My former professor friend Raghavan fell on his way back from a customer meeting one morning. With him, a colleague, a young man in his late twenty, an accountant named Kuldeep, was younger than Raghavan for a few years younger than him. When I sat them and I bought tea, the dog fillet began to bark and showed that he was at the door. He was a registered parcel for me: he needed my signature. He knew I was old and took my time to reach the door, and he waited patiently while I was lame.
“Do you know they have stopped the registered post from September 1?” Raghavan asked, when I moved the parcel home.
“From where?” I asked.
“They combine it with Speed Post service,” he replied.
“What is the registered shipment?” Kuldeep asked. “I heard but I never used it.”
“The government’s courier service, Rağ Raghavan explained. “A little safer than the normal shipment. You go to the post office to get your letter or parcel or everything registered, and if they lose, they send you a letter that tells you.”
“There is no big loss,” Kuldeep said. “Nowadays, we have courier services that collect mail from our offices, so there’s no stance in line.”
“Nostalgia has a value, Rağ Raghavan said.
“Are people nostalgic about standing in line?” Kuldeep asked.
Raghavan grinned. “You think of the wrong end,” he said. “In the past, people who have been registered will be nostalgic in this regard.” He paused to sip a reminiscent tea, and his gaze turned inside. Orum I remember saying that I would accept the registered letter to my university. A few years later, I took my first appointment letter with a registered task. After starting work, we had to send a lot of articles to the government offices.
My mind was dragged back in time, and when he was young, he lived in a university pension. In those days, there was no direct cash transfer, so we had to be connected to checks, drafts and telegraph money orders or TMOs that were removed a few years ago.
We had three degrees of breakage: all regular, emergency and emergency containing the post office. Regular state included monthly payments: chaos, settles of accounts with tradesmen, replacement of worn shoes and clothes and so on. Parents sent us monthly controls to deal with them. We invested them in the local bank and had to wait for a few weeks for them to clean. For a few days at the beginning of each month, we all called to ask for a registered mail in our Postman’s names, and we were increasingly worried until the check arrived.
The urgency called for demand drafts that can be returned fluid without cleaning. For example, if you lost an expensive textbook and had to change quickly, you asked your parents to send you a draft. This included a house and a response that took something between three and ten days from there. People waiting for the drafts came to the post office towards the middle of the morning, hoping to intervene the postman there and enter the bank next to the bank to collect the money.
Emergency situations called for TMOs and usually lasted less than a day to fruit. Paradoxically, people in real emergencies have never been inadequate because everyone was willing to come in.
In other words, the postman who carried out your registered duty was a financial white knight. The normal postman of our hostel, whom we call Mashji and respected more than some professionals, knew the student groups so well that when he received a letter for one of us, he would tell our friends, so we got the message earlier, not later. I graduated from university in 1981, but Maeshji and his letter bag and envelopes, and the memory of his struggle to pronounce the names of South India all these years later.
I have returned so far. Our house is beaten and the couriers have difficulty in leaving it. Calls delivery agents and requires directions and still disappears. Many of them tell me to give up and to collect my packages from the office – and most of them have grids on the bridge opposite the nearby river in the town, 15 or more kilometers away. Nevertheless, we did not have any problems with writing. The postman knows where we live and delivers it without a fuss. If we go out, he will seek the package to tell you that I can collect it from the nearby post office. So I always tell people who send me materials to avoid couriers, and instead I use a recorded article instead.
When Raghavan touched me to the knee, I left my Reverie. Im I thought you would be left to sleep, ”he said.
“I was drifting,” I said. “Thinking of mail services and how some disappear from our lives.
“I am not,” Raghavan said. “But there will be a difference.”
“What?” I asked.
“He will store his nostalgia with his grandchildren in social media in paintings,” he said. “You and me, we only have words.”
