Chapter 6: The Mobile Connection (2003)

The monsoon was late that year, and the town had gone phone-crazy. Reliance had pasted its white hoardings over every bus stop in the district — a small white handset, RS 500 PER MONTH in red block letters, a man in a checked shirt holding the phone to his ear like a trophy — and the queues at the mobile shop on the main road ran out the door, around the corner, past the tea stall where the old men sat and watched and said the world had lost its mind. Ravi watched the queues from the college steps in the last months of his final year, twenty-three years old, his Nokia from Vikram still in his pocket with its cracked screen and its battery that died by evening, and he understood what the queues meant better than the old men did. The door was opening wider. The window he had been looking through his whole life was about to become a door the whole country could walk through, and everyone was lining up to walk.

Arjun came to him in April with the request. Arjun was his batchmate, a broad boy from the village side who laughed loud and studied little, and he sat down on the steps beside Ravi with a folded paper in his hand and said, “You know about these phones.”

“Some.”

“My jija — my sister’s husband — he’s in Dubai. Two years now. He calls the STD booth on Sundays and the line is always busy, and my sister sits in the house and cries after she talks to him.” He unfolded the paper — a Reliance pamphlet, the white handset on it, the red letters, the whole promise of the new world in one sheet — and held it out. “He wants to buy her one of these. He sent the money. But she’s never touched a phone in her life. She’s scared of it.” He looked at Ravi. “She’s scared of everything, that one.”

Ravi looked at the pamphlet. The white handset gleamed in the afternoon light. “You want me to set it up for her.”

“My mother says I should do it, but I’ll just break it. You’ve had a phone for two years. You know these things. Come with me on Saturday. Show her how to use it. She’ll listen to you — she listens to anyone who talks softly.”

The wanting stirred in Ravi before he understood its shape — the old hunger, the one that lived in windows and open doors and lit rooms, turning over in him at the mention of a woman alone in a house. He folded the pamphlet along its creases and put it in his pocket. “Saturday, then.”

The village was two hours by bus, past the district town, past the sugar factory, down a road that narrowed from asphalt to gravel to dirt, and the house stood at the end of a lane of identical houses — a small brick house with a cement courtyard swept clean, a tulsi plant in a painted pot, a bicycle leaning against the wall, a girl’s blue dupatta hanging on the line. Arjun’s mother came out at the sound of the gate and took Ravi’s hand in both of hers and said, “You’ve come to help my girl,” and led him inside, and the house was dim and cool and smelled of old wood and camphor and the faint sweetness of something cooking, and in the middle of the front room, standing with her hands folded in front of her, was Meera.

She was small. That was the first thing — small and fine-boned, in a green cotton saree with the pallu drawn up over her head, and she looked at him from under it with dark eyes that went still when they met his, the way water goes still before the wind. She was a year older than him — he learned that later — but she looked younger, looked like a girl playing house, except for the small brass key that hung at her waist and the way she stood with her weight settled, the way a woman stands in her own house. Her face was ordinary and then it was not; there was something in the set of her mouth, a stillness, as if she had learned to hold herself very carefully so that nothing could be seen.

“This is Ravi,” Arjun said. “He’s come to set up your phone.”

She looked at him a moment longer, and then she smiled, a small careful smile, and said, “You’ll have to teach me everything. I’ve never even held one.”

The phone lay on the table between them — a new Reliance handset, white, small, its screen still wrapped in plastic, the battery not yet fitted — and Ravi sat across from her and showed her how to hold it, how to press the green button to answer, how to find the numbers, and she leaned over the table with her face close to the screen, her hair falling forward, and she asked him questions in a low soft voice, and the afternoon went slow around them, the fan turning, the smell of her — soap and the faint oil of cooking and underneath it something warm and private — moving across the table between them. She pressed the keys with the tip of her finger, carefully, the way you press something you are afraid of breaking, and when she looked up at him for confirmation her eyes were grateful, and the gratitude went through him like a small current.

Her husband was in Dubai. Everyone knew this. The husband’s name was never said in the house without a certain weight — the jija, the one who had gone to the Gulf, the one who sent money home every month and came home once a year in a white shirt with gifts. Meera had been married at twenty-one, and he had left for Dubai eleven months later, and she had been alone in the house ever since, with her in-laws in the city and her mother in another village and a husband who called the STD booth on Sundays.

She told him this herself, in pieces, as the afternoon went on — not as a story, but as the way things were, the way you mention the weather. “He’s coming in December,” she said, pressing the keys the way he had shown her, her face lit by the small screen. “Eleven months. I count them on the calendar. I cross off each day at night before I sleep, so the morning has one less.”

The phone made its first sound in her hands — the little chime of a message arriving, a service alert from the company, nothing — and she jumped, and then laughed, a sudden bright sound that came out of her whole body, and she looked at him with her eyes shining and said, “It works. Look, it works.” And the laugh went through him like a struck wire, the same wire that had been struck at every window of his life, and he smiled and said, “You’ll be an expert in a week.”

He left the village at dusk, and on the bus back to the town he sat with the window open and the wind in his face and the wanting moving in him like a tide, and he did not yet know what he wanted, only that the wanting had a shape now, a small shape in a green saree with a phone in her hands and a laugh that came out of her whole body.

That night his phone buzzed at nine. A number he didn’t know. He opened the message, and the words sat in the little green light, and his heart went like a machine.

Meera, 9:14 pm: is this ravi?

He typed back, his hands steady, his heart not.

Ravi, 9:15 pm: yes. is this meera didi?

The reply came back fast, faster than he expected, and the speed of it went through him like a current.

Meera, 9:16 pm: don’t call me didi. it makes me feel old.

He laughed out loud in his room, alone, the phone glowing in his hand, and he typed:

Ravi, 9:17 pm: ok. meera.

Meera, 9:18 pm: good. i was scared to press the buttons but i did it. see?

Ravi, 9:19 pm: see. you’re an expert already.

Meera, 9:20 pm: arjun said you’re smart. he said you know everything about these things.

Ravi, 9:21 pm: he said i know enough to set up a phone.

Meera, 9:22 pm: he said you know girls too.

The words sat on the screen, and Ravi read them three times, and the room went quiet around him, and he typed:

Ravi, 9:23 pm: did he.

Meera, 9:24 pm: he said you have a girlfriend. a college girl.

The wanting rose in him — for this, the green light, the dark, the small voice coming out of the screen — and he typed:

Ravi, 9:25 pm: he talks too much.

Meera, 9:26 pm: so it’s true.

Ravi, 9:27 pm: it was true. it’s complicated.

Meera, 9:28 pm: everything with boys is complicated.

Ravi, 9:29 pm: and with husbands?

The pause went on. The phone sat dark in his hand. The fan turned, and the night pressed in at the window, and he watched the screen, and then it buzzed, and the words came:

Meera, 9:34 pm: husbands are simple. they send money and they come home in december.

He read the words, and the weight of them, the whole of her life in one line, went through him like a stone in the chest, and he wanted, suddenly and completely, to be the one thing in her life that was not simple.

The texts came every night after that. It began with the phone — she had a question, he had an answer, the small practical business of a woman learning a machine — and it moved, in a week, into the shape of two people who had found each other’s hours. She wrote to him after her dinner, when the house had gone quiet, and he wrote back from his bed with the sheet over his head, the way he had once written to Nandini, the way he had once typed into the grey window of the chat room, and the feeling was the same and different — the same door, the same dark, the same green light — and the door was smaller now, and the light was closer, and the voice on the other side was a real voice, a woman in a village two hours away, sitting alone in a house with the fan turning.

She told him things in those first weeks. She told him about the house — how the rooms stayed the way her mother-in-law had left them, how she dusted them anyway, how the sound of her own chappals echoed in the passage. She told him about the roof — how she climbed up at night to look at the road, the thin grey road that led to the highway, the road her husband would come on in December. She told him about the calendar — the red crosses, the shrinking month, the way December glowed at the end of it like a lit window. And he told her things — about college, about his parents, about the town, about the window in his room that he kept open all night, and she wrote back: why?

Ravi: i like the air.

Meera: you like something else too. i can tell from your messages.

Ravi: what?

Meera: you like that someone could see you. you write like a man who wants to be found.

The words sat in the green light, and Ravi read them, and the being read went through him like a struck wire, because no one had ever read him so fast — Annes had named it, years ago, in the blue light of the café, but Annes had known him, had watched him, had seen him with her own eyes. This woman had only his words, and she had found the same door, and she had walked through it in a week.

He typed: you read people.

Meera: i read you. i have nothing else to do all day.

The first time she crossed the line, she did it without warning. It was late, past midnight, and the texts had been coming slower, the pauses longer, the way they do when the talk has moved past talk. He had told her about his day, and she had told him about hers, and then there was a pause, and then the phone buzzed, and the words came: