Here’s the deal.
I am old school enough to still have a landline number.
At around 2 AM every night the landline phone goes off - when I pick it up, I can hear people talking on it. I don’t think either party can hear what I am saying. I’ve tried to speak, or even rudely interrupt them sometimes.
For a while, I thought nothing of it. Sometimes I’d hear angry wives talking to their husbands – asking them to head back home – it would be older folk talking to their kids in Europe or the Americas – I was also surprised to hear some teenagers talking at that time of the night. Perhaps they’d not much going on their curated Instagram feeds.
I contemplated whether I was into some kind of voyeuristic eavesdropping that I wasn’t aware of before – I judged myself rather harshly – I am self critical that way.
But again, Netflix has ceased to be entertaining and there isn’t a new season of ‘Altered Carbon’ anyway.
Every night I’d wait for these calls at 2 AM - these calls would sometimes go on for hours. I would stay up and turn it into a ritual to listen to various people talk.
It is my own form of reality radio.
I will be honest I was enjoying this to the point where I had stopped turning up at my job at the international courier service where I worked anyway. It’s okay I wasn’t ‘missing out’ on much, since people were literally going missing there anyways.
For the last two weeks, this innocent middle of the night pastime of mine, took a rather sinister turn.
Monsoon has come early to my part of the world this time of the year. It’s been raining a lot all the time.
I had the phone on loudspeaker. My cat on the lap, heavy tropical rains – with a cup of decaf and lemongrass aroma diffuser doing its thing— ambience of eavesdropping.
There was this couple arguing over the phone, and the lady was bawling her eyes out, while the husband, on the other end of the line, was being a jerk, and answering in sarcastic monosyllables – egging on the lady to further wail. As heartbreaking as it was to listen in, I just could not stop doing it.
Maybe I had disassociated from these midnight calls to the point where the folks on the telephone, weren’t at least for me, any different than the folks on the telly.
But something about the loud crying of that lady on the phone was gut wrenching,
“You bastard!” - I shouted into the phone, fully aware neither will be able to hear it.
The other side of my window has a rather generous awning – many people take shelter there from rain and sun, all the time of the day or night. I don’t think much of it. In a country with 1.4 billion people, privacy is an almost alien concept.
I did not pay much attention to the lady standing outside the window. Since the phone was on a loudspeaker she could hear the conversation too I think – or not, I am not quite sure, since the rains were heavy.
She screamed at me. That made me jump out of my skin. A guttural scream, from the other side of the barred window (very common in my part of the world)
“That’s my daughter that’s crying so hard, do something!” - she said to me in a rather sad voice. I was appalled how soon she was able to find composure right after screaming at me.
“Console her” - she almost asked me nicely.
I picked up the phone and moved to the other end of the window in the room trying to get away from her, although I was separated from this frail old woman by a thick concrete wall and barred windows - something, a primal part of my brain, made me very weary and scared. That tingling in the spine, I am sure we are all well aware of .
The distance from where I stood and the barred windows was at least 15 feet.
Yeah, like in a bad CGI horror movie, her hands actually were able to reach across that distance and gently pry the phone from my trembling hands.
“Console her - her name’s Sheela”. She said more gently this time around.
Our eyes locked. Her cataracts glowed even in the moonless night. “Don’t make me come in”
You don’t reason with old ladies that can reach across a 15 feet room and take the phone set away from you. You just do what you are asked to do.
I say all soothing things to Sheela, but she cannot hear me, and her husband isn’t stopping from being a jerk – I say all possible things I can think of to soothe her. Finally Sheela stops crying and she hangs up.
“Good job” - says the old lady - her cataracts are dull embers now. She goes away just as suddenly as she’d appeared.
Even now, every night, at around 2 AM the phone rings. The old lady reaches in through the window and picks up the phone.If it’s not her daughter then she hangs up and walks away, while I pretend to sleep – tightly hugging my cat.
Sometimes it’s her daughter.
“Console her”
I’ll have to pop at least three BZDs to get my pulse to quieten, before I start talking to Sheela, who can never hear a word I’m saying anyway.
Travesty.