Anything associated with the word snail must have an inherent unhurriedness about them. Letters, the kind written on a piece of paper or an inland (for those born in the last 20 years: yes, they exist), now take longer than before to be even written. They slouch about the sender’s desk for months on end, before they are stamped and sent away. Lucky are those who receive the snail mail – cover, stamp and all – for quite a few of the slackers get lost on the way.
But let’s not harass the poor fellows anymore. It is a week to celebrate them, with World Post Day falling on October 9, and National Post Day, on October 10. Ideal time to recount a story about a lost snail mail that led to the discovery of an office called Returned Letters Office (RLO) or Dead Letter Office (DLO), and further discovery of how it no longer exists in Kerala, where the story unfolded.
In late June, writer of children’s books and humour columns Khyrunnisa A sent a snail mail to a friend of many years. Only, having last sent a letter two years before, Khyrunnisa did not realise that her friend’s address had changed. The letter came promptly to the friend’s old address in Thiruvananthapuram a day after it was sent, but an unusually alert security guard told the postman that the person at the address had moved away. The postman flipped the envelope to check for the sender’s address, which, as luck would have it, Khyrunnisa forgot to add. If it was there, the postal department would have sent it back to her.
The procedure in such cases is simple — send the letter to the Returned Letters Office. This is the tricky part, for when the friend went in search of her letter, hardly anyone at the regional post office knew where the RLO was. Many made unhelpful guesses, and at the end of tracking all the wrong places, the friend arrived at the office of the Post Master General in Thiruvananthapuram. Yes, there used to be an RLO there, but not since September 2023.
If the existence of the RLO itself was news, then the closing down of it was the bitter aftertaste, not just for Khyrunnisa’s friend, but for everyone who might hold dear memories of handwritten letters, and the idea of an office that stored the lost mail. The RLO would diligently keep the lost mail for a year for the seekers to come find their letters of love and gifts from afar. But in late 2023, as part of the Union government’s rationalisation process, RLOs were merged to zones and only a handful exist in the whole country now. Kerala’s lost mail is now sent to the RLO in Chennai.
RLOs are not as dreary a place as the acronym may suggest. This is where love letters, rejected or lost, find a haven. Messages and tokens of love including wristwatches for actors have come to the RLO after they refused to accept it. Props used for black magic, like your standard box of eggs, reach the pile. But along with these, priceless items including gold and silver jewellery and idols, reach the RLO doorstep. After waiting for a year for someone to come claim them with proof, the officials auction off the valuable items. A notice is sent out, through newspaper ads and social media posts, about the date of auction. There was a move to digitise the process through the Metal Scrap Trade Corporation Ltd, a government company for e-commerce, but this has not materialised, and the auction is still manually done.
The last auction at the Thiruvananthapuram office was held in January 2024. This year, they will auction off whatever is left in the office, for one last time, and then that’s that. No more lost letters and stories for the Kerala team. Perhaps the office in Chennai may soften seeing the unreceived gifts and words of love (and very likely, hate), and find a way to send them back home.