I still remember our old landline number from Malakpet. All eleven digits, even the STD code, even though that phone was
disconnected years before I finished school.
We did not get a landline at home until I was about seven. Before that, any call to my uncle in Bombay meant walking to
the PCO booth two streets away, the one with the yellow board and the meter that clicked every few seconds like it was
judging you for talking too long. My mother would keep the conversation to under three minutes on principle, standing
there watching the little digital counter climb while my uncle was still in the middle of a sentence.
My mother used to write the important numbers on a torn calendar page pinned above the phone. Doctor, my father's
office, my grandmother's neighbor who would run and call her if it was urgent. That page stayed up for years, corners
curling, ink fading on the oldest entries.
There was one night my cousin got a high fever and we had no working landline, the line had gone dead after a storm.
My father ran to the PCO in his chappals at eleven at night to call the doctor. I still think about that walk sometimes,
how normal it felt then and how unthinkable it sounds now.
Now I cannot recite a single phone number from memory, not even my own wife's. Everything lives in a phone that
remembers for me, and if I lost that phone tomorrow I would not be able to call a single person I know without
looking them up somewhere first. My son finds this hilarious, he thinks it is funny that grown adults used to hold
that much information in their heads on purpose, just in case.
Do you still remember any of those old numbers, or has your head let them go too?