Rain, Dab and Post Office Skirmishes

Rain is becoming a part of daily living--a welcome relief, even if only in the moment of cooler breezes and freshly smelling growth, since it's often followed by the same thick heat that came before the rain, which in itself promises more rain and more relieved moments.

Walking back from the post office as the late morning leaps into a fierce downpour, my heart is still thumping from the somehow necessary low-level skirmishes with post-office bureaucrats to get various letters started on their journeys. I don't have any fotos of the office, but I can try to describe it: there are 8 windows with cryptic signs that display various abbreviations and acronyms. These windows are rather capriciously occupied and it's entirely within the realm of reality that you will walk up to a window just at the moment when the person decides to have a cha (Bangla for chai) break or just go sit in the back room and watch you watch them watch you...and onward and so forth.

What makes the post office particularly exciting is that every step of the posting process takes places at different windows. First you convince the Auntie at the "weighing" window to weigh your letter even though she really really really would rather you go somewhere else. The Auntie scribbles the cost of postage on your envelope and sends you on your way. Then you go to the "stamps" window which may or may not at that moment have the stamps you need which means you must negotiate with another Auntie to go into the back room and get said necessary stamps. And THEN, you approach the "final stretch" window where another Auntie wields the all-important seal that announces the entrance of your letter into the wide world, and you watch as the iron fist holding the stamp hovers for what feels like hours over your wee little epistle, and as it finally comes down with a satisfying thwack you breathe for what feels like the first time in days.

(At least I can brandish a semblance of Bengali now, which though far from perfect, still gives me the advantage of shocking and surprising and occasionally stunning into silence my bureaucratic adversaries.)

So back to the rain... though it's coming down with increasing intensity, I'm determined to have fresh green coconut water (dab) to reward my thumping heart with something nourishing. So I stand under an awning in the silent company of a few men who let me be. The dabwalla hacks the top off the coconut with his long curved knife, puts two straws in (just in case I suppose). I sip the sweetly salted liquid, watch the rain change from torrent to almost gone to torrent again. Old men walk patiently down the street, their dhotis or dress shirts soaked through. A few young men run by, thin handkerchiefs tied around their heads. One men wears a plastic shower cap. But my heart takes on the rhythm of the old men, returns to a patient measured pace.

Paz y Amor,
J&J