Death of mailman
MINE must be among the last of the generations to have waited eagerly for the mailman to bring us a missive; mostly an interview call, and on rare occasions, an appointment letter. Until the late 1990s, there was no concept of online applications or email appointments. As beat reporters, the first gadget issued to the more important among us was a beeper, a match-sized contraption capable of relaying messages such as ‘call office urgently’ or ‘post-haste’ when they emanated from the subbing desk.
The world of literature and cinema would be that much poorer without the genre centred on a lost mailbag containing letters ranging from confessions of mischief to professions of love. From the personal archive, two stand out. One was an interview letter from a foreign news outlet, received a month later than intended. My editor was a lot more crestfallen than I was; imagine the esteem in which yours truly was held. The second was more amusing: a typed letter in a brown, official envelope, crumpled among the myriad contents of a diplomatic pouch. Its opening was a show-stopper: “The competent authority is pleased to terminate your services with immediate effect… .” However painful the rest of the message, the comic irony of the opening remains an all-time favourite. Laughing my head off, with tears in my eyes, I entered a much senior colleague’s office, waving the letter at him and exhorting him to read just the opening paragraph. Being a member of the deriving-sadistic-pleasure officialdom, he kept puffing at his cigarette and had only this to add: “This is exactly how clemency appeals from death-row convicts are rejected, ie, ‘the competent authority is pleased to reject your mercy plea’.”
Over time, the mailman’s profession lost its standing and charm. In Western imagery, the mailman was portrayed as being chased by a dog over a very jumpable fence. In our part of the world, the dakia (in Urdu) or tapali (in Sindhi), went from being the confidant who not only delivered but sometimes read letters aloud to unlettered addressees to a derided figure suspected of defrauding people out of their money orders and of not delivering Eid cards until after the event to get some Eidi.
Maqbool, our postman in a middle-class Karachi neighbourhood in the 1970s and 1980s, was a respectable man. He always delivered letters, no matter how wrong the address; he waited to see if all was well when delivering telegrams called ‘taar’ (literally meaning wire), for these were usually the bearers of bad news from distant towns. He not only delivered Eid cards on time, but would turn on his heel and leave, lest he be seen as eager for a tip. Long before anything was ever expected to be mailed to our age group, one remembers coming across him during our daily runs to the market, asking “Maqbool bhai, anything for us?”, and he would very politely say “no, nothing today”.
The postman’s profession has lost its charm.
Among all the service groups that one could enter through the competitive civil service exams in the subcontinent, the postal service ranks among the lowest in the eyes of wannabe babus. In fact, the ‘elite’ who pass this exam and join the worthy ranks of customs, excise, or better still, police or the district management group would deride their lesser colleagues as not even worthy of the postal service. With technological advances in the last few decades and changing modes of communication, no other profession has tried as hard to reinvent itself as the postal service around the world. On the heels of fax and cellular phones, when PCs and email gained currency, the mailman faced redundancy in many parts of Europe and America. While institutions such as the postal ballot survive, the ‘cheque-in-the-mail’ ruse has lost currency amid digital payment platforms.
True, technology has done wonders to improve the quality of life, enabling people to study or do business without geographical or physical constraints. But it has also led people to withdraw into their gadgets and isolate themselves socially. During the ongoing heatwave in Europe, the French authorities have given the mailman an additional task: to ask elderly citizens living alone how they are doing with the mercury rising.
A cultural and architectural icon, the dak bungalow is another manifestation of the postal service of yesteryear, albeit not a pleasant one owing to the colonial miasma surrounding the edifice. Its ubiquitous presence in our memory and canon warrants a separate piece later. Among the jokes that never fail to amuse are: an uncle who, basking in female attention at a party, introduces himself as a ‘commissioner’ — as it turns out an oath commissioner. And the only general not dreaming of imposing martial law is the postmaster general.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2026
