The man who came bearing letters

Rameshwor Bhaiya was a mailman and a chowkidar rolled into one. He was stationed at Southfield Loreto College in Darjeeling for many many years, until he retired.

I learned the other day from a WhatsApp group that he recently passed away at a hospital in Siliguri after battling throat cancer for a long time. I had forgotten all about him until I saw the message. 

Rameshwor Bhaiya was a petite, agile man, always taking mails to the post office and fetching them back. He was always busy, walking with brisk, soft steps, sometimes stopping in the lunchroom for a glass of water, the last one sitting down to eat because the mail had to be done in the first hour. 

For his physical stature, I cannot recall how he managed his guard work, but he must have been good at that too, because he kept some 500 girls safe everyday.

Rameshwor Bhaiya always wore his hair oiled and combed back with a side parting, neatly. His postal bag slung over his shoulder, the strap falling across his chest was bulky on some days and some days it would be shriveled up and swinging in the air with the lack of weight. 

He wore gray or khaki sweaters mostly and a jacket the same tint. His trousers were in the same shades too, and once in a while, he would spot a colourful shirt -- there was a maroon one with a fading collar. The V of one of his V-neck sweaters had come undone and looked like a Y with a short tail instead and I don’t remember that he ever fixed it.

I do not even remember his full name. But we all understood from a way of understanding caste and religion in South Asia that he was a Hindu, North Indian man who had moved to Darjeeling for work. We never understood where his family was because he lived on campus.

The Southfield building was known to have once been the summer palace of a Maharaja of Burdwan, and by then had become Rameshwor Bhaiya’s home. He lived in a small room on the ground floor of the building, close to the lift. Sometimes, he would point at the lift and explain how the pulley worked. It had to be pulled by men to move the lift users up and down the two-storey durbar. But as chowkidar, Rameshwor Bhaiya was the sole nighttime occupant of that house.

In the morning, he woke up to the nuisance of monkeys from the Mahakal temple right above Southfield. And the morning would get noisier as the cleaners came in and then the girls and the teacher would start to trickle in, first slowly and then in quick steps and in full numbers as the bell for the first class went off.

My roommate Meenu and I were sincere letter writers. We wrote to parents, to friends, to admirers sometimes. Sometimes, to boys we crushed on. (I mean, I did.) Meenu was always more careful about how she put her feelings out there. But she was the one always doing couriers home. Her mother would send her parathas and achar and ladoo by courier, all the way from Phuentsholing, Bhutan, our midnight snack. So, Meenu maintained a cordial relationship with Rameshwor Bhaiya.

Our hostel was in Springfield and we were only allowed outings on weekends, which meant mails had to often wait a whole week until Saturday. On Sundays we couldn’t mail. That was when Rameshwor Bhaiya would come to our rescue. If we needed to send a mail to the post office or courier something on weekdays, we would give it to him and he would make sure it was done. For us, the Indian postal service’s efficiency thrived on Rameshwor Bhaiya’s existence.

When we returned to hostel life from our holidays, some of us would bring little gifts to the staff. I used to bring pustakari from Nepal for Rameshwor Bhaiya. He said once that it hurt his mouth to suck on them but he still enjoyed it. He was more of a connoisseur of paan, but he appreciated the gesture.

The campus was always bustling with staff, but when I think of Rameshwor Bhaiya letters instantly come to mind. There was the post office and the smell of mail and the feeling of rippling open an envelope and thrusting the fingers into it to reveal its content to the self. 

Once or twice, I had surprise letters from a secret admirer and I was worried they would be discovered. No, having a boyfriend was not encouraged. In fact, we were often pre-emtively reminded of the student who went on a walk to the mall road with her boyfriend and was gang-raped by strangers, an incident Late Peter J Karthak records in one of his novels.

So, we led sheltered lives. Mama’s girls and Daddy’s girls, all huddled together in classrooms, heads buried in textbooks, but our minds wondering who to borrow the next romance novel from. Cloistered, free of the world’s strings, we bubbled with hope for all kinds of things. Mostly, for what our future as women in the real world would be like.

And in his own little way, Rameshwor Bhaiya made lives possible for us because he brought us letters, documents, exam results, notices from the University of West Bengal.

“Is there a letter for me, Rameshwor Bahiya?” Sometimes he would joke and say no even if there was one. Usually there was no mail for me at Southfield. But there was always Rameshwor Bhaiya with his postal bag -- the bag of hope.

Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.