The problem of ends - 1

He took the letter from his father and started walking towards the post office. That big cylindrical thing wearing a black cap with a gentle expression of "Please come hither" on its face, eyes bowed down in courtesy and partially hidden in the shadow of the black cap, a square mouth in the middle wide open, body painted in kumkum red, standing just outside the walls of the post office always amused him as a kid. He would wonder how the letter reached the person whose name was written on the envelope. And as he went closer to the red box, he saw the hidden hollow eyes lift their eyelids up and greet him. He simply loved dropping letters into the postbox. Sometimes, he just put his hands in and tried to reach into where he dropped his letters, deep. He knew what lay inside was mystery and that his fingers were trying to reach the skies, of another world, where his uncle lived. Afterall the letter was to reach his uncle. A nice, comforting thought, probably like 'Alice In Wonderland' that he watched on every Sunday. He loved Alice and the rabbit that carried a clock, the mushroom and the shape of its underneath and all the green of the woods. "How can my uncle ever live in such a small box?", he asked himself. But he knew things were not what they looked like, something that he forgot though as he grew up, but knew it well as a kid, before his teachers and textbooks told him that a molecule of water is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

"The box that I am in must be really wonderful", he thought, when he heard his father shout from a distance, "Have you finished with dropping the letter into the postbox?". 'Alice' was in her wonderland for half-an-hour a week and he would be glued to the TV set for the few years when it was telecast. Slowly he started liking the Science and Maths courses in his school. And in school he was told by his teacher about how the postal system worked. He was convinced about the duties of a postman and of the kumkum red postbox. Nothing was a wonder anymore.


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