Patience, humor, and dogged determination: three qualities required to travel well in India. All three were necessary simply to mail a package. It used to take an entire day for such an endeavor.

Whether I had one package or more to send, the length of time was almost the same. Since it took so long, it seemed better to wait until I had several to mail. First, of course, boxes had to be procured. That might seem like a simple affair, but in the seventies, before India released its massive international trade restrictions, all commodities were highly prized, and almost everything was recycled. Durable boxes were hard to come by, and it took diligence to find just the right ones.

Let’s assume that I began the postal day with the necessary containers already in hand—otherwise, hours might be added onto the morning. The first place to visit with the boxes was the cloth merchant where bolts of strong white cotton were unrolled and examined, the sizes of the containers measured, and the appropriate lengths of cloth purchased and cut. Remember that all transactions in India at that time were accompanied by at least one cup of tea and all the necessary small talk. Things did not happen quickly. I had to locate a tailor, one willing to do such a menial job, and without delay. The cloth was hand-stitched into a wrapping for each box, leaving the top open for later examination. A needle and strong thread were bought, sometimes at a third shop, and taken with me to the post office.

It would have been foolish even to consider mailing a package at a town or small city. The time involved would have been quadrupled, and that package might never reach its destination. I would only mail in large cities. Of course, Indian urban centers are subdivided according to profession, as are most old-world towns. Tailors are in one street, cloth merchants in another. Neither was near my hotel, and both were almost always far from the main post office, which is usually in the business center. Carrying my increasing bundles, I would have to take a bicycle rickshaw to my destination. And until now, the whole process had been relatively easy.

The post office was another matter: a sea of people, all crowding into disorderly lines. Indians learned their love of queuing up from the British, but the demands of the hierarchy and inflammatory natures had altered the concept of the polite, straight queue. Many would stand patiently in line, but the sense of personal distance can be different in India, and people tended to push and jostle one another constantly. Others demanded seniority through a form of entitlement. They believed that they had the right to push directly to the front of the line, shouting for the clerk’s attention. This action may or may not have produced overt resentment from those others who have been standing for hours. Some just chalked it up to karma, others screamed in rage. A post office was rarely a quiet place.

Arriving amid this confusion, I had to first locate the queue for customs forms. This line might be relatively short. Once at the front, I would take five copies of three different forms for each package, and then retire to a dark corner of the building, or perhaps to the steps outside, and painstakingly fill out all the forms. Each was required to be written individually; carbon copies were unacceptable. I wrote and signed a list of all the contents and values, a statement that they were not antiquities, included my passport and visa numbers and their dates of issue and expiry, my address, and that of the destination: fifteen times for each package. Then on to the line for customs examination. That line might well take an hour or more. Remember that India is often hot and muggy. Standing in line, even for a young man in his twenties, was never comfortable. Once reaching the counter, I had to present my passport, open the box for examination to prove that the contents were not restricted for export, show my invoices, and give all the papers for proofing. One of each was kept by the customs official, who assigned a peon to accompany me to the sealer’s queue.

At this point, I had a choice. I could either return to my corner or steps to sew up the cloth, always under the watchful eye of the peon who made sure that I did not alter the contents, or try to juggle them while standing in line, attempting to complete the sewing by the time I reached the sealer. The sole occupation of this invariably aged bureaucrat was to heat red sealing wax over a candle flame and drip it onto all of the sewn edges of each box. He then pressed a brass seal into it at short intervals along the edge to prevent the package from being reopened. Once I paid the sealer for his services, I would tip the peon who could now return to his post. Now that the parcels were sealed, I used a ballpoint pen to laboriously print the destination and return addresses onto the white cotton of one side. For each box, I also had to roll eight of the remaining forms into a single tube, tie several loops of thread around it, and sew it to one edge.

It was now necessary to have the packages weighed. Of course, the clerk who manned the scales had his own long queue which might take an hour or more to wade through. Once reached, this clerk placed each package, one by one, in the left-hand dish of an age-old scale with various bronze metric weights added and subtracted from its counterpart until the needle was precisely centered. Then he counted all the weights and wrote the appropriate figures in ink onto the cotton cloth of each parcel. I could then move to the end of the postage calculator’s line. That clerk would read the weight amount of each and figure out the cost of sending the packages (we would discuss whether they would go by air or sea), and also mark that amount onto the cotton. The next queue was for the stamp vendor who, when paid, would hand out a collection of stamps for each box. Indian stamps never seemed to be in large denominations. Consequently, each box usually required several dozen stamps.

It might appear logical that the process was over at this point, but that conclusion would be based upon the assumption that Indian stamps were manufactured with glue already on them. They were not. It was always necessary to find a piece of scrap paper (often newspaper) and use my fingers to dig a dollop of white paste from the ever-present mound on the nearby counter. Then, precariously balancing packages, remaining forms, stamps, and glue, I would try to find an empty space at a counter (not an easy feat in such a crowded place). Paste smeared with my forefinger onto the back of each stamp allowed me to messily affix it directly to the cotton. Often the stamps covered more than one side. I took one of the remaining contents forms and similarly pasted it to the side opposite the address, difficult on small packages.

Finally, I was ready for my last queue: the canceler. Once reached, this man would take a large round bronze seal, pound it onto a red ink pad, and cancel all the stamps, tossing the package into a bin behind him. I had finished.

In general, it might take me between eight and ten hours to mail a group of packages. As I only had one set of arms, I could only manage between six and eight on any given day. In my first six months in India, I sent sixty-seven packages home: some handicrafts to be given as gifts to family and friends, others the basis of my first collection of Indian art. Because the itinerary of my second trip with Helene was greatly foreshortened, we mailed only thirty-two and shipped the rest in crates by sea from Bombay and Delhi (via Bombay). But on the upcoming third trip, we posted more than ninety.

India has modernized and significantly changed during the past five decades, and mailing packages is far easier. Boxes are readily available and are strong enough to endure rough handling without disintegrating. Cotton covers are no longer necessary. Packages are not sealed with wax, stamps are sold with glue on the back, and only three forms are required for each parcel sent. In most cases, customs inspections are far more manageable. Today I might only take an hour or two to mail a package and find it almost as efficient and reliable to do so in a town as a major city. Sometimes I wonder what happened to the people who filled all those minor jobs: the customs peons, the sealers, and the weighers. Perhaps they have graduated to much more exciting occupations? The Indian bureaucracy is still ingrained, and India still teaches me the lessons of patience, humor, and determination. Nevertheless, I am glad of the changes and, on mailing days, of the many free hours I now have to luxuriate in other activities.

[Pippa Rann Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Transformed by India: A Life, Stephen P. Huyler, Pippa Rann Books, 2024.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.