Only a few years back, when I was meandering back home overland from Nepal, I had never heard of e-mail. Nobody I knew had. There were no internet cafes along the road to keep in touch with. I simply wrote my letters and sent them off. Most arrived. Eventually.
For my part, I was receiving post at American Express offices along the way. Amex kept letters longer than post restantes, and I was never sure when I would be arriving somewhere.
The anticipation of arriving into a town or city where I had arranged to pick up mail usually kept me awake the night before. The wild excitement of going straight to the Amex office on arrival at the station to collect post was of a particular kind that I'll never know again, now that we all are on-line and Asia is as full of internet cafes as everywhere else. To me, nothing can ever match the delight of a thick envelope bearing familiar handwriting, and covered with stamps.
Taj Mahal
My correspondents did not fail me. Every Amex yielded post. My record was the 18 fat letters that were waiting in Agra, in India. I took a rickshaw back to my hotel and spent an entire day on the roof, reading and rereading the precious letters, looking up now and then to watch the Taj Mahal shimmer in and out of sight in the dusty afternoon.
That Christmas, I was in Goa - a dreadful place which I disliked instantly on arrival, and to which I had come only because I had decided on it some time before as the next drop for my post. I arrived in Panaji via Bombay, after a two-day - or three-day? - train journey from Calcutta, and headed straight for Amex. It was Christmas week, and I was expecting all my correspondents to be waiting for me at the other side of the counter. I had already planned to save the letters for Christmas Day, for consumption under a palm tree on the beach with a few beers.
To say that I was disappointed when one miserable postcard was eventually produced, would to be a little understated. I was gutted. The Amex staff searched high and low, but nothing else appeared to join the lonely postcard cowering on the counter. They looked through all the post - tons of it, waiting there for travellers luckier than myself - to see if anything had been misfiled under another surname, but not a letter yielded itself up. In the end, they even let me behind the counter to search myself, since I was so convinced that letters were lurking somewhere, but I had no more luck than they had.
Christmas letters
That was my Christmas post, and no number of return visits to Panaji Amex that week turned up anything else. The mail from Europe was on some sort of go-slow, and that was that. In the end, I gave up, found some friends, lay on the beach with them and the beers, and sent my miserable postcard sailing into the horizon as a paper boat. It was months before the backlog of the Christmas letters caught up with me. A few were forwarded to Delhi, others to Columbo, still others to Islamabad.
It was March when I picked up letters in Delhi, among them one only two weeks old from my closest friend, Selina Guinness. In it, she wondered why I hadn't remarked on the packet she had sent to Goa with her Christmas letter, and asked if I had ever received it. As I read on, she revealed what had been in the parcel.
It being Christmas, and I was in need of a little taste of home, she had posted a side of smoked salmon. "I was going to send brown bread and a lemon too, but thought they might go off," she added pragmatically at the end. "Did it not arrive?"
Large package
It was days before I stopped laughing at the thought of the long-lost flying fish, and months until I reached Istanbul, for the last Amex drop. Among the post was a letter from Selina. It began:
This morning I woke up to a loud knock on the door. The postman had a large package wrapped in a plastic bag for me. He had it at arm's length. "It smells a bit unusual," he said, passing the pen for me to sign. "Do you know what's in it?"
One look at its smeared ad- dress and familiar scrawl was enough for me. "Yes," said I. "Smoked salmon."
The postman was impressed. "It seems," he said, in a tone reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, "to have been to India."
"Yes, yes," said I faintly. "I sent it there myself."
"Ahhh," said the postman, "I think it has passed its sell-by date."
Well, they do say that the salmon always comes home to die. . .