Stamp of Deceit

by NINAD JOG

"You can't have those stamps," snapped my mother. "Give them to me!"

"But I've given Ninad stamps in exchange," Shishir protested.

My mother asked to see the stamps my friend had given me. She took one look at them and told me to give them back to Shishir. She took back the stamps I had given Shishir and kept them on the dresser, out of my reach. "Now it's time to go home," she told Shishir. "It's Ninad's bedtime."

My friend took his stamps and left. He didn't have far to go; he lived in the flat next door.

I could scarcely believe what had happened. I burst into tears and started wailing. How rude of my mother to summarily undo the elaborate trade that I had completed just minutes earlier! What was she thinking when she deprived me of the dozen little treasures? Didn't she have any faith in me?

Wasn't it obvious to my mother that I had got the better end of the deal? I had given my friend ten stamps in exchange for a dozen. Yet my mother had added insult to injury by confiscating the ten stamps that should have been rightfully mine once my friend returned them.

I couldn't stop crying. Perhaps the fact that I had a tiring day and it was nearing my bedtime had something to do with it, for I was only six years old.

My grandfather came into the living room and asked my mother why I was crying. My mother told him how the next-door neighbor had tried to dupe me by giving me a dozen small and widely available Indian stamps in exchange for ten rare stamps of the Isle of Man. She said Shishir could trick me because he was a couple of years elder to me.

My mother told my grandfather that my father had sent me the large Isle of Man stamps from the Middle East, where he worked for the government of Bahrain at the time. One of his co-workers, an Englishman named Boyd Shaw, had given them to him.

My grandfather praised my mother for nipping the stamp trade in the bud. I let out another wail. Who would have thought my grandfather would support my mother? I had fully expected him to support me. Adults were illogical when you least expected them to be, and were all too prone to ganging up on kids.

I was one unhappy puppy that night. My mother consoled me as she put me to bed. She promised me I would get better stamps someday. The chapter was closed. I did not exchange stamps with Shishir ever again.

***

"You have such an extensive collection!" said Prateek as he admired my collection of a thousand-odd stamps. "You have stamps of many countries that I don't have."

"But your collection is bigger than his," Prateek's father pointed out to his son.

I beamed nonetheless. I wasn't used to strangers admiring my stamp collection. Few of my friends collected stamps, and the ones who did didn't seem to be anywhere near as interested in them as I was.

Prateek's father knew my father; I don't know how. Perhaps they were ex-colleagues or perhaps they were childhood friends. At any rate, Prateek's father and his family had come from New Delhi to Mumbai and were paying us a visit.

While I was a couple of years shy of entering my teens, Prateek was a couple of years shy of exiting them. I don't remember how Prateek and his father looked, but I believe they were fair-complexioned and handsome.

I do remember Prateek was quite charming, for I fell for his charm. I agreed to give him a couple dozen of my duplicate stamps in exchange for what he promised would be dozens of stamps. My mother didn't like the idea, but she kept quiet in the face of my father's hearty endorsement.

"I'll mail you all the stamps right after I get back to Delhi," Prateek promised. His father said he would make sure his son would keep good on his promise.

But the stamps never arrived. I don't think they got lost in the mail, for my father did follow up with Prateek's father a couple of times. He said his son hadn't sent them yet; he would send them soon.

I didn't cry over it. Not only was I older, but the disappointment I felt when something I had been looking forward to failed to materialize was nowhere near as acute as the pain I felt when the stamps that I had newly acquired were snatched out of my hands.

***

I was five when I started collecting stamps. I remember the exact date, for I wrote it down in my diary. I was bored at home one afternoon when the postman dropped off the mail. I rushed to the front door and picked up the mail. I was intrigued to see a two-paise, purple-colored Indian stamp of a Gnat jet aircraft on one of the letters. I gave my mother the mail and asked her what the small picture was. She told me it was a stamp, and asked me if I wanted to save it.

I found it fascinating that stamps were so similar to each other in having serrated edges, yet were so different in shape and size and color. I soon learned that stamps came from different countries, whatever that meant. Apart from the Indian stamps that we got from the mail delivered to our home, my father got stamps of different countries from his office for me.

I first learned of Iraq when my father brought me a tiny Iraqi stamp. I was in first grade, and old enough to know that the letter Q had to be followed by the letter U. I lost no time in pointing it out to my parents.

"Write a letter to the Iraqi government when you grow up!" my mother advised me.

Almost forty years later, the country's spelling remains unchanged. Maybe I should have taken my mother's advice after all. I must admit I have ignored my mother's advice on many occasions, but seldom have the consequences been as profound.

***

As I grew older, stamps became my window to the outside world. In a world without the World-Wide-Web, in a country with a single government-run TV channel, in a home without a TV and in a land with a paucity of color-printed foreign books and magazines, the stamps I collected were the diplomats from faraway lands that had honored me by deigning to take up residence in my home.

Stamps were a link to the outside world in yet another way. I was reasonably sure I would never get a chance to leave Indian shores, for it was a given that smart people were the only ones who could go abroad. No one from my family apart from my father had gone abroad, and I didn't think I was anywhere near as smart as him.

Even if I couldn't visit a foreign country, at least I could hold on to a stamp that had originated in one. Holding a stamp was like holding a piece of moon rock. I figured that my friends who didn't collect stamps weren't as lucky as me.

***

Over the years, naiveté started getting elbowed aside by savviness when it came to trading stamps with my friends. Gone was the need for my mother to supervise every trade, and gone was my annoyance on the rare occasions when she vetoed them.

I learned to trade Indian stamps for Indian ones, rare stamps for rare ones, and a stamp of a particular shape for a stamp of a similar shape. I also learned to ask for two rectangular stamps in exchange for a triangular one.

But not all tricks of the trade were learned ones; there was at least one that was devised. I rubbed an unlit candle on a few duplicate stamps until the wax transferred to the stamps. "Plastic-coated stamp!" I would tell my friends when we met to exchange stamps. "You have to give me two stamps in exchange for one plastic-coated stamp."

My friends would look skeptically at the stamp. Never had they come across plastic-coated stamps, they would tell me. I would shrug and say I hadn't either, until my father had got them with his office mail. They could take them or leave them.

Some of my friends would hold the stamp under a bright light and look for imperfections. But there were none, for I had made sure the wax coating formed a uniform sheen.

***

I remember the day when my neighbor Shiv accosted me in the compound of the building in Mumbai that we lived in. "This stamp isn't plastic-coated at all!" he cried. "Look, the coating is peeling off!" he said as he scratched the wax off with his thumbnail from the circular stamp of Singapore. "It looks and smells like wax to me," he added.

I was a deer caught in the headlights. I was at a loss for words. Never had any of my other friends caught me red-handed. Not that I had tricked more than three or four at the most, on no more than one occasion each. There's only so far you can go with plastic-coated stamps. I'm sure I wouldn't have thought twice about pulling a fast one on several other people, if only I knew others who collected stamps.

I mumbled something incoherently to Shiv. I told him I didn't know why the coating was coming off. But Shiv was in no mood to back down. He made it clear that I had to return all the three stamps he had given me, and he would return me the Singapore stamp. A logic that one seemed impeccable - one extra stamp in exchange for the circular stamp and another extra stamp for the plastic-coatedness - had been scraped off before my very eyes.

I must have agreed to Shiv's demand. I don't quite remember, for memory has a knack for failing when you get caught. I could not have possibly disagreed, for the scrawny teenager in me was no match for the larger and stronger Shiv.

A quarter century has passed before I've found the nerve to wax eloquent about the plastic coating. Some of our best-kept secrets aren't necessarily about intimate or private matters; they are about incidents where we have been measurably less than honest.

Try though I did, plastic-coating a stamp was a feat that I simply could not hold a candle to. And who would have thought that it would lead to my feet being held to the fire?

***

Roguish though it was of me to pass off waxy stamps as plastic-coated stamps, it pales in comparison with depriving someone of their entire stamp collection.

But that's exactly what I did with Anmol's stamps.

Three years younger to me, my cousin Anmol and I were quite close when we were growing up. Anmol looked up to me; he often imitated me. Perhaps that's how he started collecting stamps, or perhaps he was just as interested in collecting them as I was.

I was in my early teens when I had a bright idea. Wouldn't it be great if Anmol and I merged our two collections and started collecting stamps together? I must have coerced Anmol into accepting my suggestion; I don’t think he agreed readily. I also told Anmol I could take care of his stamp album.

Anmol complied. He handed his stamp album over to me, much to my delight. I was thrilled that my stamp collection swelled by hundreds of stamps. I remember telling Anmol that his collection had swelled by over a thousand stamps because of the merger, but he wasn't excited about it.

I wonder why none of the adults objected to the takeover that masqueraded as a merger, the robbery that took place in broad daylight. I can’t imagine that I managed to hoodwink my parents as well as Anmol's. Perhaps there is some other explanation; I have to hunt for it.

***

While the exact day that I started stamp collecting is etched in my diary and is tattooed on my brain, there is no such record for the day I stopped collecting them. Perhaps that’s because it happened over a period of several years after I moved to the U.S.

I don't get stamps from letters these days, since I hardly get any letters, although I do get a lot of junk mail. I and my friends and relatives have all but stopped writing letters; we email or call each other instead. The World-Wide-Web allows the world to visit you on your computer in all its colorful glory; you don't need a stamp-sized paper diplomat anymore.

And I have left Indian shores and visited a few countries, for it so happened that I didn't have to be particularly smart to be able to leave India.

All these developments have robbed stamps of some of their luster, even when the stamps haven't been shiny, plastic-coated ones with a uniform waxy sheen.

To this day, my stamp albums - and Anmol's - lie in my parents' home in India. I wouldn't say they are gathering dust, for they are tucked inside a cupboard. But you can be rest assured that they are fast asleep. Out of sight, they are mostly out of mind.

***

When I was a little kid, the dishonesty of people that came to light when they traded stamps was inextricably intertwined with the joy of collecting. As I grew up, my stamp collection became a telescope to the wider world that I was certain lay permanently beyond my reach.

But little could I have imagined that my stamp collection would ultimately focus a sharp, laser-like light on my own deceitfulness.
   
For the naiveté of a knave does not have a long lifespan.