A Hill Station, a Post Office, and a Curious Boy

Some stories begin with a house and a landmark. My father grew up in Kasauli, a hill station in India where addresses were often given in relation to familiar places rather than precise numbers. His home, for years, was simply known as: “opposite Kasauli post office.”

From that house, he watched the world pass through the doors of the post office across the street. Envelopes and postcards arrived from all over India and beyond, each bearing a tiny, colorful square in the corner—a stamp. Those stamps became his earliest windows into the wider world.

Curiosity soon turned into a quiet obsession. My dad began to save the stamps that crossed his path: Indian stamps featuring freedom fighters, national symbols, and festivals; international stamps with unfamiliar scripts, distant landmarks, and faces he had never seen before. There were no special albums, just cardboard-covered notebooks and glue. Page by page, he built his own universe of color, history, and geography, one small square at a time.

Life moved on, but the notebooks traveled with him. Decades later, he handed them to me. The paper had grown fragile, the glue browned at the edges, but the sense of wonder was still alive on every page. Holding those notebooks, I felt connected not only to his childhood, but also to the many journeys those stamps had made before ever reaching his hands.

I found myself asking a question that wouldn’t go away: If these stamps could talk, what stories would they tell? That question eventually became the heart of my children’s book, When stamps delivered magic.

In the story, a boy named Liam is determined to get his hands on his dad’s beloved stamp collection. When his attempts fail, his curiosity only deepens. One night, Liam stumbles into the stamps’ secret quarterly meeting, where they share tales of their designs, the countries they come from, and the letters they’ve helped send around the world. Stamps don’t just deliver mail—here, they deliver speeches, memories, and maybe even a little magic.

When Liam wakes up, he is left wondering: Was it all real, or just a dream?

Through Liam’s journey, I hope today’s children—growing up in a digital world—can rediscover the quiet magic of stamps, and the way something small and ordinary can carry stories across both distance and generations.