You’ve Got Mooli.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Red, brown, purple, and many shades of green. Rajesh’s vegetable cart is full of colours. The red is of course the red of tomato. But there is another red present, sighted not on the veggie cart, but beside it. This is the red of the letterbox.

Letterboxes used to be intimately linked to the daily life of an earlier generation, in an era when people used pen and paper to write what we today say in e-mails and WhatsApps. The handwritten pieces of paper would be folded and inserted inside an envelope, the address jotted down on the envelope, and a stamp pasted towards the lifafa’s top right (its sticky back often licked wet with the tongue). Then, the letter author would walk to the nearest letterbox and drop the envelope into the letterbox’s dark crater.

Decades have passed since most of us have touched a letterbox. But the letterboxes continue to be littered across the city. One letterbox stands by Rajesh’s cart, here in Ghaziabad’s Sector 17. The stall is right outside the local post office. (The post office interiors too invoke an earlier era, when everything was done on paper. Great bundles of white sheets are piled atop cupboards; chairs are marooned atop hillocks of empty mail sacks.)

This accidental coupling of veggie cart and letterbox inevitably conjures up the scene of a citizen coming over to drop a handwritten letter into the box, using the opportunity to buy bhindi or baingan from Rajesh. “That never happens,” he says, smiling. The letterbox is lucky, he informs, if it receives more than a single customer during the day. Rajesh himself has never dropped a letter into it. He arrived in the city from zila Mainpuri and founded his stall 15 years ago. “I never have to send letters to my village, for my wife and children live with me.”

Rajesh resides in nearby Prahlad Garhi. Every morning at 5, he walks to Ghazipur Subzi Mandi to get fresh vegetables, which he brings to his stall on the “battery rickshaw.” He opens for business at 7, and goes back home at 10 in the night. As for the letterbox, it is unlocked (and emptied of correspondences if any) by the postman daily at 4:30 pm, he says.

This afternoon, the letterbox is lying locked. The sight recalls the 1998 romcom You’ve Got Mail, the worldwide blockbuster that first signposted the end of letter-writing culture and the start of the e-mail civilisation. Though no radish is to be spotted in the Ghaziabad veggie cart, one is tempted to distort the Hollywood movie title to You’ve Got Mooli.

“Letters!,” exclaims Rajesh, shaking his head, as he shyly stands beside the letterbox to pose for a portrait.