Badminton, Bison, Deer and the Postmaster
I recently came across a black-and-white photograph and gazed at it intently. I was captivated by it. The article accompanying the photograph noted:
“The field hockey matches during the Summer Olympics of 1936 in Berlin saw a total attendance of 184,103, and 157,531 tickets were sold. The Indian team scored 38 goals, while only one goal was scored against them. British India were the gold medallists.”
My attention was drawn to an Indian man clad in a dhoti, with a whistle in his mouth, looking at a stopwatch in his hand. To say I was thrilled would be an understatement. The sight of a dhoti-clad Indian on the field during the hockey Olympics ninety years ago felt surreal. Was he the coach or a referee?
While enjoying this experience, I was also reading copious notes left by my late father, written almost seventy years ago, after his retirement from service. From among the notes tumbled out a sepia-toned photograph of a Morse sounder with a Morse key beside it. It was from around the same period as the Summer Olympics — around 1935.
My father, R. V. Subramanian, was a Post and Telegraph Master posted at the Aruvankadu Sub Post Office, located within the Cordite Factory established by the British for the manufacture of explosives. Telegram services operated twenty-four hours a day even in those days, so he was provided residential accommodation where he stayed with his wife and children.
A hundred years ago, Aruvankadu was malaria-infested, and anyone posted there usually sought transfer to other offices within weeks of joining. My father braved the situation and stayed there with his family for five years. As a result, he later received postings in combined Post and Telegraph offices, as a Postmaster in single-handed offices, and also in offices with larger staff.
The Cordite Factory at Aruvankadu was located in the Nilgiri mountain range, over 7,000 feet above mean sea level. The factory employees were all British — managers, foremen, and shop-floor workers — and they all lived within the factory campus. The Postmaster, though an Indian, lived there with his family and was included as part of that community.
Telegrams were the only form of instant communication for those living abroad and for others stationed across India during those days.
Our interactions with the other residents of the campus were largely limited to courteous greetings when we met. Some British ladies, however, took a greater interest and interacted warmly with the Indian family, especially the children.
My father was tall and handsome, with a fair complexion. He had long hair, which he tied into a kudumi, a knot behind his head. He was a good badminton player and played left-handed. He was a regular at the badminton court on the campus, arriving to play after the factory siren signaled the end of a shift.
The court was indoors, located within the recreation hall, with high teak rafters and a wooden floor. My father played wearing a white shirt, dhoti, and canvas shoes. His forehand shot was particularly dangerous. In our nearby home, my mother could hear the sound of the shuttle being smashed by the left-hander, often followed by loud applause and appreciation.
He was welcomed as an accomplished player and earned the respect of others for his sportsmanship. There was camaraderie on the court, but clear red lines remained outside it. There was formal politeness on the court but rigid social boundaries away from it. Amenities such as clubs, social gatherings, dancing, and many other activities remained off limits for native Indians.
That was British India.
Weekends were marked by hunting outings for the elite British managers. They hunted deer, birds, and occasionally bison in the forests. During the five years at Aruvankadu, the players shared some of the spoils of their hunting expeditions with my father as a gesture of friendship and regard for a fellow badminton player.
We still have a bison horn which my father mounted on a wooden block and hung on the wall. He was also gifted deer antlers — perhaps four or five of them — similarly mounted on wooden blocks.
While all this fascinated me, my greatest joy was inside the office itself.
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Postal articles arrived safely at the Post and Telegraph Office in a large red box marked Royal Mail, mounted on top of a bus. The office had a wall clock with Roman numerals, a notice board displaying postal rates for postcards and envelopes, an oil lamp or Petromax, and a delivery register for obtaining signatures or thumb impressions for registered articles.
The smell of molten wax used for sealing official postal bags before dispatch was overpowering. Prominent in the office was an open almirah with racks where letters and other postal articles were sorted and kept according to their destinations before dispatch.
Then there was the liveried postman (Thapaalkaran in Tamil), wearing a khaki shirt with brass buttons, shorts ending just above the knee, and a bright postal-red cap. His calves, from ankle to knee, were wrapped in broad canvas puttees, and he carried a canvas mailbag over his shoulder.
He wore hobnailed boots that made a distinctive sound on the granite roads as he walked. It is a sight I still remember vividly and can recreate perfectly in my mind.
He carried a three-foot-long stick with a couple of tinkling bells tied to it. As he walked through the thick undergrowth to deliver postal articles to distant places, the bells rang softly, serving as protection against wild animals.
In the evenings, the postman would return to the post office to report the day’s activities to the Postmaster and hand over any undelivered articles for safe custody until the next day.
My greatest joy, however, lay in watching and listening to the dit-dah-dit sounds of the Morse sounder. It had a hollow horizontal brass rod at the top that clicked back and forth while receiving messages, or while the Telegraph Master operated the Morse key to send messages — silent codes that a trained Telegraph Master could decipher and write down on pale pink sheets bearing Government emblems.
The seamless synchronization of ear, brain, and hand required to transcribe the messages measured the true skill of a Telegraph Master.
Picture him sitting at the table with a sharpened pencil in hand, head slightly bent, listening to the dit-dah-dit sounds from the sounder while the pencil moved steadily over the telegram paper, converting coded sounds into letters and words. At times he would tap the key in response, perhaps seeking confirmation from the sender.
Some messages ran to five or six lines, while others stretched to ten or twenty.
After the stream of messages ended, the sounds would sometimes continue. My father would relax in his chair and tap the key again. The sounder would respond with a different rhythm of dit-dah-dit, making him chuckle or laugh aloud. Perhaps he was chatting with the Telegraph Master at the other end — on departmental matters, social exchanges, or personal conversations — all through coded signals.
I watched carefully and memorized those sounds.
Once I tried operating the key myself. Suddenly the sounder responded as the hollow rod began its dit-dah-dit, startling me so much that I ran away.
The sounds continued until my father walked in and attended to the sounder. He sensed that I had touched the key and called me. I tiptoed in, dreading a scolding.
Instead, he surprised me. He held my finger, guided it to the key, and tapped it gently.
The sounder responded.
Father laughed aloud and smiled at me.
I looked at him sheepishly.
Later, as I delved into history, I learned about Morse code, invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in the 1830s and publicly demonstrated on May 24, 1844. Morse, together with physicist Joseph Henry and mechanical engineer Alfred Vail, assigned dot-and-dash lengths according to letter frequency.
Today the Morse sounder has fallen silent, telegrams have vanished, and even the postman’s tinkling bells belong to another age. The hunting parties have disappeared into history, and the men who lived and worked in that distant world have all passed on. Yet some sounds and images never leave us. The dhoti-clad figure on the Olympic field, my father striding to the badminton court, the rhythmic dit-dah-dit of the Morse sounder, and the laughter that followed my frightened attempt at touching the telegraph key still remain vivid in my mind.
