Nearly seven decades ago, MGM, the legendary film studio, came out with a film titled, The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring the heartthrob of millions at that time, the bewitching beauty Lana Turner in the lead role. I was reminded of the film and the title when I read in the newspapers the story of a postman in Kodialbail, a small town in Mangalore, who, if the sequence of events are any indication, never bothered to ring the bell even once at any of the households under his jurisdiction. The story unfolded like this.
The postman obviously intending to minimise his daily workload actually managed to do away with it altogether. He faithfully took delivery of the daily tappal from the post office and delivered every single consignment to just one address, his own.
The cookie finally crumbled when the landlord having allowed the postman to stay on despite the rising arrears of rent found his patience wearing thin, and one fine day, decided to break open the house and throw his tenant’s belongings out. It was then that he stumbled on the cache. Not a junkie’s lifetime supply of narcotics, nor stacks of thousand dollar bills neatly stacked, not even several kilos of gold or diamonds. Strewn all over were inland letters, postcards, Aadhaar cards, appointment letters, love letters, court notices and so on and so forth. At a rough count, there were over four thousand in all and the entire paraphernalia could well tally with the number of letters that he had taken delivery of from the post office where he had been serving for a year-and-a-half.
When last heard, the poor bloke had been suspended for his effort or rather the lack of it and the post office had made alternate arrangements to deliver the mail to the addressees and obviously many of them might have been left wringing their hands in despair piqued no end by the inordinate delay in delivery.
Although in this electronic age modes of communication like postcards, inland letters etc. have all but become obsolete and the telegraph service — once a vital mode of conveying urgent news (mostly relating to someone or the other kicking the bucket) through telegrams especially in the pre-Sam Pitroda and C-Dot days when you had to book trunk calls and wait for an eternity to get through — has been totally dispensed with as it had become unremunerative, the sight of an ubiquitous postman in his livery or nowadays, mostly in mufti is indeed a welcome one.
And considering the fact that the erstwhile UPA government’s flagship scheme, Aadhaar, involved sending crores of cards through post offices, the role of the humble postman became more pronounced and important. Of course, our friend who earned his keep without the sweat of his brow could well be an exception.
And come to think of it, he was not the first sinner in this category. He had an illustrious predecessor in a postman somewhere in England who could well have staked his claim for a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest collection of letters. It was found that in his 30-odd years of service, he had not delivered a single letter, a feat that makes our desi hero’s achievement pale into insignificance.
aravindcv@yahoo.in