By Ratna Manucha
It never ends, does it? The cellphone saga. Ever since those stout black landline phones trundled silently out of our lives, life has never been the same.
For starters, truth has given way to lies, as now the phone is in our pockets, and we can glibly lie about our whereabouts.
What got me thinking was an incident that happened recently. Old friends had dropped in for a nice, cozy dinner. The evening passed uneventfully with lots of laughter and recounting old tales.
Cut to dinner. The six of us settled ourselves comfortably around the table and we had just about begun to eat after the customary passing of the dishes and the preamble of solicitous questions…
‘Have you taken the mutton? Would you like some pickle?’ And so on. And then the unthinkable happened. The shrill trilling of the phone from inside a pocket interrupted our conversation as we ate. The chit-chat stopped abruptly as the man in question took out his phone from his pocket. Five pairs of eyes stopped eating and looked at him questioningly, waiting for him to either silence the phone or tell the person at the other end that he would call back later. But nothing of the sort happened.
Without so much as a by your leave, he started talking excitedly … and guess what – to top it all, his phone was on speaker! So here we are, all five of us, sitting and chewing noiselessly in case we disturb him, listening to both sides of the conversation. We sat motionless like errant schoolchildren who have been punished and asked to place their fingers on their lips, only in this case we couldn’t as we were trying to eat as soundlessly as possible while our sixth friend went yakkety-yak happily with scant regard for the rest of us.
And just like that, we had been seamlessly shunted to second place while the mysterious caller was the most important person in the room.
I was flummoxed. I had just about got the Boss Man out of the habit of talking on the phone at the dining table, yet here we were… I’m sure after tonight Boss Man would have happily unlearned all that I had so painstakingly taught him, and we would be back to square one. My dinner party was over even before it had begun. Nobody was getting a chance to praise the table décor, the new place mats, or the food. This was a sitting – talking disaster! I needed to do something to salvage the situation, and fast.
So, I began with offering our guest food, all the while saying loudly, ‘Here, have some rice, more salad?’ Hoping that the person on the other end gets the hint and hangs up. I’m sure I was strident enough, but he kept brushing me off impatiently and carried on the conversation, regardless. I was fighting a losing battle.
The dinner and his conversation ended simultaneously. By the time dessert was served we were discussing the life and times of the caller who till now was nonexistent in all our lives, but one. We knew where he had settled after retirement, what his two children were doing, that his wife didn’t like her new home and that their dog had just given birth to a litter of six puppies, two of whom were male and had been snapped up within a week of their being born and now only the four female pups were left and they were looking for homes for them. Whew! That’s a lot of information for one evening.
Not knowing what else to do, I began humming under my breath-
‘Those golden days
Of stout black telephones in living rooms are gone.
But in my mind
I know they will still live on and on.
But how do you stop someone
Who loves his new mobile phone.
It isn’t easy, but I’ll try.
If you wanted to talk
Couldn’t you wait it out
Till you got home?
I know you wouldn’t have lost your caller friend…’
By the way, does anyone want a female pup? I know someone who knows someone…
(Ratna Manucha is an academician, storyteller, poet, columnist and author of fact and fiction. She lives, dreams and writes in Dehradun, her happy place.)
