It’s no good to think outside the letter box
RAMU died. He might have lived had the ambulance got to him in time. Precious minutes were lost as the paramedics searched in the dark for his house number. Radha, the shebeen queen, eventually directed them to the baby blue semi-detached cottage with the chopped mango tree diagonally opposite the red airtime container.
If you grew up, like I did, in Chatsworth’s Bangladesh market district you would recognise road number and house number. Ramu’s house number and letter box disappeared sometime during the night of Diwali 1982. The corner boys had loaded it with fireworks for a laugh. Since then the postman has left letters under a round rock at his gate post.
The postman has to work out the address by counting in twos from four doors away. That house belongs to the Lutchman twins. They keep a clear house number on their gate for fear of the pizza delivery being eaten at the wrong address.
Numbers are a throwback to apartheid control. Our home was House 51 on Road 320 in Unit 3 in Chatsworth. If the police wanted you, they knew exactly where to find you. There was no such thing as an individual personality if you were black under apartheid.
Nowadays it’s not quite Wisteria Lane but we have names like Florence Nightingale and Fleet Street. Nobody I know uses the names. We still describe ourselves as being from the twos or the sevens.
Our home had a clear number on the letterbox. It was once painted with a template my father cut from a piece of cardboard. That was after the Unit 10 clinic matron in the tight, crisp uniform, shiny purple epaulettes and delicious plump ankles stuffed into government-issue laced brown shoes threw a tantrum when she couldn’t find Lenny Boy’s house number to administer the missed measles jab.
There are mountains of books that glorify the letterbox. Short story writer, MJ Cope, published Funny Australian Letterboxes which shows off wacky postboxes from Down Under. Caroline Bird has written beautiful poems in Looking Through Letterboxes. Talking about the broken heart she waxes lyrical, “Your perfect pulsing peach, in scarlett syrup… ”
The Letter Box: An Enduring Story of Love captures Mark and Diane Button’s special memories in letters to each other and their children. The catchiest cover for me is The Letterbox Cat by Paula Green and illustrated by Myles Lawford. Its poems have a great deal of word play and are about subjects as diverse as animals and the weather.
The voluptuous matron pleaded for civic pride by having a number in front of the house. Ramu’s wife still weeps that the pizza delivery gets to the house faster than the ambulance.
Find Higgins on Facebook as The Bookseller of Bangladesh and at the Nelson Mandela Chatsworth Youth Centre today.