No more msgs pls

People Like Us

My sister, who lives in Ahmedabad, has just moved into the domain of mobile telephony thanks to her husband's recent posting to Kargil.

At first, we were relieved, as it meant we could stay in touch with her in spite of the vagaries of the cantonment exchange. This enthusiasm turned out to be short-lived for, surprisingly for someone who is technophobic, she took to SMS like a fish to water.

Soon enough, I was inundated with messages, one following another in the span of moments. It got so, my cell would ping with her messages day and night, each awaiting an urgent response.

For someone loath to use the phone as a keyboard, this was tantamount to a Herculean chore, but a failure to reply would mean a string of accusatory messages, and the sins of childhood re-visited.

Try as I would, I found it difficult to reply to her idea of a conversation by way of messaging. "I'm on my way to a party," she'd inform us, to follow up with, "Have arrived at party," or even "Njoying party", later "Party over" and finally, "Going back from party."

Thus illuminated about the high points of her evening, I'd report back with "Sleeping early 2nite", only to be pulled up and told to "Go get a life".

I would have a life, I wanted to tell her, if it wasn't spent peering at the tiny buttons so I could punch out a message after having figured out how many times I had to press a button to make it write out the alphabet of my choice.

I seemed to spend inordinately long hours erasing most of what I'd managed to write in garbled fashion while a barrage of banal information would continue to bombard me with "Have put mehndi in my hair", or "Am wearing a chiffon saree".

"Am cooking in the kitchen," she'd flash a message, or "Am watching TV", or report "Just had tea". If I would report "Is raining", she'd SMS back a competitive "Is raining more here". If I'd suggest that mine was likely to be a "Busy day", she'd insist "Mine's busier".

Even outdoors, she'd stay in touch: "Am walking," she'd let me know, followed by "Still walking", winding up that bit with "Long walk today".

She would even manage "Am teaching" or "Yelled at student for incomplete homework" from the class she took at school, leading me to surmise that her concentration, instead of being on their notebooks, was probably on the instrument in her palm.

As respite, she'd mail jokes of a particularly smutty nature that I had to beg her to desist from forwarding, on the premise that my children read all messages on my phone, though of course, it had more to do with old-fashioned prudery.

"Applying for sainthood?" she would message back, even "Grow up". Quietly reclusive in real life, SMS seemed to have unleashed the demons in her.

Some while back, my parents had wondered whether they, too, should go mobile, in spite of the multiple instruments in practically every room of their house in Bikaner.

At that point I had said it might be a good idea but, in hindsight, I'm no longer sure it would be prudent. After having been buried under the barrage of information supplied by my sister, I wonder how my father might spend his day carefully punching in the letters to form a message.

Given his age, I suspect he might spend the better part of it over "Discomfort caused by gas," followed by "Still uncomfortable," topped by "Relief at last, will now lie down".

Or my mother SMSing, "Mutton curry for dinner, caused pain in tooth cavity." Followed, perhaps, by my sister's "Am tweezing eyebrows". The thought boggles the mind.