The Post Office

For decades our local Bangalore post office remained unchanged, growing more and more decrepit. By 2017 the whitewash had long since faded, there were holes in the roof, and the lighting inside was provided by a few faint bulbs. Most people had moved on to email and Facebook, and important documents were now sent by more reliable courier services. Online stores in India do not use the postal service. The postal workers must have had less and less to keep them occupied, but they carried on with their routines unchanged.

This post office was a part of my history. As a teenager, I had a close friend in Hyderabad: phone calls were too expensive, and in those pre-email days we kept in touch via fat weekly envelopes of multipage letters. I took a correspondence course in high school, and would mail packages of problem sets to be checked by some remote person and mailed back. My college entrance exam applications were posted here. My parents received telegrams about the passing of elderly relatives. Birthday cards, condolence letters, and wedding invitations plodded through the dusty, dark shelves of the post office. The very occasional package came, with a lump of red sealing wax attached at the intersections of the string holding it all together.

One day in 2015, I went to the post office to buy some stamps. The building was dark, a quite normal state of affairs. The door was ajar, but there was only one employee inside.

“Strike, madam”, he said, discouragingly. Apparently postal employees had gone on strike nationwide.

“But the door is open?”

“Just started”, he said with a sweet smile.

Other post offices got renovated, but not this one. In 2016 my friend stood in front of the building and said ‘Where is the post office?’ — it was hard to believe that the beat-up building behind the piles of rubble was actually functioning.

And then, all of a sudden, the postal service gave them some money and they got a spanking new whitewashed look.

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In India, as in the UK, you can save money in a post office account, and my father had set up several such accounts at various times. We decided to close an old joint account — mine and his — so when I was next in town, we went together to the post office. The clerk looked up the account on his computer, and then sadly shook his head. ‘Write a letter’, he said.

‘What? Why?’, demanded my father.

“The account is dormant. So first you have to activate it then close it.”

‘Can you activate it now?’

‘No, you have to write a letter. ‘

“Ok, give me a sheet of paper. What shall I write?”

Luckily, at that moment Ashwini came in to the office. My father goes to the post office often enough that he has a buddy behind the counter, the capable Ashwini. She took command of the situation immediately. She grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote the following:

Respected Sir,

Sub: Revival of my a/c 123456789

As per the above subject I wish to revive my a/c 123456789 for further transaction.

Kindly do the needful.

I signed it. My father signed it. Then there was a form, which again Ashwini filled out on our behalf. I signed in two places. My father signed in one place. A third piece of paper appeared, and we signed again.

“2-3 days”, said Ashwini, tersely.

“and then?” I asked hopefully.

“Then the account will be active. I will phone you, and you can come and close it. Only one person needed”.

Phew!

On the way home I asked my father how much money was in the account.

“Rs 500”, he said.

My 89-year-old father believes that completing a project is more important than optimization of effort.

Alas, two days later Ashwini called to say that our application had been rejected. Attached was a note:

Resubmit after supply of omission.

1) KYC is not updated

2) Scanning photograph is not affixed.

3) Revised AOF is not available

4) ID proof is not available

KYC turned out to be a form called Know Your Customer that required all the same information provided in the earlier forms — name, address, and suchlike, requiring several signatures. The ‘scanning photograph’ required three (!) copies of my photograph. Ashwini, bless her, took care of revising the AOF, whatever that might be. And a copy of my PAN card was attached as an ID proof, self-attested (i.e. signed by me as verification that it is a real copy.)

So far I have signed 14 times. We await the fate of our Rs 500.