This essay was first published in the 'India Magazine; (August-September, 1996) and has been re-published in 'Elsewhere' (Penguin India, New Delhi, 2000) ed. Kai Friese.


I am a prisoner of phone booths. STD/ISD/PCO/FAX/Xerox by Japanese machine, booths. I am enthralled by their darkened glass panes, stencilled signage, and plastic flowers, the late hours they keep, and the stories that gather on their wallpapers. Like an idiot hungry for tales of travellers who idled in the serais of the Delhi sultanate, I waste my time in the phone booths of 90's New Delhi. Even when I have nothing to say and on one to call.

An STD phone booth is like a caravanserai, where you can alight at odd hours from the journeys of everyday life and hear news of distant places. The phone booths close to where I live host Afghan refugees and Israeli backpackers, Malayali nurses and Gujarati traders in transit. I go there to sit next to travellers and people with faraway relatives, and to listen to strange languages being spoken. I go there to eavesdrop on the world, because the world inhabits phone booths. I go there to whisper in my head the magic of distant place names-Adas, Addagadde and Ahwa, Galagali, Galsi and Gambhoi, Kanjirapuzha, Kalna and KantiIo, Zira, Ziro and Zineboto. Or, I search farther in the book of codes for cities with enchantments-Rosario, Erevan, Chittagong, Oruru, Tenerife, Uppsala, Valparaiso, Leipzig, Hafnart-Joerdur, Zauqa, Dewaniya, Sabh, Sert and Yundum... and Aqaba ...and Sandnes...and Los Angeles.

A single operation of the fingers, and I could be talking to someone I do not know in Rosario, Argentina. A phone would ring, somewhere in the world, someone would pick it up at another hour, in another hemisphere, perhaps on the following or in the previous day, in another season, and ask who is calling in another language. As some people collect views of other places in postcard to remind themselves of places they can only dream of, would someone begin a collection of recordings made over the phone of surprised voices in other languages? Would they play the recordings to themselves late at night on a barsati terrace? Woul there be exhaustion, laughter, irritation and sorrow in those voices? Would there be rudimentary, crude, grunting conversations: found sounds, like found images, scattered and then gathered between time zones in the phone booths of New Delhi.

All this is possible in a New Delhi phone booth. But the] are other, more serious purposes that justify their ubiquity Business, family, marriage, news of sudden death, examination results, birthday greetings and homesickness. Love, real estate, births, exports. Arrivals and departures, the distress of stranded tourists, illness and the stock market. In the course of an hour and a half waiting for a clear line to Bombay I hear snatches 'of all this. I hear of broken engagements and faulty diagnoses, of mothers-in-Iaw and travel agents, of missed opportunities and the daily grind. I hear the trivial details of everyday lives compressed to save time, and money.

STD booths heal. They purge us of the dross of our lives by allowing us to jump time and distance and have our say to that faraway person who is suddenly so important. They cripple us because letters lie unwritten in our drawer, and 'I'm all right. Are you OK? Call next week' becomes a catch-all substitute for conversation. They perform miracles, because, like the little boy who walks out of the booth and asks his father why it's afternoon there when it's night over here, I still can't quite believe that I can speak to someone in their yesterday.

There are thousands of phone booths in a city like Delhi, and their number grows exponentially. As they thrive, they replace barbershops, grocery stores and milk queues as the hubs of conversation and social life in a neighbourhood. Gradually, each booth builds up a clique of regulars, nodding acquaintances to each other, but well aware of the intricate details of each other's family histories. This tends to happen because it is impossible not to have a fair idea of what people are saying in a phone booth. The most private conversations become public when they are long distance. People still tend to shout down the phone line, both because the lines are bad and because the act of speech traversing the distance, say from Lajpat Nagar to Dhanbad, still seems by consensus to require greater volume, intensity and projective power.

Phone booths also become centres of nightlife, venues for illicit assignations and coy flirtations between students and singles living in one-room sets. I have seen a love affair form and then conduct itself, ever since both its protagonists met at a booth. One travelled to a distant city, and many long phone calls later, betrayed the other, who continued to call long distance from the same phone booth to berate her unfaithful, 'has been' lover. Each phone booth has a distinct character, which consists of an amalgam of the people who manage it and its repertoire of clients. Thus, there are little holes in the wall, which are proof of a panwallah's sharp business acumen. Salesmen and commercial travellers gather here for a late-night cigarette and have abbreviated conversations about money, with their out-of-town partners. Then they call up their wives, perfunctorily. There are phone booths run by auntyjis that cater to a family audience, men and women in nightdresses and children come here to talk at length to relatives in the course of an after-dinner stroll. Their conversations are lively and encompass a universe that stretches from infidelity to toilet training. Hi-tech booths with fax machines and the beginnings of E-mail are the arena for the urban professionals, who can't get rid of their mobile phones even when surrounded by so many other kinds of telephones. These are efficient but unfriendly places manned by sharp-looking young men. Even late into the night, in the quarter-charge hours, this crowd makes it a point to be well dressed, and a little anxious to be noticed. Here the operators and bosses sit behind an array of the latest in telephony. They transfer calls, co-ordinate conferences between five different callers and exude the kind of power that is associated with priests, magicians and orchestra conductors. There are STD booths that offer Xerox facilities, which are favoured by university students. They come to ask their parents in their hometowns for money and to get their lecture notes and texts photocopied. These are malnourished and often lonely people. Their eyes red with sleeplessness and worries about exams, careers, the rent and impossible love affairs. They often stand still after their conversations and ask for credit, or painfully part with their very little money. They leave the phone booth just as they came, embarrassed and forlorn.

Then there are dingy and suspect premises hidden in the basements of commercial complexes. These see little activity, barring unsuspecting tourists trying to call Jerusalem, or Amsterdam. The real players here are the owners themselves, the men who sit behind unused telephones and wear dark glasses even when indoors and surround themselves with the musty smell of cheap incense. They crowd their walls with images of the Sai Baba of Shirdi and 'Jai Mata Di' stickers. On hot summer afternoons, when no one ventures out to make STD calls, they dial in to Indore, Bulandshahar, Cuttack and Mogulsarai and rapidly read out a list of numerals-5, 9, 3, 43, 17 ...Those are the conduits of the satta trade, relayers of the day's lucky digits to number-gambling cartels spread across the underbelly of small town India. When approached to make a phone call they will often tell you with an implacable, greasy and mysterious smile that the lines are out of order. Phone booths in the city centre, close to railway stations and cheap hotels, are home to a floating population of tourists and travellers in various stages of fatigue and enthusiasm. As they unbuckle their voluminous rucksacks and unzip their hip pouches to take out scraps of paper with phone numbers in Belgium or Germany, they can be seen imagining the prospects of return and mapping their future itineraries-will it be Ladakh before Goa, or Dharamshala before Benares? These are the roving envoys of the lonely planet, fixing their next destination well in advance, enquiring after jobs left behind, and desperately trying to make friends as they wait their turn. They are invariably overcharged by smooth phone booth owners who hide their racism behind the complicated arithmetic of time and money conversions. Despite the inherent variety of the people in them, the phone booths have certain common architectural features. A big yellow sign with a red arrow across the street. Plastic bucket chairs, a calendar image of Shiva or Ram astride the would-be temple at Ayodhya, a statuette of Ganesh or the Virgin Mary, a framed print of a fat baby reading the holy Quran, wallpaper, Formica tables, aluminium and glass partitions, second-hand air conditioners, plastic flowers and a black-and-white television set at an elevation. Sometimes on the wall behind the manager there is a film star's portrait, or large poster of alpine Switzerland, and a set of clocks with the hands showing different hours, each neatly labelled with legends saying UK (London), USA (east coast and west coast), GERMANY, NEW DELHI, TOKYO, MOSCOW (Russia) and GULF. The decor of phone booths suggests an imagination that brings together sections of airports, the kitsch of drawing rooms and the aspirations of the office premises of a small business- domesticity, the world abroad and the trappings of efficiency.

The phone booth negotiates between these, and simultaneously between nostalgia, the desire for a better, more glamorous life and a Protestant ethic sternly spelt out in notices in bold type. 'Be Brief- Time is Money- Work is Worship.' 'Wrong numbers dialled will be strictly charged for.' 'Management is irresponsible for line failure or engage tone.' 'Make no love talk here-others are in queue.'

Yet, no matter how many guides to STD etiquette get pasted on to the space next to Shah Rukh Khan's smile on a phone booth wall, the random and unpredictable quality of phone booth behaviour cannot be contained.

A group of Malayali nurses, exceptionally graceful, who answer to the names of Minnimol, Gracekutty and Malathi regularly call up family in their home town Kalamassery. They ask after nephews and the price of coconuts, sometimes are worried by the fact that the money order sent for Easter hasn't reached, or that a cousin has eloped. Every week on the appointed day, after their calls are made and the change is tendered, the boss of our phone booth asks them searching questions about the Christian faith. Is the holy ghost a ghost? Was Jesus reborn after his death? Did the Virgin Mary have a normal delivery? Do Christians have caste? Painstakingly the Malayali sisters answer these queries in halting Hindi. Sometimes they promise to find out from the priest and clarify a difficult issue. Once they leave, the boss shakes his head solemnly. These exchanges are not brief. The boss doesn't charge them for wrong numbers and he lets them jump the queue. No one seems to mind. Not even the anxious exporter who makes a scene if anyone else redials a number. Minnimol, Gracekutty and Malathi are the familiars of our booth.

When I can't get through to a friend in a city that was once called Bombay, or I get too much interference on the line to Frankfurt, Munich or Sydney, I think of Minnimol's patient 'try again, simply one more time only', and sometimes it works. Or at least we all like to think it does.

Not everyone comes away form our phone booth contented. Raminder Kaur breaks down every time she speaks to her son in Vancouver. Her husband, who escorts her out, is always smug. He never speaks, though he helps her dial the long and complicated code number. Each time she makes a collect call, and each time her son disconnects at the other end, and each time she gets hysterical she begs us all to help her dial again. But her husband cajoles her out of the booth and takes her back into the unhappiness she comes from.

A medical representative stops by on his way after a long shift on Wednesdays and Fridays. He deals in drugs for psychiatric ailments, and I have seen him pass strips of pills quietly to Raminder Kaur's husband. Each time he dials a number in Bangalore, he takes out a letter and says something furtively into the phone. Then he steps out of the aluminium and glass cabinet and sits quietly in a corner of the booth, staring at his polished shoes, or carefully examining his fingers. After all the calls are nearly over, at 12:40 or so, there's just me, a Backpacker still trying to get through to Barcelona, and the boss, who is watching cable TV. The phone rings, and the dealer in pills for unhappiness rushes in, unloosens his tie and asks, 'Husband is asleep?' The boss and the backpacker are asleep as well by now, and for the next twenty five minutes the shiny-shoed salesman makes long-distance love to a married woman in Bangalore. Sometimes he breaks off from Kannada, and begins talking about her long hair in English. The peculiar, furtive melancholy of his voice is perhaps the only consolation that she has ever had, and till ten past one on Wednesdays and Fridays he sings her his song. He remembers their days together, promises to write, tells her about Delhi, and about how the mental hospital here is nothing compared to the to the one in Bangalore. He asks for news of her children, jokes about the sleeping husband, and promises to see her soon. In the end he whispers to her things that are perhaps too intimate to speak out aloud.

The backpacker is awake by now and impatient again, and he wakes up the boss. The drug salesman finishes his call and before leaving offers me some pan masala. The backpacker calls Barcelona and he can't get through. I try calling a friend in Germany and I can't get through either. The boss begins counting the day's takings. One thousand and twenty-seven rupees. Then he begins rolling down the shutter.

The boss of my neighbourhood phone booth is a generous quasi-insomniac, but even he locks up his business at one o'clock. The booths that claim to provide twenty-four hours service actually stay open only till midnight.

There are very few places you can go to at the dead of night to call. I offer to drive the backpacker down to the all- night STD phone outside the Eastern Court buildings on Janpath. I still have to make my call, and so does he. We drive in silence, we have things to say to the people we have to call, not to each other. Then my companion decides to tell me that his friend is dead and cold in a hospital morgue, that he is catching the next flight back in the morning with her body. He lapses into silence. When we get there, he lets me wake up the operator and get the cards with which to work the phones. He shuts the door tight behind him when he calls, and I cannot hear his voice. When he is done, he thanks me and leaves before I can ask him if I can take him to his hotel, or to the hospital. As I dial I can hear a taxi go away into the night.

A phone call is measured in terms of time and money in red liquid crystal display digits that glow in the dark like malformed fireflies. The backpacker's call to Barcelona that night was brief and it cost him three hundred and fifteen rupees. He never bothered to pick up his receipt when he left. How did he say what he had to tell his friend's family? 'Flavia and I are coming home tomorrow, but she is not alive', or 'Flavia died this morning at six-forty-five in her sleep " or just, 'Flavia is dead.'

A phone call breaks the pattern of an evening in a Barcelona home. Sudden distant death intrudes upon a family sitting down to supper. They make more phone calls, arrange for the funeral, find a picture of Flavia taken just before she had left for India and send it to the photographers for enlargement and framing. They wait, and so does the backpacker, and the time and distance involved in the transit of the body make it difficult to mourn. Death, Flavia's particular death, takes on an unreal, virtual mantle, existing only in a phone call made at midnight in the Eastern Court phone booth.

An Afghan doctor and his wife, recent refugees from a meaningless and forgotten war, come to a phone booth I know to ring up Kabul. I asked them once whether they still have friends or relations there. 'No', they said, 'every one dead, or in exile. We call only to see if the house we left behind is still standing. When the phone rings, it means that the house has not been shelled.'

A phone that no one attends to in a vacant house that waits to be shelled.

A phone call that's made in which nothing is said.

A phone call that isn't made because the person is too close at hand.

All the conversations in the world are made in part of silence. And sometimes the silence overshadows the rest. It becomes possible to talk at, past or around someone, without re- ally speaking to them. For a long time now, I have needed to speak with a friend I meet every day, or every other day. We talk about work, schedules, the books we've read and the films we have been sitting through, we do not talk about ourselves.

At these times I feel the need to make a long distance call to this person close at hand. Perhaps the need to say a great deal in too short a time would act as a necessary prelude to a real dialogue, pursued at length and with leisure. How tar would I have to travel from the city that we inhabit for this to happen? Would Meerut be far enough, would Port Blair be the right distance, would I get through from Calcutta, or from Goa? Would I need to travel to the other end of the world to Rosario or Buenos Aires in Argentina? Would I need to be in winter when it is summer here, or in night in place of day? And would it do then to just say hello, or would we have to cajole conversation out of its hiding places? Would we just find things to say that fall in place, naturally, yet still as if by magic?

Sometimes I think of all the telephone conversations that criss-cross the earth and all the things that still remain unsaid. Numbers don't match, there is static interference, satellite links fail and even when people get through they don't know what to say, or are unable to say what they mean. Perhaps all that is unsaid collects each night and hovers above us like an unknown layer in the atmosphere until it is blown away on the rare days when people find it possible to really speak to each other. Those are the days on which the STD booths shine, their tin and paint banners gleam as if washed in a new rain. And the quiet hum of phone lines and many ringing dial tones signal the everyday fact of people enjoying the things they have to say to each other, across real and imagined distances.