Stacks of letters are piled up on tables, and some are scattered on the frayed armchairs in the room on the first floor of the Speed Post head office in Delhi’s Connaught Place. Old gunny bags lie on the floor, bulging with parcels. There are pots of glue, staplers, reams of thread, stamps and notepads everywhere. Amid this clutter and under the whir of old ceiling fans sits Indrawati, India’s first ‘lady postman’, as she is accustomed to being called.
After over three decades of service, the feisty 60-year-old retired yesterday. She threw a party for her colleagues a few days ago, and on her last working day, the postal department arranged a special farewell.
Still going strong
But I see no signs of retirement in Indrawati’s demeanour. And I can’t help but notice how youthful she looks.
“It is because I walk six to eight kilometres each day to deliver letters door-to-door. Sometimes, I have had to walk up to the 9th floor of apartment buildings that have no elevators. This keeps me fit and glowing,” she giggles.
In the 1980s, it wasn’t easy being a postwoman. Indrawati would don her khaki salwar-kameez and take the early-morning train from Rohtak in Haryana, where she lived then, to Gol Dak Khana in Connaught Place, and return home after sunset. Her day involved sorting letters and delivering them on bicycle. After a stomach operation in 1988, she began to deliver letters on foot. Sometimes she was reluctant to wear the uniform, a drab affair compared to the bright clothes she was used to wearing back home. Lugging that heavy bag on her shoulders, many people initially mistook her for a thief or a beggar, she recalls. But slowly things changed, and several families began to see her as one of their own. “Those who couldn’t read would ask me to read out their personal letters. It was a great feeling to be trusted by people,” Indrawati says.
Lately, things have been far easier for her. She travels shorter distances — from Rohini (in north Delhi) to Connaught Place — and there are fewer letters to sort and deliver.
Now, every child in the neighbourhoods around Connaught Place knows Indrawati by name. People who visit the post office, or those who know Indrawati as Delhi’s first postwoman, request selfies with her. And when she visits Bangla Sahib Gurudwara, barely 100 metres from Gol Dak Khana, people offer her prasad . “It feels incredible when they say ‘ Gudiya chitthi laai hai (The little one has brought letters)’,” she says.
Growing up in a village in Delhi’s outskirts, where girls were not allowed to continue studies after puberty, Indrawati was married at 12 to an ex-serviceman. “My husband was possessive and conservative and did not allow me to read and write,” she says. Luckily, her father-in-law and brother-in-law encouraged her to resume studies at 17. Indrawati passed Class X at the age of 20. Her brother-in-law got her the recruitment forms for post-office vacancies, and she bagged the job of post-woman.
Digital distance
Now a mother of two and grandmother of four, Indrawati says she has made sure that her daughter and daughter-in-law are educated. “They are both post-graduates,” she says with pride.
And what’s after retirement? Indrawati takes a deep breath. “I will join yoga classes, go swimming with my grandchildren.”
If she has any regrets, it is the advent of the Internet, WhatsApp and the mobile phone. “They may have helped with communication but they have created a huge distance between hearts,” she says.
She remembers the love letters she used to read out loud to women whose husbands worked in other towns. “People would use every inch of the inland letter to pour their hearts out; what they ate, what they planned to cook. That their their cow had delivered a calf. What their neighbour’s son had scored in the board exam. Stories from the wedding of a relative’s daughter, the last Panchayat election, everything was in the letters.” And today? “Even a wedding invitation is just two lines long!”
