Confessions of a stamp murderer

It is an unremarkable day in an unremarkable remote village of India. On the main road, cycles trill shrilly and overbalance into pedestrians. A cow squatting on the footpath is placidly chewing the lungi of the newspaperman established on the wayside. A radio teetering on the edge of his table blares out classical music between bursts of static. With every knock it receives, it emits a fresh outburst of indignant squawking.

Adding to the cacophony, hawkers exalt the virtues of their wares with indiscernible yet hypnotic lyric, punctuating the sounds of the hot afternoon with their soprano cries.

Every plant is parched and coated with dirt and grime. A similar layer of grime is building up inside the collar of a small boy standing at a shop. Oblivious, his whole being is concentrated on a man's hands, as they carefully pick up a stamp, apply glue to its back and press it down firmly with a steady thump-thump into an album. In a few minutes, the man smiles at the boy who grins and, clutching the album, runs home to gloat over his treasure.

26 January 1951. It's been a year since the country has been declared a secular sovereign socialist democratic republic with its own written constitution. The little boy has grown into a strapping young man with a son of his own. The baby is brought up in a free environment and encouraged to follow his dreams.

The stamp album never leaves his side. It now contains not only postage stamps but also revenue stamps, local utility stamps, old currency notes, crumbling letters and first day covers. Protective to the extreme, the lad constantly fusses over it, adding, changing and lecturing his siblings on the ways of distant lands — lands that he has visited only in his soaring imagination on the wings of fancy, via his stamps.

15 August 1981. Television has made its foray into the land and old perceptions are being dispelled everywhere. New opportunities in new frontiers are available and science has hauled mankind to the brink of the Information Age. Into such an India I am born, the apple of my father's eye. I take to reading at an early age and churn out juvenile stories with childish gusto.