Independent Goa Observer

WISH YOU WERE HERE

Only when his letter box is full does Nimesh feel alive. Manohar Shetty weaves a tale around Nimesh when the post goes on strike

NIMESH UNLOCKED the door and glanced at the blank floor before stepping into the flat. He lifted the coir doormat. Nothing there: only dust rolled into black shreds. For the third successsive day, Nimesh had not received a letter. He felt uneasy.

Moving into the bedroom, he saw some of the old ones scattered, colourfully, over a table. He picked up one of his favourites: a postcard with a view of Mt. Fujiyama from Suzie. Behind, with a green felt pen, Suzie had scrawled: ‘Wish you were here.’ Then, from an envelope bearing a US postage stamp, Nimesh drew out a polaroid photograph and looked at it again. The picture showed a young girl in a bikini, her uplifted blonde hair dripping through her fingers, her breasts thrust forward. He turned the photograph over: ‘To my Brown Indian, Don’t I look sexy? Liz.’ Liz’s writing was round and florid. Nimesh smiled at the thought: Dizzy Miss Lizzy from Florid Florida. He picked up another envelope: Helvetia. Urs on his annual skiing trip ... And then another, and another ... Magyar Posta, Polska, Espana, Posta Romana, Deutsche Bundespost. He held them in his hand, arrayed like a Japanese fan. Nimesh thought: they give me all the fresh air I need. He shuffled them together and snapped a rubberband around them. He dragged out a steel trunk from under his bed and unlocked it. The letters packed inside bounced gently up and fell back. He added the new pile in. He would have to buy another trunk.

Nimesh turned off the light and settled down to sleep. Three days without a letter. Only once before, last year, had something similar occurred. But that was because of two consecutive public holidays followed by a Sunday. Besides, there had been the thrill of anticipating the windfall of letters on Monday. He tried to dismiss the situation now as the result of a chance factor, but he felt uneasy. He slept poorly.

At the office, the next day, Nimesh heard the news: a postal strike. He smothered a spasm of panic as he read the item on the front page of ‘The Times of India’. Headlined: ‘Bombay’s Leterless Days’, it read:

The postal strike entered the third day today as more than 5,000 postmen, clerks and sorters went on a peaceful protest march to the Secretariat. The postmen, it will be recalled, have demanded an increase in salary and the provision of bicycles to ease their workload.

Mounting piles of mailbags can be seen at the GPO. The mailbags containing wedding invitations, salary and pension cheques, appointment letters, notes from loved ones from near and far, are all waiting to reach their destinations.

The Chief Postmaster General said that the demands were unfeasible. A 50‑year‑old postman, however, told this reporter that he had to walk almost five kilometres every day. He said that a bicycle was a necessity. The postal employees have reiterated that the strike will continue indefinitely till their demands are met. No immediate solution to the problem appears to be in sight.

Nimesh dropped the newspaper. His hands shook. No immediate solution! He wandered slowly back to his chair. His boss snapped at him for not paying attention on the job.

After work, Nimesh caught the local train. He fought his way to a corner seat. ‘The Evening News’ flapped on his lap. The report on the strike was only a repetition of ‘The Times’, with a few more details. At the station, midway, the train halted. Nimesh brooded over his predicament, watching another stationary train next to the window. Then, he experienced a hollow, drifting sensation: his train seemed to be lurching forward. He looked towards the door: his train had not moved at all. It was the one opposite that had rolled on. Nimesh shrugged off the vaguely disturbing illusion. He turned to the crossword puzzle. The train began to move again.

Walking home, he stopped by the post office. Red flags hung limply. A group of postmen in day‑to‑day clothes raised their fists and shouted slogans. A few constables lounged on the verandah near four or five bulging mailbags. Fleetingly, hope swelled in Nimesh.

Then he realised the futility of it. He trudged past a parked police van

He felt that the slogans were directed at him.

Nimesh pushed open the door to his house, and glanced involuntarily at the empty floor. He slumped into a chair. ‘No immediate solution’, again the line coiled round him. What would happen if the strike went on and on? The thought struck him horribly. He suppressed another bout of panic and then sat on the floor and pulled at the steel trunk. Again the letters fluffed up. Seventy penfriends from fifty‑three different countries. It had taken him more than two years to build, what he called, his communication network. For the past three years hardly a single working day had gone by without him receiving a letter. Sometimes he would get four or five. The record so far had been ten. That day had been memorable. Ten letters from all the continents had flown to him, a lone man in an obscure flat in an obscure bylane in Bombay.

He had felt privileged to be able to share in the frivolity of Liz as well as in the melancholy notes, in broken English, of a young musician in Moscow. And to think he had recently managed one from Cairo. His eye caught the viewcard from Egypt: a stark, contorted cactus plant, like a piece of modern sculpture, in the middle of the desert. Then he picked up a postcard from Afghanistan‑a photograph of an Ibex. How closely it resembled a mullah! Nimesh thought. He shuddered and put the letters away. He wanted the fresh postmark, the unopened envelope.

That night Nimesh barely slept. He had often imagined himself as a dot on a map which had lines radiating to and from it like the routes drawn in airline advertisements. Now he saw‑ only drifting, wavering lines, slowly forming themselves into a net closing over him.

Nimesh disliked newspapers; they were not like the letters he received. But he had to read them to follow the strike. It could not go on, he knew. But the news, the following five days, was disheartening with headlines like ‘Let Them Walk!’ says Postmaster General’ and ‘Postmen Adamant’. He could not concentrate on the job. He applied for sick leave.

Sick leave is right, Nimesh thought, as he lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. A fly settled on his slack gummy lips. The fan whirred hypnotically as the afternoon slid past. Occasionally, he roused himself and walked desultorily round the two rooms of his flat, catching sight of his face as he passed the small mirror on the wall. His eyes, he saw, were red‑rimmed, and there were dark, tired hues under them. The effect, Nimesh thought, was not entirely displeasing. At night, when the silence became overwhelming, he wrote another letter to one of his penfriends. Once, in a state of feverish agitation, his hand racing in the glow of the table‑lamp, he wrote seven in a row.

‘Dear Klaus’, he wrote to one of his first penfriends, the only one he had actually met. ‘Greetings once again to you from India. How lucky you are that all the basic services run like clockwork in Germany. In our elephantine nation, nothing seems to work. Everything is in a state of collapse. Corruption is now second nature with our politicians and leaders. Now even the postal department has gone on strike, even though these essential services are not allowed to do so by law. But nobody cares. The newspapers report that the Communications minister is out on a foreign jaunt and nothing can be done to resolve the strike till he returns. Imagine! An entire nation held to ransom while a minister holidays abroad.

I have not received any letter for the past ten days. I feel helpless and utterly alone. But I think of all those who cannot receive their pension cheques or appointment letters for precious jobs, and the vast millions in the villages waiting for a postcard from their near and dear ones, and I feel ashamed of my pain. There’s constant tension in our daily lives like high voltage wires. It’s shocking, anything can snap at any time like dead branches. Even the postage stamps I buy get torn because the perforations are not done properly. Even the glue in the post‑office is watered down. Can you imagine a nation which cannot even make proper postage stamps? I’m sorry to complain like this but I have not been sleeping or eating properly the past week. It is not a raw feeling of pain that 1 feel, like a cut finger. It is a dark cloud growing endlessly in your head, following you everywhere like a guilty conscience. But 1 don’t have a conscience, that is why I can survive in this unconscionable country. Now 1 can only believe in miracles, because there’s nothing, nothing else to believe in...’

In five days’ time twenty‑six letters lay neatly piled on the table. The last one, to a penfriend in Helsinki, he had finished the night before. He had slept fitfully after that and had woken up late with a headache and a nauseous taste in his mouth. He picked up the bundle of envelopes and postcards and looked at them helplessly: he could not buy stamps, he could not even post them. Nimesh felt anger and a foggy fear. He dropped the letters back on the table and paced the room, muttering to himself.

A desperate way out suddenly came to mind. He rummaged through the pile of letters, till he found what he wanted: a letter from Aberdeen, Scotland, from Loma Aitken. She had always written warm and friendly letters to Nimesh. She was a florist and her letterhead carried the logo of her shop, ‘Pretty Petals’, with the address and telephone number under it. Nimesh had never made an international call ‑ he couldn’t afford it and the very idea of phoning a foreign penfriend, someone he had never met before, seemed to him almost preposterous. But the situation had gone out of hand. He quickly wrote down the number, dressed and went out into the street.

At a public call booth, he hesitated. The adjoining office was filled with people. The board above read ‘Fastrack Communications ‑ ISD and STD Calls’.

Nimesh felt the few currency notes in his pocket and then entered the office. He noticed a brown‑haired foreigner talking over the phone. Through the glass door of the booth he also noticed the meter reading of the call flickering rapidly up like the seconds of a digital clock. Nimesh sweated and wiped his thin, bony hands on his sticky, terrycotton trousers. From a cluttered table he picked up the telephone directory. It felt like a block of wood. He sat in a rusty chair and turned to the ISD code pages. ‘Aberdeen: 0044‑224’. The sheer numbers confused him. The brown‑haired foreigner left the booth and moved towards the cash counter. Nimesh, in a few steps, was soon inside the booth. He wiped his brow and carefully dialled the digits he had written down. He heard a long beep and then a faraway silence.

‘Hello, hello. Is that Loma Aitken?’ Nimesh blurted out.

Suddenly, a cheery female voice, loud and clipped, spoke up at the other end: ‘Hello, I’m not in ritt now. Leave your message after the beep and I’ll get rrit baak to you.’

Nimesh looked around in confusion, his hands clammy. ‘Hello’, he said weakly, and then stared blankly at the receiver and at the ticking red meter swallowing up the seconds as if it were timing some frenzied relay race. Hurriedly, he put back the receiver, pushed opened the door, and walked in a daze to the smoked‑glass cash counter.

Out in the blazing street again, he walked, head bowed, unconsciously in the direction of the post office. Midway, he suddenly stood very still. He felt strange, his palms very cold and bloodless. His head seemed vacant, airy, floating weightlessly over him. He saw the scene before him, silent, and frozen as in a sharply‑focussed photograph:

A man raising his hand for a taxi, the wheels of the taxi turning towards the pavement, the churning, glinting, wheels of a bicycle, spinning in the reverse direction, going past the slowing wheels of the taxi, the hands of the giant clock on a tower stationary on XII, a newspaper boy’s rising hand suspended between a jubilant cry and a man putting his hand in his pocket and a man raising his hand for a taxi.

Nimesh put one foot forward; his knee creaked like an old man’s. He swivelled round; the street burst into life. Sweat ran down his face as he walked and ran on the pavement, till he reached his building. He scrambled up the stairs to his flat and collapsed on the doormat. His heart thrummed. His eyeballs felt as hard as marbles. The ceiling swayed under his gaze. He breathed heavily.

After a while the breathing slackened. Nimesh wiped the sweat from his brow. He lay by the threshold, the coir doormat under his head like a pillow. The hours throbbed away soundlessly.

The following day, when the slot in his door opened in a blank smile, and a shower of envelopes, postcards, and aerogrammes dribbled over his face, his wide, staring eyes slowly came to life.

Manohar Shetty has published three books of poems, including ‘Domestic Creatures’ (OUP, N. Delhi). He is the editor of ‘Ferry Crossing‑Short Stories from Goa’ (Penguin India)

Courtesy: Govapuri

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