Phoney Talk

==========================================================================

About six months back when Ishani was just 1.6 years, I bought a high-end toy cell phone for her...a fake Nokia model with a battery and a keyboard and glittering lights and twittering tweets. And gave it to her as a precious gift. Within seconds she peeled off the soft-plastic keyboard, threw it away, hit the fake Nokia on the ground, retrieved the cell and started chewing it. And when her mom tore it away from her, she snatched her mom's genuine Nokia from her and started talking.

That is Gen XXX.

But in 1955 in Muthukur, when our Father brought from Nellore a toy telephone for us that had two plastic 'sets' connected by a 2-meter plastic pipe (waveguide), our joy knew no bounds and we played with it for a whole week, one of us whispering and the other listening in and announcing the secret.

Our Uncle BRK was the Post-Master then and he had the only public telephone in the Village in his Post Office, and they used to pay him Overtime when he manned it overnight. And one day I begged him to take me along for the night and he obliged. And he said we both can sleep till 2 AM when a half-masked gent would arrive and pick up the phone in the booth and whisper in it, pay up and go home, to return again at 5 AM and repeat the process. And BRK told me that the chap didn't know there was a 'parallel' on his table. And I asked what the mystery drill was all about; and he replied in hushed tones: "Cotton Market," of which I knew all about since the first bus used to come and there would be a throng waiting for it and the Driver would shout: "Double Zero" or "67" as the case maybe for the day. Cotton Market (New York) was 'glory' for the subsequent satta or matka gambling headquartered in our own NY, i.e. Bombay. Folks used to pick up the day's Hindu in the Public Reading Room and furtively take out a lens and peer through its Tarzan comic strip as they believed that the next day's Cotton Market Digits were hidden therein somewhere.

Three years later I was at Vizagh in my MD Uncle's place for a week and he came home and was rushing to his favorite Ajanta Hotel which boasted its own telephone and whose owner was a friend of my Uncle (taking free tablets from him) and obliged. And he took me along to call up my elder sister at Nellore to announce that she got a coveted seat in the Andhra Medical College where he was an Ass Pro and asking her to rush urgently fetching the all-important Migration Certificate. I then came to know that the P&T then had a "Trunk Call" and a higher-end "PP Call". In a Trunk Call you call the Post Office closest to the chap you want to call and pass on the message. An errand boy will run and convey the message that a babu is born to him only to discover later to his utter disappointment that it was a baby (girl) and not a babu (boy). To avoid this transmission distortion you book a PP (Person-to-Person) Call. The errand boy will then physically drag the nervous Person called to the Post Office to take the deferred call.

Thirty good years later, the same Didi who was working in Delhi where her hubby was an IAS Officer in the Ministry of Finance visited us at KGP for a week. And asked me if she could call her hubby and say that she reached safe. I didn't have a telephone at my humble Qrs then and had to carry her as a pillion on my Bajaj Chetak to our IIT Telephone Exchange. It was daytime and the Call Rates were a flat Rs 100 per minute. After a dozen trials Didi got her hubby in his Office and announced that she reached safe and that KGP Campus is beautiful and that milk packets are in the freezer and that he should cook and eat at home rather than eat out (Ha!) since his tummy is nice and that he should also help with the Home Work of her truant son and bla bla bla...My Pulse, BP and Sugar were skyrocketing till she put her phone down, only to pick it up again to convey a Post Script that she forgot. The Bill came to a neat Rs 3000, a month's take-home for me...but blood is of course thicker than milk and I had to lump it since she brought goodies worth Rs 5000 which unfortunately couldn't be exchanged with IIT Call Charges.

A decade later, I was a Senior Professor in Physics with our son in his Final Year Chemistry and had a Campus Telephone as well as a P&T (Hijli) Telephone by my side on my sofa in our Drawing Room and 'parallels' for both in our Bedroom. Whenever the (Free) Campus phone rang, my wife would pick it up thinking it was Mrs RSS with the latest campus gossip, but would hear instead my son's peremptory order from the 'parallel' in our Bedroom: "Put down the phone mom!" and would bristle like a wounded tigress.

One morning when I was rushing to my First Hour Jumbo Class, the Campus phone rang and since no one was lifting it, I did, and heard a female voice: "Shreenath?" I said, "No" and the voice asked me to tell Shreenath to return to her without fail the Organic Chemistry Book he borrowed. And I guffawed loudly: "Who are YOU?" There was a stony silence and then the voice grunted: "Prof XYZ". I asked my wife to wake up her golden son and convey the order of his Teacher.

When I returned for lunch, my wife was all of a doodah and said Mrs XYZ called her after I left and rebuked me saying: "I am surprised and feel insulted that your husband didn't recognize my voice, we being in the same Campus for thirty years as colleagues." And immediately I had to call her back and apologize profusely citing all fake excuses like being in a hurry on empty stomach...Shreenath's Grades are more important than my ego, no?...He did get an Ex alright in her Paper...there is a moral there..."Insulting and then groveling is more effective than mere catching feet of ladies"

One of those days I rang up my mom's number at Gudur on our Hijli Telephone and heard a golden husky voice saying: "Aapnar dial korar number aapattato byasto aachey..." instead of the Campus Phone which just says: "Beeeeep..Beeeeep...Beeeeep" for Engaged. I rather fancied the voice and surreptitiously started dialing up my own number and listening to it. It became an obsession.

Indra was by then three years old at Princeton and used to call me up and talk for hours once in a while. So I asked him the definition of 'phone sex'. After humming and hawing he proclaimed: "Any call from which you get sexual gratification is phone sex"

I let it go at that...

===========================================================================