For most of us, he has been a part of our growing up years. We often saw him with a bag slung across his shoulder on his cycle in our colony while on our way back from school. He obviously had a name but in our innocent minds, he was the proverbial postman, the ‘dakiya’ whose appearance brought to mind Kishore Kumar’s hugely popular song, “Dakiya daak laya, daak laya” from the film Palkon ki Chhaon Mein .
Indeed for many years, the postman was met with a sense of anticipation. On long summer afternoons, he would pedal his way through the lanes and by lanes of the city, his cycle bell alerting children and senior citizens alike. He seemed to know the way to everybody’s house, everybody’s letter box too. And wherever the letter box was missing, he knew just where to tuck in the letters. Ah, the joy of opening an inland letter or an aerogram! Those moments of bated breath, spent trying to decipher the sender’s name on the basis of the hand writing in the address section! And the much simple pleasure of receiving a postcard which hid nothing, revealed everything. Indeed, the postman in Delhi, in the years gone by, was much waited for. Few landline telephones, no mobiles, no couriers, no 24X7 news; the postman was the one who linked small town India with the Capital. With most residents of the city being immigrants from smaller towns, the postman was the bridge to home. He brought glad tidings. Occasionally, he passed on notes of sorrow. But everybody knew the local ‘dakiya’. Not just the postman, now even the mention of the word ‘letter’ evokes memories in this age of emails and text messages. How the families used to crowd around the inland letter when one was received, how the parents/grandparents kept the letter tucked under their pillow before finally filing it away. And who is to forget the exercise of looking for a letter box to post the reply! Some boxes with the easily identifiable hat on top were said to be opened regularly, others not so. As a consequence one often walked a kilometre or two to post the letter in the box which opened every day – this was before the time when they started being opened twice a day, and much before the years when the mail was segmented on the basis of local and domestic. International aerogram could best be sent after getting them duly stamped at the post office!
Today, these red letter boxes are part of our memory bank. Their green cousins less so. Yet they all stand almost like art installations in a city caught up in an imaginary rat race. Dakiya, dak ghar – the first one came up in 1885 near Kashmere Gate – letter box….so many memories of an age more leisurely, of life less frenetic.
