By Prabhneet Kaur
I am a 90s’ kid. When I was a child, cordless phones were the coolest thing around. You could carry them anywhere in the house and make a private call. Private only till someone else picked up another receiver of another phone somewhere. If you were careful, you could hear the breathing noise of the third person but most of the time the Komolika (a famous fictional vamp of my childhood) on the other side won. I too have sometimes indulged in overhearing conversations. It was fun. Younger siblings are usually detective lucifers (reference to a Netflix show) of the house anyway.
I had spent the initial years of my life in a convent school where girls and boys were all friends with each other. When parents shifted me to another school in first standard, I faced the initial cultural shock. This new place was better but my classmates for some reason were super judgmental. Girls were not supposed to talk to boys. They were allowed to fight though. I don’t even know who’d made the rule in the first place. I’m glad phones today have passwords and no one actually checks your contact list because my list back then was always written on the last page of my school diary. Two male classmates in my school van had exchanged numbers with me in case they ever needed to know homework. On knowing about the ‘Boycott Boys’ rule, I had pasted the last two pages together. Girls in my class tore the pages apart the very next day, found the smudged remains of their names and started mocking me. That had for some reasons made me feel dirty even though I was but a child and my parents had not raised an issue at any point. The next time a boy called, I told him my number was about to change and I didn’t know what the new one was. He never called again. The other boy had already left the school by then, this one left soon after. The problem was solved. I never talked to a boy again.
When mobile phones were introduced, my father was the first one to get one along with my uncles. That first number of his is still alive even when he isn’t, the only number apart from mine own that I remember today, but that’s a discussion for another day. I’d started using a mobile in 11th standard. It was my mother’s number but I took it with me to tuitions and she anyway preferred landline. By that time, however, I had become an entirely different person altogether. I was that no-nonsense type now who was helpful to everyone but awfully distant to anything relating love. I had also started bro-zoning guys who tried to become extra friendly with me. I would warn people of dire consequences if someone forwarded my number to anyone without my permission, even in college. So I never got a call from a guy, except a schoolmate whom I used to treat like a younger sibling.
He would call me like I was the most important person to him, and then would disappear for months like I was of no value anymore. He would answer in an instant or would not text back at all. There were no blue ticks back then. I wouldn’t even know if he got my message. That kind of treatment changes the entire fabric of your being. I didn’t know. Welcome to the world of mobile phones. The naïve me would keep wondering if he was too upset to talk or if he was in trouble. By the time I actually realised that he simply didn’t care and the word sister (he used to call me didi) was but a joke to him, my life had turned upside down. My cousin had died and then my nephew had passed away.
The people I’d wasted time on, solving their problems, didn’t give a damn about me when I needed them. But some others came to the rescue, the ones I had always underestimated before. I sailed through and changed my friend list entirely. All this looks today like a long-lost dream but it isn’t. If I were to tell my younger self a thing, I would tell her to stay away from mobile phones. But would she actually listen? I doubt it.
Before I’d got a personal phone, I was independent. I was mostly on my own but never unhappy. The more I connected with people, the more I started expecting; and the more I expected, the unhappier I became. At exactly what point that solitude turned into loneliness I could not understand. Now I have a very limited set of people I talk to or care about. I have only those people in my life now, who I can reach out to, those who actually care.