COUNTER 22 (1989)
The early morning sun was beginning to burn off the dawn mist. The dew had disappeared from the ground. On the street, men cycling by, wore dull brown woollen scarves tied from under the chin into a knot above their heads in order to stay warm, but I was enjoying this relative cool. I was excited by planning to do many things this day, so I was in a buoyant mood. My first task was to undertake the new experience of posting a parcel in India.
The night before had been a scene of celebration at the guest house, as I had procured a cardboard box. The staff seemed envious of this, yet they prepared to join in my good fortune by helping me create a parcel of souvenirs, acquired throughout Gujarat and Rajasthan. Between us we found paper, tape and string. I boldly addressed it with the thick black oil crayon from my case of drawing materials.
Carrying the parcel in my arms, I entered the large, high-ceilinged hall of the GPO. It was an overwhelming grimy space. On one of its green walls, there hung an old map of the world, its large areas of pink, denoting the colonies of the British Empire. Underneath the map lay a line of red, bull-nosed fire buckets, filled with sand.
This huge room was heated by a two-bar electric fire with its twisted and suspect wiring.
I scanned the hall to work out where I should go. The long, polished counter spanned its width; with green metal grilles above, it was divided into 22 separate counters, each of which conducted a different kind of transaction. Counters no.1 and no.22 were appointed for parcel services, so they had no metal grilles. It all felt very ordered.
I made my way to counter no.1. There was no unruly mob waiting there, as there was at some of the counters. The stars were aligned for a quick and easy transaction. Twenty minutes should do it.
The assistant sat there with his feet up on a stool, his woolly scarf tied tightly around his head. He appeared to be staring up at a cobweb. I proudly presented him with my boldly addressed parcel, crossed with string. He looked over. It was only after a while that he stood up and laconically dragged his chappals over the dusty floor. On reaching the counter he slowly and silently inspected all six sides of my parcel. Eventually he made eye contact with me, and rather abruptly said, ‘Weight!’
I replied, ‘OK’.
Seconds passed, then he repeated, ‘Weight!’ in a louder voice.
A little taken aback, I replied, ‘I am waiting’.
This time his yell was impatient, ‘Weight!’.
I tried to equal his tone and yelled back, ‘I am waiting, aren’t I? How am I supposed to wait?’
The assistant was about to give up on this foreigner who was not able to understand a simple instruction, when the foreigner scanned the hall again. He noticed that behind counter no.22 there was an old, handsome, cast iron weighing machine.
‘Ah yes’, I said, ‘You want me to get it weighed?’
He stared at me, his ferret-like body slumped with lassitude, and he said, ‘Counter 22’.
I took my parcel to counter 22 and said curtly to the assistant, ‘Weight!’
He took the parcel from me and weighed it. I felt somehow initiated into the ways of working. He boldly wrote 8.5kg in chalk onto the side of my parcel, and told me to return to counter no.1.
I was finding this amusing as I re-acquainted myself with the dour ferret in the woolly scarf.
He didn’t say anything, as he again carefully inspected the six sides of my parcel. Eventually he muttered, ‘8.5kg’, then intensified his inspection of the side with the written address.
‘Inge-land’, he remarked.
‘Yes, that’s right, 8.5kg to England’, I said with a tone of finality in my voice.
He sat down. In silence he opened a wide drawer behind the counter. Inside was a dog-eared paperback booklet, containing a list of countries. He put on his glasses, which were taped at the hinge with selotape. He looked like he was preparing for a long evening of poker.
Opening the booklet, his lips began to move. He guided his finger down the list of countries. Barely audible, his lips mumbled, ‘Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra ….’. He was painfully slow, and was having difficulty pronouncing some of the names in English.
I let him continue to Belgium and Belize, when I said, with a hint of intolerance in my voice, ‘E, go to E. E for England’. He stopped with his finger on Benin, looked at me for a few seconds through his watery eyes and said nothing. He glanced back down at his booklet, and he continued, ‘Bhutan, Bolivia……’.
I stood back and calmly waited. I took interest again as he reached the letter ‘E’. He struggled to pronounce ‘Ecuador, then Egypt’. He got to Equatorial Guinea when I interrupted him, ‘No, no, you’ve gone too far’. He carefully placed his finger on the booklet again, and looked at me in silence, before continuing, ‘Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland’.
I craned my neck to see over the counter to find that England wasn’t listed, and hurriedly said to him, ‘G, go to G. G for Great Britain’. He ignored my pleas, and I allowed him to do so, as G wasn’t so far from E.
My interest rose again; this time it was when he reached ‘Ghana’, but felt thwarted once more when he proceeded to ‘Greece’.
I felt crestfallen, and slumped over the counter when I realised that the name of my sovereign state was the United Kingdom.
‘Please, please, just go to U, it’s the United Kingdom, UK. Please look now for UK’.
I got the same look, as he continued to scan his dog-eared booklet, ‘Greece, Guatemala, Guinea………’. As we went through ‘Kenya’, ‘Kiribati’ and ‘Korea North’, I began to feel apoplexy claiming my vital organs, when another tourist turned up.
‘Hi, how ya doin’?’ he said.
‘Fine thanks’, I replied. ‘You’ve got to get it weighed at counter 22’, I said, pointing at his parcel.
‘Oh, thanks buddy’. He nodded as he skipped off across the hall.
When he returned with his 5.6kg parcel, he was intrigued to see what our assistant was doing. Our assistant was resuming his muttering, having taken a short break to adjust the taped-up hinge of his glasses, his muttering had only taken him as far as ‘Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland’.
‘Not long now’, I said to the other tourist.
The moment did arrive when he reached ‘United Kingdom’, and he ceremoniously took out a plastic ruler and cross-referred to a box which displayed the price of sending a parcel of between 5kg and 10kg from India to the United Kingdom.
‘One hundred seventeen rupees’, he said.
I took out Rs.120/- in notes and handed it over to him. He looked at me with the usual silence for a few seconds, possibly wondering how I could not know which country I lived in. He pushed the notes across the surface back towards me, as if the counter were a gaming table. ‘Stamps!’, he said.
With a look of incredulity on my face, I echoed, ’Stamps? You mean you want me to go and buy the stamps?’
‘Counter no.7’, he said.
There was chaos at counter no.7. Hoards of predominantly young men fought with hands, knees and fists to get to the upside-down, U-shaped hole in the grille. I took a deep breath and joined the fight.
I could overhear the conversation at counter no.1 as my new tourist friend loudly exclaimed, ‘No, it’s right there, buddy, under the United Kingdom, it’s the next one, United States of America, USA! No, don’t go back, it’s right there, you got it’. The assistant was looking at him silently, and I saw him close his book, and re-open it at the first page. I saw him mouth ‘Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria’. The American glanced over at me, as I was embroiled in the fracas that was the queue for stamps, and perhaps I just imagined a tear roll down his cheek, as he impatiently took up his parcel and left the GPO, with it weighed, but not posted.
Forcing my way to the front of the scrum at counter no.7, I found myself face to face with a very efficient, pragmatic lady, wearing thick glasses and a red saree. She had a hefty book containing full sheets of stamps.
‘One hundred and seventeen rupees please’, I said.
She apologised for the shortage of high denominations, and I left there with a total of 58 stamps, which I handed over to counter no.1 along with my parcel. The ferret of few words had been expecting me. He examined the six surfaces once more. A prolonged, pregnant pause followed. I hoped that he would stick them on, and we could bid our fond farewells, but a new expression of doubt covered his face.
‘Cloth!’ he said to me.
I was dumbfounded, and I paused. I leaned against the counter exhausted, before I managed to reply, ‘Cloth? What do you mean, cloth?’.
‘Cloth!’, he re-iterated.
‘I heard you, but what do you mean?’
‘Cloth!’, he said once more, raising his voice a little higher each time he said the word.
A middle-aged gent, wearing a brown acrylic shirt, was listening in from the queue at counter no.2. He stepped in to explain that my parcel had to be wrapped in cloth.
I wanted to join the American who I imagined was breaking down in tears on the street outside.
The kind gentleman from the adjacent queue explained that it was mandatory, and that I should ask a tailor to stitch a cloth and wrap the parcel before I go through the procedure of posting it.
Reacting a little too quickly, I splurted, ‘I’ve already gone through the bloody procedure, and where the hell am I going to find a tailor?’
Calmly, and with great mirth in his expression, he assured me that it would not be a problem, as there were many tailors on the street, and I could get it done immediately for a mere few rupees. I snorted like a horse and left the hall of the GPO.
On the street outside, the light stung my eyes. The day was getting hot. The gentleman from the adjacent queue had been true to his word, and I soon found a tailor. He was working from his tiny workshop, which opened onto the dusty, litter-strewn street.
He saw me walk by with my parcel, and he called out, ‘Parcel stitching, sir?’. He was a jovial man, wearing a cream kurta and pyjama, and carried a bit of a paunch.
We selected a robust calico, and discussed the importance of a French seam, as it was going all the way to the UK. We agreed a price and he told me that it would be ready at noon.
I occupied myself a couple of blocks away sitting and chatting at a chai stall, and returned to the tailor just before noon. I was in a much better mood. That is, until I noticed that the front of his workshop was shuttered and barred. I looked around, but there was no jovial tailor. I saw a lady sitting in the workshop next door, and I opened my palms, shrugged my shoulders and looked to the sky in a gesture that was clearly understood.
‘Lunch taking’, said the lady.
‘Return?’, I asked.
‘One pm’, came the reply.
Three hours on the clock, and now my parcel wasn’t even addressed, let alone posted.
At 1pm the tailor returned from lunch and told me that my parcel was ready.
Trying not to sound frustrated, I commented that he had said that it would be ready at noon.
‘Yes sir, it was ready at noon, but I go for my lunch at noon’, he said.
‘But your workshop was all locked up at noon, so I couldn’t collect it’, I pointed out.
‘Then I must have taken lunch early, sir’.
I had no strength to continue this conversation. I remained silent, and allowed myself to be charmed by his joviality.
I paid him, took out my oil crayon and re-addressed my parcel, this time to the United Kingdom.
I took it back to counter no.22, where an assistant confirmed that it still weighed 8.5kg.
I feared that I might break out in shingles as I returned to counter no.1. I placed my parcel down, and the ferret rose to his feet, without greeting, or expression. He inspected the six sides once again, and ran his fingers down the seams. He said nothing, but he looked pointedly at the 58 stamps, I had once again placed on the counter. ‘Sticking!’, he said.
‘Yes please’, I replied.
This time a different kind gentleman from the adjacent queue leaned over and pointed to a darkened corner of the hall, and said ’Gluepot sir’.
There was, in this darkened corner, a congealed sticky mess that had consumed a gluepot within, and 20 minutes later I returned to counter no.1 with one of the six sides of my parcel a wet, sticky mess of paper, glue and cloth. Surprisingly, this was acceptable to the ferret, and although he did not go back to his drawer for the booklet, he had one more stinging blow to deliver.
‘Wax!’ he said.
I was very grateful for the eavesdropping from counter no.2, as I looked across to see if anyone could help. Another gentleman explained that the seams of the cloth should have sealing wax over them for security reasons. He informed me that this was the duty of the tailor, and that he had been neglectful.
I returned to the street where the jovial tailor was stitching a lady’s blouse on his foot-pedalled Singer sewing machine.
I called out ‘Wax!’ to him, and he chortled, ‘Yes sir, wax. You must be having wax!’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve had to come back here and …….’, I decided to give up, my life force was spent, and I unwillingly accepted his charms again.
He melted red sealing wax over strategic points on the seams, and with a smile that filled his face and more, handed over the parcel. I took it and thanked him for his service.
As I strolled away, he called out, ‘Sir!’ I turned and looked at him, ‘Twenty rupees’, he said.
I returned to counter no.1. It seemed, apart from one impatient American, that I was the only person in the city posting a parcel that day.
Without expectation, and totally devoid of hope, I handed the mess over to the ferret.
All six sides examined, he took the parcel from me.
I asked him to frank the stamps in front of me, so that they couldn’t be peeled off and re-sold, and his parting words were, ‘Counter 22’.
When I returned to my home in the United Kingdom, after the glue and wax had dried, I thought how beautiful that parcel, and all its markings, looked. I held it to my nose and took a deep breath. I smelled that aroma of sour dust that is India, and I thought of the dour ferret, and I longed to return.