Delhiwale: Old forgotten inboxes

Walking through a neighbourhood where old letterboxes are still installed on gates.

The door looks weathered; so does the letterbox on it. The box is broken, there’s nothing inside. The next door on the street has a similarly dilapidated box. So does the door ahead. The lane is like a museum of letterboxes. Almost every house has one, each exuding the mood of a bhule bisre geet, an old forgotten song.

The worn out state of most of these boxes suggests the weakening of letter writing culture.

Old Delhi is speedily altering. Familiar landmarks are giving way to new. Ramshackle mansions are being replaced by multi-storey housing. Local pizza outlets are popping up within a spitting distance of kebab stalls. Much is disappearing, but the Walled City’s old letterboxes are hanging on. If no longer as a utility, then as an overlooked exhibit.

This is one of the areas in the Capital where residences are still equipped with such long-time metallic or wooden contraptions. But most are cobwebbed and dust-covered, as if untouched for years. One street to view them is in Kucha Chalan, which isn’t far from the former site of Daryaganj’s post office. (It’s been replaced by a car showroom.)

Bearing their respective addresses, the little letterboxes here might have gone out of use, but they vividly evoke the days when people would handwrite letters to friends and patiently wait for handwritten replies, dropped into the box weeks later by the neighbourhood dakiya (postman) on bicycle. In houses with letterboxes, there would be the thrill of unlocking the little lock to collect the day’s catch. “In my time, trunk (phone) calls to relatives outside the city were expensive, so we would write letters,” recalls an elderly woman whose house is fitted with an inactive letterbox. She says that the box wasn’t freely accessible to everyone in her family—a revered elder would first scan all the letters for any “objectionable” correspondence.

The worn out state of most of these boxes suggests the weakening of letter writing culture. That’s no proof of the death of paper mail. Many houses across the city, including modern apartment complexes, have letterboxes in some form or the other, stuffed daily with printed materials ranging from insurance documents and pizza delivery flyers to invoices, and perhaps even an occasional letter or postcard (what’s that?!)

One house in Kucha Chalan stands out flamboyantly: atop a rusting metal letterbox is nailed its gleaming red-and-white wooden adaptation. The letterbox revival suddenly seems less hopeless.