Mummi's Phone

“Shreyu” came an old voice from the lobby of our house in Haldwani. 

I had seen the change in the texture of this voice throughout my growing up. It had started to crack now, like the sound of a broken flute reaching new crescendos when she tried speaking loudly, tapering at the very edge until it became nothing more than a hiss. I was sitting in the bedroom with the T.V on while I scrolled down my Instagram feed, laughing at memes and envying the toned bodies of actors as a looked beyond the screen to watch the bulge of my stomach move up and down as I breathed. 

“Chii yaar… pareshan ho gaya hu mai is motape se” I thought as I set the phone aside and grabbed the sides of my stomach to see how much flesh filled my hands. 

“Shreyu… idhar aa to beta” Mummi called me again. Her voice a little louder than the time she called me before.

“Han Mummi bol…” I replied as I got up from the bed where I had been lying so comfortably until now.

‘Mummi’ was what I called my grandmother and so did my parents. It was what I had heard my father, my mother, my buas and my chacha call her from the very beginning and so it stuck with me as well. Another reason which I believe never made me feel even a tiny bit awkward about calling my grandmother mummi was because it was her who nurtured me for the first three years of my life. Both my parents were working, my father, as the principal of a school and my mother as a teacher. They didn’t have a house of their own back then, and with no nanny to take care of me, their next choice was to leave me under my grandmother's care. Though these reasons were completely valid, there was a fair bit of rhetoric that mummi used to convince my parents to let me stay with her. I was the first child in our family, who was also from her eldest son and to top it all was a boy. So even though the above-mentioned reasons had their merit, the latter ones stood above them all. 

“Kya hua?” I asked her as I approached the lobby of our house.

It was a large room tiled with white marble. In the middle was a rectangular boundary made of blue-tinted stones that enclosed within them the same white marble slabs. The edges of the floor were marked with black coloured stone slabs each divided with a strip of glass. On the diwan that rested against the wall opposite to the one which housed a huge calendar, I saw my mummi sitting with her eyes peeled into the small black phone which seemed to belong to a period of ancient history. 

“Dekh to jara, is mai gas wale ka number nahi mil raha mujhe… kabse dhundh rahi hu.” She said, still trying to look for it, bring the already tiny phone’s miniature screen almost next to her eye. 

“Kis naam se save kiya tha tune?” I asked her trying to help her out in the huge mess that she thought she was in. 

“Aag lagi jau kau.” (1) She cussed in irritation. “Raju Gas karke tha shayad. Dekh to tu” she said handing over the phone to me, completely annoyed with the modern day convenience. 

Taking the phone from her I began searching for the contact only to realise that all this while she had been searching for it in the messages and not in the contacts section. 

“Mummi, tu galat jagah dhundh rahi thi. Yeh dekh, yeh jo nishan hai na, yeh messages ka hai. Tujhe is dusre wale mai dekhna tha, number dhundhne ke liye.” I tried explaining her as I sat down next to her on the bed. 

“Yeh dekh, jab hum contacts wale option pe aate hai to usmai neeche likh ke bhi aata hai ki kaunse nishan par hai tu aur vo bakiyo se jyada chamakta hai. Ismai yeh jo hare button ke bagal mai hai na chaukor sa button, isse upar neeche kar sakte hai dusri cheezo ko dekhne ke liye. Par filhal tu yeh seekh,” I said as I began teaching her how to operate the phone. 

“Shreya.. mujhe pehle usko call karne de. Pichle hafte se bol ri hu usko ki cylinder le aa par tab se taale jara hai. Sunati hu isko mai aaj.” she responded as she began wearing her spectacles. 

“Yeh le. Mila diya maine. Baat kar.” I handed over the phone to her while I returned to the bedroom. 

Dada ji was still in the bathroom taking a bath, which saved me from a good scolding as I had forgotten to turn off the television and the lights before I left the room. While I bent over the television in attempts to reach to the depths of the world where the switch to turn the damned thing off lay, I could hear mummi scold the guy over the phone. Finally finding the switch, I turned off the television and returned to the bed to join my phone once again. None of my friends lived in Haldwani so most of my days would be spent lying on the bed and watching videos on YouTube, movies on my laptop and occasionally playing games in it. When I would get bored with all this I would return to one of my books that I began reading long back but wasn’t able to finish. While I enjoyed myself watching reviews of gadgets on YouTube, mummi finally hung up the call. 

“Hainho (2) kab aoge bathroom ke bahar tum. Sara kaam atka padha hai,” mummi complained todada ji.

“Aa to raha hu. Sahi se nahau bhi nahi kya ab? Sabar nahi hai tujhe.” Dada ji said in a voice that shook the house.

Dada ji was the only person apart from Babba (3) whom I was really afraid of. Mummi was never able to instil fear in me. Even whenever she tried her hardest to look at me dead in the eye, and stare till I would lower my head and shuffle my feet, her attempts would fail miserably. I would imitate her expressions exactly as she was doing them or maybe in a little more goofy way which would end up in both of us laughing out loud, sometimes till tears ran down our eyes. My mother, on the other hand, had a much better track record of success in this than mummi but nonetheless, the way Babba’s stare and Dada ji’s voice gave me cold sweat and a chill down my spine was like none other’s. So on hearing Dada ji speak in such a high volume, made me sit right up on the bed and throw my phone aside. It wasn’t until about half a minute that I realised I wasn’t the one being shouted upon but that didn’t stop me from staying in the position I was in. 

As my grandparents had aged they had both started to fight at the smallest of things. Sometimes I wondered if this is how it is supposed to be. You always think that as people grow old they get mature and more grounded, but when I looked at the couple before me, all this crumbled into a ball of paper and threw itself into the dustbin. 

“Pichle ek ghante se yahi kehne mai ho tum. ‘Aa to raha hu.’” She said repeating what he said, only in a tone that was bound to irritate dada ji further. 

Sensing a fight was about to ensue I got up and headed back to the lobby to make mummi come with me back to the bedroom. Both dada ji and mummi seemed to enjoy pushing the other person to the point where he or she gets really mad. Mummi would poke dada ji  for taking a lot of time in completing something like a bath or shaving which would make dada ji extremely angry. Cursing and shouting for a good half an hour would follow causing the atmosphere of the entire house turn sour. Before the matters got worse I jumped out of my bed and went to the lobby but couldn’t find mummi there. A small and narrow gallery attached the lobby with the drawing room and while on one’s way to the drawing through the lobby, the bathroom lay on the left. It was there where she was standing with a bucket full of clothes and knocking on the bathroom door. Watching her doing this all the colour of my face vanished and I could hear my heartbeats at the back of my ear. I rushed to hold her hand and pulled her back to the lobby. 

“Tu pagal hai kya? Tujhe bhi maja aata hai unko pareshaan karne mai. Phir vo gussa karenge aur ghar ka mahol kharab hoga. Baith ja shanti se yaha. Maine tujhe bola tha mai tujhe number dhundhna sikahunga phone pe, tu aai bhi nahi baat karne ke baad.” I scolded her as I stood by in front the bed on which she sat holding her head with her hand shaking it as if she was completely dejected.

“Tum sab mujhe danthte rehte ho. Meri koi ijjat hi nahi hai is ghar mai. Tera Babba, yeh aur tub hi. Mai to kuch hu hi nahi. Itni badi hu tujhse, par tujhe bilkul sharam nahi aati mujhse aise baat karte hue.” She replied in a voice hovering at the edge of breaking into a tears. 

“Tu harkat hi aisi karti hai ki tujhe danth pade. Dada ji to nahi samajhne wale, tu to samajh jaya kar na. Bematlab ka kalesh hota hai ghar mai.” I said jokingly hoping that the words of wisdom mixed with a little teasing would cheer her up again.

“Aacha! Itna bada ho gaya hai tu ki mujhe danthe ga…” was all she could complete before pulling me into a hug and gently smacking the back of my head. “Chal ab sikha mujhe number dhundhna phone pe.” She completed as she let go of me. 

I sat down next to her and gave her the phone. I wanted her to attempt it while I guided her through the process. After having the phone in her possession for over two months now, she had gotten fairly good at unlocking and locking it, but finding her way around the menu was still a handful. I locked the phone and asked her to unlock it, just to make her practise it one more time. Once she was able to do that I then went ahead to explain her the steps and asked her to follow each step that I told her.

“Han to dekh ab phone khul gaya hai. Yaha se menu mai jane ke liye yeh to chaukor button hai na beech mai, isko daba.” After telling her what to do I waited until she got it right and then moved on to explain the steps that followed.

“Daba diya. Ab?” she asked me waiting for me to tell her the next step. 

“Ab dekh yeh menu mai ek nishan hoga blue colour ka aur uske beech mai safed rang mai ek aadmi jaisa hoga. Dikha?” I enquired. 

“Yeh wala?” she asked pointing at the right icon. 

Glad that I was about my awesome teaching skills, I answered, “Han yahi. Very good. Ab ispe leke aa vo chamkila bar aur phir beech wala button dabana.” 

This time she struggled a bit as the direction keys were way too thin for her fingers to press them properly and she would accidentally press the middle button in the process, causing her to start the entire thing all over again. Frustrated as she was with this ordeal she snapped saying, “Aag lago yo phona khwar!”(4) and I burst into a peal of laughter. She did, however, manage to open the contacts and the process after that was a piece of cake. 

While I sat there basking in the glory of my victory mummi looked at me and said, “Kash to aise hi mere saath har din samay bitata. Ab to tujhse bhi tera samay mangna padhta hai.”

Footnotes (Translations):

1)    â€œAag lagi jau kau”- literally means ‘I hope it gets on fire’, a cuss in Kumaoni usually said when one is extremely irritated.

2)    â€œHainho”- Used for either husband or wife.

3)    â€œBabba”- Father

4)    â€œAag lago yo phona khwar!”- I hope this phone burns down, another cuss in Kumaoni.