My friend Milena was going postal.
She had painstakingly gathered 20 cards and notes from her mother’s old friends for her birthday
MM1: her first grade best friend from 1946, her fencing club partner from 1959, her friend who went on a study trip with her to Tunisia in 1965.
All the way up to her current physiotherapist and dental hygienists.
She mailed the package from Berlin to her mother’s home in upstate New York as a birthday surprise.
Milena got a birthday shock instead. Every day she checked in on the parcel, trying to track its progress. By the time the package finally reached the birthday was over. It had taken 21 days and given Milena a migraine.
MM2: From now onwards, I will use personal couriers only
As in friends and acquaintances carrying packages as a favour.
She might have no other choice. Goods valued under $800 that previously entered the US without needing customs clearance now need to be vetted and can be subject to whatever tariff rate the Trump administration has slapped on that country. Many countries are pausing certain kinds of mail to America. India, for example, has suspended booking all categories of mail to USA including letters and parcels valued up to $100.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
The slow demise of the postal system is not unique to America. India is phasing out registered post services, folding it in as a value add to Speed Post. No one wants to return to a pre-email and pre-WhatsApp world. I remember as a student in America rushing down every day to check if a letter had arrived from home in India alongside the usual supermarket fliers addressed to Current Resident and bills. A letter from India could take three weeks to reach my university town in America.
The postman was more than just a conduit for news. He was a witness to life’s highs and lows, bringing news of love, jobs and death. Perhaps that’s why a profession as humble as a postman or as unglamorous as a postmaster, shows up so often in popular culture.
In Sukanta Bhattacharya’s famous Bengali poem Runner, the poet says the mail runner dashes through the night determined to reach his bag of news to the destination before day breaks but no one cares about his news. nobody ever writes to him.
RUNNER: Runner choleche tai chum chum ghonta baajchhe raatey
The postman was always meant to be the person we could rely on, the one who always delivered. Hence the famous James M Cain story The Postman Always Rings Twice. A noir story about murder and adultery, it had no postmen in it. But the title just meant that even if you dodge fate or justice once, it will eventually catch up, if not on the first ring, then on the second.
POSTMANN CLIP1: Who you calling? scream
But the real romance is always about the letter that did not arrive, the letter that never got delivered. In the film Finding Fanny, an old postman in Goa realizes the love of his life Fanny, never actually got the love letter he wrote her almost 50 years earlier and sets out to find her.
FANNY1: She was the love of my life but she never knew.
In real life, actor Steve Carell, found undelivered mail underneath the seat of his car, left over from his stint as a rural mail carrier before he found fame as an actor. Carell sent it to the addressee, hoping better late than never.
Recently I got to tour Kolkata at night where some heritage buildings are being lit up by a citizens’ group The Kolkata Restorers, bringing them to glowing life at night. One of them is the former Dead Letter Office. An old brick red colonial building with a bell tower, dating back to 1876, The tour leader Sujoy Sen says its basically the morgue for letters.
SS1:Letters that can't be delivered due to unclear addresses, addresses refusing to accept them, or the inability to return them to the sender.
He said they would even open the letters to see if they could find clues.
It was later christened to Returned Letter Office in 1959 probably because it sounded less morbid.
But given the state of the postal service around the world, perhaps a return to Dead Letter Office might be more appropriate. Now we are in need of a place where our poor letters can go to rest in peace.
As for Milena, she might soon no longer be able to go postal. In a world with no mail, no one will quite know what it even means.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW
SONG-daakiya dak laya