky occupation. Hikaras ventured out armed with a spear or sword and after dark, and would occasionally be assisted by torchbearers, or dug-dugiwallahs to scare away wild animals. Often the countryside was infested with man-eating leopards and tigers: ‘Day after day, for a long time, some of the dak people were carried off,’ my old Gazetteer complains. But that did not deter us, indeed it had no effect when you consider that today we have 1,55105 post offices, and that makes for one of the largest postal networks in the world.
‘What are we going to leave for our children to inherit?’ frets my student Aaloke Malhotra, Senior Advocate as he mulls over the advice of those who seek the closure of our sub-post offices.
‘Rare to see our postmen in khakhi anymore?’ I chit-chatted with the boy manning the counter.
‘They still do!’ he said. ‘But only the ones who are permanent. The rest can wear whatever they like!’
Ganesh Saili born and home-grown in the hills belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their own pictures. Author of two dozen books; some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.
