Death of mailman

MINE must be among the last of the generations to have waited eagerly for the mailman to bring us a missive; mostly an interview call, and on rare occasions, an appointment letter. Until the late 1990s, there was no concept of online applications or email appointments. As beat reporters, the first gadget issued to the more important among us was a beeper, a match-sized contraption capable of relaying messages such as ‘call office urgently’ or ‘post-haste’ when they emanated from the subbing desk.

The world of literature and cinema would be that much poorer without the genre centred on a lost mailbag containing letters ranging from confessions of mischief to professions of love. From the personal archive, two stand out. One was an interview letter from a foreign news outlet, received a month later than intended. My editor was a lot more crestfallen than I was; imagine the esteem in which yours truly was held. The second was more amusing: a typed letter in a brown, official envelope, crumpled among the myriad contents of a diplomatic pouch. Its opening was a show-stopper: “The competent authority is pleased to terminate your services with immediate effect… .” However painful the rest of the message, the comic irony of the opening remains an all-time favourite. Laughing my head off, with tears in my eyes, I entered a much senior colleague’s office, waving the letter at him and exhorting him to read just the opening paragraph. Being a member of the deriving-sadistic-pleasure officialdom, he kept puffing at his cigarette and had only this to add: “This is exactly how clemency appeals from death-row convicts are rejected, ie, ‘the competent authority is pleased to reject your mercy plea’.”

Over time, the mailman’s profession lost its standing and charm. In Western imagery, the mailman was portrayed as being chased by a dog over a very jumpable fence. In our part of the world, the dakia (in Urdu) or tapali (in Sindhi), went from being the confidant who not only delivered but sometimes read letters aloud to unlettered addressees to a derided figure suspected of defrauding people out of their money orders and of not delivering Eid cards until after the event to get some Eidi.

Maqbool, our postman in a middle-class Karachi neighbourhood in the 1970s and 1980s, was a respectable man. He always delivered letters, no matter how wrong the address; he waited to see if all was well when delivering telegrams called ‘taar’ (literally meaning wire), for these were usually the bearers of bad news from distant towns. He not only delivered Eid cards on time, but would turn on his heel and leave, lest he be seen as eager for a tip. Long before anything was ever expected to be mailed to our age group, one remembers coming across him during our daily runs to the market, asking “Maqbool bhai, anything for us?”, and he would very politely say “no, nothing today”.

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