Silent Exit of the Postman
By: Narayan Kizhumundayur
He once came humming through the lanes, the low whistle of his cycle bell as familiar as the sunlit mornings themselves. The postman, clad in khaki and modesty, carrying a canvas bag swollen with paper dreams, was not merely a government employee.
He was a symbol of something deeper—an emissary of emotions, a custodian of secrets, a quiet keeper of trust in an age that still allowed pauses between words. With his departure, unnoticed by many, the world has lost more than just a profession; it has lost a part of its soul.
There was a romance about him, not the kind that poets necessarily wrote about, but one that lived in the fluttering heart of a teenager waiting for a love letter, in the anxious eyes of a mother expecting news from her son stationed at a border, in the trembling hands of a father receiving a money order from a child earning far away.
Each letter he carried bore not just ink and paper but fragments of lives stitched delicately together across distances. These were not messages—these were vessels of longing, joy, sorrow, reunion, and sometimes heartbreak. The postman never knew the words within, but he bore them with the gravity of someone who understood their weight.
His arrival was an event. Children would run to meet him; elders would lean on doorframes, eyes bright with hope. The sound of his footsteps was the sound of anticipation. Sometimes, he brought the only news a home had heard in weeks. He was the reader for the old, the interpreter for the unlettered, the confidant of the lonely. His cycle carved paths not just on roads, but through the emotional topography of the places he served.
People knew him by name, and he knew theirs—not just names, but connections. He remembered which son was married last year, which daughter went abroad for studies, which family had lost someone recently. His job description never mentioned these, yet he remembered, because his work was not transactional—it was human.
But the world changed. Slowly, quietly, and inexorably. Emails trickled in at first like curious visitors, and then flooded in like a storm. Text messages began to race past carefully written sentences. Then came voice notes, emojis, and video calls.
The once-beloved letter, penned with care and sealed with a sigh, became a relic, a romantic gesture reserved for a few lovers of the old world. And with this shift, the postman’s satchel grew lighter, not only in weight but in meaning. His daily rounds shrank, and so did his relevance.
Yet, his redundancy is not just a consequence of technological evolution. It is the symptom of something more profound—a dwindling of patience, a fraying of the threads that once held community and trust. When letters disappeared, so did the waiting, the longing, the sweet ache of anticipation. In their place came instant messages, quick replies, and a strange emptiness that speed could not fill. In the name of progress, we traded depth for velocity. We connect more, but communicate less. We send messages, but seldom meaning. And in this transformation, the humble postman—who once brought the world to our doorsteps—faded away like the last page of a worn diary.
He was, in many ways, a symbol of trust. When you gave him a letter, you entrusted him with a piece of yourself. He would carry it across towns and hills, through rain and dust, with the unspoken promise that it would reach the right hands. In a world before encryption and tracking numbers, the guarantee was his character.
He delivered not just messages, but dignity. He read letters aloud to widows and laughed with children waiting for birthday cards. He brought books, government forms, parcels of sweets, and letters with creases from being held too tight. He did all this not for applause, but because it was his way of serving a world that still believed in sincerity.
Today, as we scroll endlessly on our screens and type messages with our thumbs, we do not see the quiet moment of the postman folding a letter before slipping it into a door, or the care with which he ensured a money order was handed over to the right person. These small rituals are gone.
What remains is speed, but not soul. And though we call this progress, there is something haunting about the way we no longer wait for someone to arrive, someone who carried words chosen with care, words that came not instantly, but meaningfully.
The postman now survives in nostalgia—captured in black-and-white films, in sepia-toned photographs, in yellowing envelopes tied with string and memory. He is remembered in the stories we tell of times when news arrived slowly but sincerely, when we valued messages not by how fast they came, but by how deeply they meant. In his vanishing, we are reminded that communication was once a ritual, not a reflex. That to write was to think, and to receive was to feel.
His exit was not loud, not declared. It was a slow, dignified walk into the past. No farewells were offered, no headlines written. And yet, in that silence lies a profound truth about who we are becoming. We are forgetting to pause. We are forgetting to trust humans more than machines. We are forgetting the beauty of waiting.
And maybe, just maybe, we should not let that memory go. For though the postman no longer rings the bell, the values he carried—honesty, connection, warmth—are still relevant. They can still light a path in this hurried world, reminding us that somewhere, beneath the buzz of notifications and the blur of scrolling, there remains a human desire to be touched by something real.
Let us remember him—not as a figure of the past, but as a whisper of what we can still be.
(The author is a Thrissur based Accountant and a Freelance writer in English and Malayalam)
