Remembering Dakiyawala

Indian Postal Department --- When was the last time you had heard about it, in its real sense. Yes, I am talking about the mails which we used to get in our homes during the days when Tim Berners Lee (The supposed inventor of the revolution called "World Wide Web) was not famous and we were not having flora and fauna of technological inventories like mobile phones and Electronic Mails around us.

I still have some vivid memories of the Khakhi clad - Postman, which we had back to my growing-up place in Dhanbad, Jharkhand. He would come in a cycle and his job was to bring us mail, money orders, telegrams, New Year greeting cards and you know what was the reason I remembered him the most. I remember him because he was my sister, for he used to tie Rakhis to all brothers who didn't had sisters(Of course "Bhaiya mere Rakhee ke bandhan ko Nibhana" wala song happened to be a mismatch in our case). Well, that seemed funny but was quite a remarkable thing to happen to me especially on that day. This continued until I had some real-sisters to tie Rakhis to me.

I wanted you all to just spend a few moments for the surprise element which our Postman used to carry in his baggage. The moment he opened our house-gates, there was this feeling of excitement as to whose mail it would be. We would then see the Sender's address and then quickly open the mail to read its contents. All of us would sit down and listen to the reader, either my Papa or Mummy, for most of the times, it was written in Malayalam. And it took some time for me to learn to read and write my language.

And probably the busiest traffic month for the Postman would be in December, when he would be bringing flurry of New Year Cards to our homes. He used to bring good news, sometimes bad, but nevertheless the stature, the spontaneity his legend("Legend" word came here 'cus I recently saw "I Am Legend" - Will Smith) carried in our lives would remain intact in my memories forever for reasons galore.