The house remained dark for most of the day. The matriarchs lounged in white clothes, some new and crisp and others yellowing past their prime, waiting for death to consume them. Of course, the long interlude between the present and the final state were consumed by unspoken stories and unshared gossip as always, shared meals and rare feasts and most importantly by the arduous wait for the time to pass.
The fact that time refused to pass was a source of great tension between them and the bearer of all time, the postman.
The postman came by only when there were letters. The fact that his visits were rare did not preclude the inhabitants from waiting for him and to calibrate their internal clocks by his arrival. He always passed by the house exactly at half past eleven on all working days when post was delivered. He passed without noise on all days in bicycle when he had no deliveries for them. On other days, he stopped his cycle and rang the bell twice. He was the one thing that made time move in the house.
He was a lanky dark fellow with severe smallpox scars on his face. He was polite without being given to frivolous conversation. The weight of being a central government servant and thus its representative to such gatherings hung upon him like a heavy shroud.
At the same time he was careful to linger around long enough on days when the inhabitants received a money-order from a far-living child for it was customary for them to thank him with a token appreciation from the proceedings that they were fortunate enough to inherit because of him. It never occurred to the matriarchs or the postman that he was just an agent in the middle and his presence in the discharge of this function was a routine and replaceable one.
Unlike the other visitors, the postman was the written record keeper bringing to them actual records of events and memories that could be held and read out without adding or subtracting to them with ambiguities. The matriarchs, not satisfied with this, sometimes read meanings into the pauses or cancelled out words. For fear of this, nobody ever dare to cancel a word out when they wrote letters.
On Sundays, when there was no postal deliveries, time stood still around the house. As time moved slowly outside the universe of the big house, the sun rose and set around them without bothering the upset the pretence of this timelessness. The matriarchs rose when they pleased and ambulated along without precision and languid aimlessness until mere exhaustion and ennui claimed their purpose bidding them to repose.
This arrangement worked well for them. They contemplated the endless death for six days and on the seventh, they stopped time altogether and rested.
Every now and then, they will let out a sigh and remember one amongst them who had already died and say, "lucky cow."
Then they went back into their dark corners and rested again. In the dark corners, they shared their space with apparitions of death and the postman. In their feverish dreams, the postman merged with death creating a three-dimentional form that cajoled them into living. They rejected such nonsense outright and preferred to wallow in their morbid fantasies.
(From the novel I am forever writing)
