I Taught My Mother to Use a Smartphone
Somewhere between the emojis, our whole relationship softened.
My mother held her first smartphone the way you would hold an injured bird: cupped in both palms, elbows tucked in, terrified that any pressure at all might kill it. It was her sixty-eighth birthday, the phone was my gift, and she looked at me over the wrapping paper like I had handed her a court summons.
"I have a phone," she said. She did. It was nine years old, the screen was the size of a matchbox, and the 5 key needed to be pressed with conviction.
"This one has the camera, Ma. And the video calls. You can see Rhea's face when she talks to you."
That was the sentence that did it.
My daughter's face, available on demand. My mother put on her reading glasses, then her other reading glasses on top of them, and held out her hands for the bird.
The first weeks were slapstick. She tapped the screen the way she rings a doorbell: three firm, evenly spaced presses, which the phone read as a series of contradictory commands. She turned the torch on by accident and could not turn it off, so she put the phone face down in a drawer overnight, the way you would handle a haunted object. She saved my number under a contact name she typed herself, in full capitals, because capitals were more respectful: MY SON RAVI GOOD BOY. I found this out when I changed a setting for her and I have never corrected it, and I never will.
Her early messages read like telegrams from a previous century. CALL WHEN FREE. NOT URGENT. YOUR MOTHER. As if I might otherwise wonder which mother. During video calls she held the phone to her ear, because a call is a call, so for the first month my daughter had long, warm conversations with a ceiling fan.
Then came the era of the voice note.
My mother discovered she could talk instead of type, and she took to it like a woman released from prison. Her voice notes were four minutes long and shaped like her: they began with the point, wandered off to the price of tomatoes, visited a neighbor's knee operation, and ended with "okay, I will stop now"... followed by ninety more seconds. I listened to every one on my commute. My colleagues thought I was taking briefings. In a way, I was.
And then, the emojis. She began, cautiously, with the folded hands, which she sent to everyone for everything: to the milkman, to her bank, once to a wrong number who wrote back "God bless you too, aunty." But the heart changed something. In person, my mother has told me she loves me perhaps four times in forty years, each one under conditions of medical emergency. On the phone she sends hearts like a slot machine paying out. I have written about love for years and somehow never noticed the version of it that types with one finger, hunting each letter like it might escape.
There was one disaster.
A distant cousin posted news of a death in the family, and my mother, meaning to send the crying face, sent the one that cries from laughing. She realized at some point in the night what the tears on that yellow face actually meant, and she called me at six in the morning, distraught. "Why would they make two rains that are opposite," she demanded, "on the same face?" I had no defense of the modern world to offer. I helped her write the apology. The cousin, to her credit, replied with a heart.
By the sixth month, something had shifted between us that I did not have a name for yet. My whole adult life, our contact had been the Sunday call: ten minutes, fixed agenda, have you eaten, is it cold there, okay then.
Now there was a low, constant hum of her in my pocket. A photograph of the jasmine plant, one third of her thumb in the frame. HAVE YOU EATEN at one o'clock, every day, like a lighthouse. The distance between us had not changed by a single kilometer... and yet.
I thought that was the story: son teaches mother the phone, mother becomes charming menace, everyone softens. I would have told it that way at parties forever.
Then one evening, while I was clearing storage on her phone because YOUR PHONE MEMORY IS FULL had frightened her badly, she asked me a question without looking up from her tea.
"If I send a message to a number that is not being used anymore," she said, "where does it go?"
I started explaining towers and servers, and stopped... because I had seen the screen. Her sister's number, still saved under Didi, no photo.
My aunt had died fourteen months earlier.
The chat was empty... but the text box was not. There was a message sitting there, typed and never sent, about the jasmine flowering early this year and whether Didi remembered the wall they used to dry chilies on. From the drafts and the half-finished lines I understood this was not the first. My mother had been writing to her dead sister for a year, one finger, letter by hunted letter, and deleting every word, because she did not know where it would go and could not bear the thought of it going nowhere.
"It doesn't go anywhere, Ma," I said, and her face did a small thing that I will be sorry about forever. So I tried again. I opened the notes app and I said, "Write it here. It goes nowhere. That means it stays with you."
She was not learning a phone. She was learning a door, and on the other side of it stood everyone she had never finished speaking to.
She writes at five in the morning now. I know because the notes sync to the account I set up, though I stopped reading them without asking after the first accidental one, which knocked the wind out of me on a Tuesday train. Recipes that stop being recipes halfway through: two cups rice, and Didi always washed it seven times, who has the time, who has the sister. Little crooked lines about the jasmine, about my father's chair, about a girlhood wall in a town that technically no longer exists. Some of them, and I say this as a person who reads for a living, are good.
Not sweet. Good.
It took three refusals over two months before she let me share one. I typed it up exactly as she wrote it, capitals and all, and posted it on a community wall for poets under her own name, which she insisted on spelling out to me twice, as if I might have forgotten it. Strangers replied. A woman four time zones away wrote, "This is my sister too." My mother read that reply with the phone an inch from her nose, and was silent for a long time... and then said, "Tell her I said God bless."
She now scrolls profiles of writers nobody had heard yet the way other people scroll gossip, and she discusses these strangers with me like they are neighbors' children who have done well. Arre, the boy from Indore has written again. The nurse who writes about her night shifts, did you read her.
Last month I stayed over after a wedding. Half past midnight, walking to the kitchen for water, I saw the light under her door: that blue-white glow, cold as moonlight, the one every article says to keep away from old people at night. I did not knock. I know what she is doing in there. She is washing the rice seven times. She is talking to her sister. Somewhere between the emojis, my mother became a writer, and I became someone she writes to.
When I got home the next evening, the phone buzzed. GOOD NIGHT BETA. NOT URGENT. YOUR MOTHER. Then a heart. Then two more. Then, because extravagance costs nothing in this new country of hers, ten.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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