At the post office, echoing with the voices of senior citizens, you feel a sense of travelling into lost time
Illustration/Uday Mohite
I land in Delhi after two years. I wonder what is lost in the time I lost, of visiting my other home. The city feels haunted by moments I did not see. I go to the Lodi Road post office, a quaint red and white building, probably for the last time.
I first went there almost 20 years ago with my father who was very keen that I open a PPF account—a desire that housed his anxiety about my dubious career choices, my worryingly uncertain future. The relief of my succumbing to this sensible behaviour was brief. I would always remember I had to put money in it on March 30 and then call my dad to do it, making him “run around at the eleventeenth hour!” as he would say. After my father died, I should really have moved the account to Bombay. But it was one of those meaningless, impractical ways I held on to the memory of him. The result, as my father could have foretold with irritation, was that the account matured past its renewable date.
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At the post office, echoing with the voices of senior citizens, you feel a sense of travelling into lost time. The ability to wait for as long as you must, a relic of a world in which we are not always trying to get to the next thing, always too good for the present moment, the present person.
“My heart is heavy” I texted my friend. “I don’t want to close this account my dad opened.” When I finally reach the counter, the man asks me, “do you really want to close it?” as if he found my text messages and read each one out loud. “If you don’t need the money right now, keep it, let it keep gathering interest.”
I am tempted. For a moment, all my sense of loss—my father’s striped bush shirts, his lectures about savings, his handwriting, his neatness, his love feel like they are deposited into that account. How can I let it go? “Well, I can’t open a new one without closing this,” I say, after a beat. “Then it makes sense,” the man shrugs. “Anyway, you have filled the wrong form.”
Once done, I feel grown up and sensible, not acting on meaningless reasons like emotion. What a terrible feeling.
Later I go for a haircut to an old Chinese salon which is the only place I cut my hair, despite 32 years in Bombay. I find it diminished by the pandemic, the lighting dim, the clientele thin. It would be sensible to find a place in Bombay, I think dully. Surely, the two lost years of the pandemic should have taught me to be more sensible.
I wonder if I should walk over to Khan Market and drink a strawberry and champagne cocktail I shared sometimes with my friend S, who we lost to the virus. But why ask sadness out for sentimental reasons?
I then think. Let it be in its quiet inside place.
At a panel discussion, a woman lectures me to see the positives of the pandemic. Yes, “‘let’s be sensible and similar curses” as the poet Yehuda Amichai wrote. In the last month of a year of loss, the art of losing should not be hard to master. Yet it is.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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