The Fading Story - A Journey Through Vanishing Pages

As my birthday approaches, I feel a strange feeling, the type of feeling where the mind fills up with the realization that in this journey of more than four and a half decades, I have seen the world change so much. It will not be an overstatement if I say that the Generation X has lived through it all – and there is more on the cards in the years to come! 

And come September 2025, the familiar red post-box will be history. 

There was a time when the postman was almost family. Every afternoon, we would see his familiar figure walking down the lane, a sight that brought a mixture of emotions. My mother would pause her knitting, I would imagine what he might deliver, and my siblings would call out, “sithi aahise” (“letter has come”). Was it a letter from my cousin in Jorhat? A money order from my uncle? Maybe a postcard from a friend traveling in the hills? 

The postman, sunburnt and smiling, carried a canvas bag which was filled with mundane news, vital news, good news, bad news and ‘in-between’ news. The appointment letter for the dream job, the selection letter in preferred colleges, the much-awaited copies of magazines like Misha, Xofura, Reader’s Digest, etc. all came by post. The postman didn’t just deliver letters; he delivered anticipation.

I think of the postcards the most, those wonderful rectangles of joy. A cousin once sent me one from Shimla, where she studied, with beautiful scenery which had tall trees and a lake that shone like a mirror. It arrived about a month late, after she had come home for her winter break, but I still carried it to school to show off. 

Then there were the inland letters. Those neatly folded blue sheets had just enough space to pour out homesickness, gossip, and secrets. My cousins and friends wrote to me regularly. Letters arrived from my ancestral home in Lahoal, Dibrugarh, with dried marigold or rose petals and wood apple (bel) leaves pressed inside - blessings from a puja held there which we could not attend. 

And then there were the pen - friends. We found them through newspaper or magazine’s “Pen Pals Wanted” page. One wrote in deep red ink on coloured stationery, telling me about local traditions, while another regaled me with her dreams of dancing, and her love for George Michael. I remember replying with tales of monsoon rains, school punishments, and Bihu celebrations. We never met, but for many years we were a part of each other’s worlds. 

Not all letters were joyful. Telegram day was tense. It usually meant something serious. I remember one - “GRANDFATHER EXPIRED STOP COME IMMEDIATELY STOP”. Telegrams were swift and final, the way grief sometimes is. 

And yet, all of it felt human, so deeply, achingly human. 

The post office was never just a place. It was a theater of emotions. I remember standing in queue outside our local post office, smelling the ink and dust in the air, holding tightly onto a registered post envelope. I would watch the clerk stamp it with that satisfying thump, sealing a piece of our life into its journey. 

Then slowly, almost without us being aware, the world shifted. The telegram service shut down on 14th of July 2013. There was no farewell ceremony or any significant national pause. It was just a quiet disappearance. Fax machines, once marvels that printed paper across distances, stopped screeching. Registered post became rare, replaced by scanned copies and e-signatures. Inland letters were quietly phased out too. Faster and efficient courier services transformed letter and parcel delivery into silent systems without any soul. Now, a parcel arrives without any knock; I barely look down at the predictable text message on my smartphone: “Delivered”. There is no anticipation, no familiarity as the cardboard box lies on my doorstep. 

Gen alpha (and beta, theta, gamma, etc.) will never know the joy of recognizing someone’s handwriting before even opening the letter. They will never know the suspense of tearing open an envelope from a friend or the way a fold in the paper could carry the imprints of a loved one’s hand. 

Sometimes, I take out an old box from the back of my cupboard which is full of yellowing letters, stamps from foreign lands, doodles in margins, a smudge from a teacup from an aunt’s letter, a pressed marigold from my uncle. And trust me, each word still breathes. 

The postman still comes, but now he is in a rush. A barcode beeps, a package changes hands, and he's gone before you can say thank you. But my heart remembers. It remembers every fold, every smudge, every word written not to impress but to connect, written not with flowery language assisted by AI but jotted down with feelings and thoughts which defined relationships. 

The memory of our postal world is now buried deep down but some of us still long for the human touch of ink on paper, and for the times which we had taken for granted in the bygone days.