How the World Came to Me [15]

In some corner of the world there was a country called Magyar, but I did not know where. It frustrated me. Like all countries it issued postage stamps. I had a few of them, they bore the name Magyar Posta. Sanu had given them to me. His father worked in the town post-office and he often gave me stamps of countries I could not locate on the pages of the atlas. I possessed stamps of a country called NOYTA CCCP. I never managed to trace it on a map of the world. I sometimes pored over a map of Europe or Africa trying to locate these lands. I never found them. Do they exist at all, I wondered.

It was Shiv who first began to collect stamps in our class. We were in the seventh standard then. In our tiny town not too many received mail from abroad. So, acquiring exotic stamps was not easy. But Shiv persisted and built a fair collection within months. I think, he took the trouble to befriend Padam Sharma, the town postman. Often, he paid a visit to the town post-office after school to enquire the health of Padam bhaiya. His collection grew steadily. Shiv, Dibakar and I were fast friends and sat on the same bench. Inspired by Shiv, Dibakar and I too decided to be philatelists. I did not have a stamp album and did not know where to buy one. I ripped pages of my mathematics notebook and sewed them together to create a stamp album. I was not very satisfied with it, but it served the purpose. The first few stamps of my collection were donated by Shiv. If I remember correctly, he gave a few to Dibakar too.

Within days I was a passionate philatelist. Unlike Shiv, who had a large collection of European stamps, I mostly had Indian and Nepalese ones. The latter were colourful as butterflies and much prettier than our own. My Nepali friends, whose kin wrote to them from their homeland, supplied me with those. However, no matter how pretty they were, Nepalese stamps, being from a country next door, were not foreign enough for me. They carried images of mythological heroes I was all too familiar with, or of sacred hills, temples and sadhus. None of these motifs carried the enchantment of strangeness. Naturally, I yearned to make more exotic acquisitions for my collection. 

There lived a boy in Shiv’s neighbourhood who was rumoured to have the largest collection of stamps in the town. Shiv’s younger brother was friends with him. Shiv knew that my collection is not growing as fast as I would want it too. One day, he told me in school that the lad is ready to trade stamps for comics. I jumped at the idea. The boy, I fail to remember his name, was a year junior to us. We decided to meet in the playground after school. Shiv was to accompany me to mediate the negotiations. I have always been a very bad bargainer. When we met, and the negotiations began, he turned out to be hard-nosed businessman. A stamp for a comic book was his demand. I was outraged and tried to put some reason in his head. As a comic book is so much bigger than a stamp physically, I should get at least half a dozen stamps for one, I argued. A valid enough argument it was, both Shiv and I thought, but he was adamant. I gave in as I was desperate for some exotic specimens. The next day was a Sunday and he promised to come over to my house in the afternoon with the stamps. I barely slept in the night and woke up very early to an overcast Sunday. By noon it was raining cats and dogs. I was fearful lest he not turn up. But turn up he did around three in the afternoon. He had on him four tiny United Kingdom stamps, all alike, badly soaked. United Kingdom has always issued the drabbest stamps, bearing nothing but the Queen’s profile and the denomination. I was speechless with disappointment. I had expected some colourful Czech or Rumanian issues. But it was too late now and I had to keep my part of the bargain. He selected four of the most exciting comics from my collection and left. 

The disappointment was indeed bitter and I was morose for the rest of the day. Baba noticed my muted spirits and I told him what had happened. I think he saw the injustice of it all and promised to have a word with Padam Sharma when he will come to deliver the office mail. I could not have asked for more. A couple of days later, upon returning from office, Baba handed me a stamp from Oman. Padam Sharma had sent it for little brother. I was beside myself with joy. Soon, it became a frequent occurrence. Padam Sharma, if he happened to have any, passed on to father a foreign stamp or two. Baba gave them to me in the evening. My collection was growing at last. But I was still not satisfied. No collector ever is. I had a fantasy, a particularly wild one. I wished to discover a trove of stamps somewhere in our backyard. One day the fantasy came true, just like that. By then I had moved on to the eighth standard. The winters had set in, the half yearly examination had just ended. Every year during the winters we grew some vegetables in our backyard. That year too we had planted some beans, cabbages and potatoes. One day, late in the afternoon, I was taking a stroll amid the cabbages when I discovered that the earth beneath my feet is strewn with stamps. They had apparently originated in the strangest of lands, some bore the name Magyar Posta, some NOYTA CCCP, a few were from some country called Deutsche, some others from Dai Nippon. It was all for real, they all lay beneath my feet waiting to be picked up. That day I knew that joy numbs too, too much of it. I was numbed to the extent that I could begin sticking them in my ersatz album only next morning. But whence had they come? As it turned out, Sanu had had them for quite some time. Postage stamps held no special charm for him as his father worked with the Postal Department. One day he decided to get rid of, what were for him, these useless bits of paper and dumped them all in his backyard. Some gust of wind must have blown them into ours. From that day on, till the day I left home, Sanu fed my collection along with Padam Sharma. He also did what Padam Sharma could not. He helped me plan trips to the countries whose stamps I possessed, especially the ones I could not trace on the map. I do not know if I will ever actually get to make these trips, though I have them all planned for so many years now. I have even discovered on the map the countries I could not find then. Today I know that Magyar is Hungary and NOYTA CCCP is Union of Soviet Socialist Republics abbreviated in Cyrillic. But in those days, when I wondered on my own, or with Sanu, what lands these are, their stamps carried a greater enchantment. Knowing dulls the world.