Darjeeling Mail

We've been lazily making our way around Darjeeling for the last week, and it's been great, for the most part. We're still really enjoying the fact that you can walk down the street without acquiring an orbiting cloud of touts and salesmen. For the most part, it's a great low-stress place to spend a few days.

And then there's the post office.

We picked up a bunch of souveniers on our second day here, and decided to mail them home before we had to lug them around between cities, so we headed down to ship them off. We'd heard it's important to leave lots of time to ship things, but "How hard could it really be?" we thought to ourselves. Little did we know... Here is a visualization of the process of mailing a parcel through the Indian mail system:


The first sign that it might be an ordeal was when we walked in the door and saw that the sign marking the "Speed Post" queue was covered in cobwebs. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. Not a good sign. Then we had to line up to have our parcels, uh... tailored. The Indian post office requires that all international parcels be sewn in linen.

To make this possible, there's a guy who sits in the corner of the post office at a tiny wood table, with a needle, some thread, and a big pile of linen cloth. For a fee of about a dollar per package, he will unpack all your things, rearrange them and wrap them in twine, and then provide a fine bespoke suit for your souveniers.



After it's been all sewn up, and you think you're ready to finally start actually mailing your package, he busts out the sealing wax.

Wax?


Yep, wax. Your package is then subjected to no fewer than two dozen wax seals along the sewn edges of its fine linen suit. At this point, I was pretty sure our parcels would make their way to Canada on the back of a camel, or in the hold of a galleon, or something.

Here's Mallory clutching her package after about an hour and a half of sewing and sealing.



Finally, once your package is completely sealed to the satisfaction of the Post Master, you get to actually line up and send it. Unfortunately, there's only one guy in the post office who does this, and he takes frequent half-hour breaks, without notice. When he does return, he moves with all the blazing speed of a glacier, even pausing to laboriously roll up his sleeves before getting down to the rough and dirty business of affixing labels and taking money. Mal sat in line for the better part of an hour before finally sending hers off.

Total time spent to ship two packages and 3 books: 3.5 hours.

This goes some distance towards explaining why we're spending so much time in India. You can't do anything spontaneously here. Shipping parcels is basically an entire day's worth of activities. Ditto buying train tickets. The whole country operates on its own logic and unhurried rhythm which, for the most part, is cool. Just not when it comes to mailing a package.