In a love story from the Ramayana, Nala and Damyanti communicated with each other through an odd swan that could speak and fly. During the Mauryan Dynasty, emperors kept specially-trained pigeons, who helped them communicate with people who lived far away from the kingdom. Even in recent years, the police in Odisha used pigeon mail to contact unreachable areas of the state.

With the coming of modern postal services in this century, communication has already taken a new turn. People would eagerly wait for the postmaster, who flew by on his cycle, delivering letters filled with love, duty, and affection. But this couldn't satisfy people for long. They wanted their messages to travel faster. To tackle this, 'airmail' was launched in the 1940s, giving wings to India’s letters on a larger-than-life scale.

Soon, letters from different parts of India would be stacked neatly in aeroplanes and flown across the country on NAM, i.e., the Night Mail Service. When these letters landed at their destination, they were sorted, redistributed, and delivered instantly. But for all this to happen, a young pilot first had to prove their worth.

Thirty years before NAM, on February 18, 1911, a Humber biplane took off from a humongous polo field in Allahabad. This aeroplane, stacked with 6000 postcards and letters, flew to Naini, a place five miles away from Allahabad. Just one day earlier, in Petaluma, California, the first recorded airmail trip utilizing an aeroplane had occurred. But India’s chapter would go down as the world’s first official airmail. Behind the wheel was a 23-year-old French pilot named Henri Pequet, tasked to steer the historic flight that took off to change the entire map of the Indian Postal System.

Back then, Pequet had stayed at Allahabad to participate in a United Provinces Exhibition air show. Arranged by a trailblazing British aircraft and the Captain of the Royal Indian Navy, Walter Windham, this exhibition's purpose — for the Holy Trinity Church in Allahabad — was to raise money for establishing a hostel for students. On this flight, postcards and letters were to be flown from Allahabad to Naini by Pequet. People not only had to pay for the postcard, but also extra fees that would be used as donation money for building the hostel.

This pioneering use of an aircraft to transport legally sanctioned mail even drew international notice, especially after a substantial quantity of those postcards and letters were shipped from the Naini post office to England the next month. The front page of the Pennsylvania-based Pittsburgh Daily Post wrote, "First Aerial Mail Received in London. These pieces of correspondence bear a new postmark, which ought to become historic.”

The flight took about thirteen minutes to land in Naini; but in the span of these few minutes Pequet set the stage for India's commercial and civil aviation flight system. Pequet later explained his "instruments" to French Air Forces Colonel Edmond Petit in the following manner: "You would not believe it, but our planes at this time were a sight before us was just space. I had a watch on my wrist and an altimeter on my left knee."

When asked to recollect some exceptional occurrences during his journey, he said, "No, only the buffaloes. Before landing, I flew over the Ganga and was not sure I would make it. About 3 or 400 meters. But I feared not the unexpected bath but the crocodiles."

Today Pequet’s flight is largely absent from history. Even NAM’s instant mail service is a distant memory. But during the years these events first shook the world, they stamped an indelible story in the lives of those who witnessed it.