I Faked a Call and My Phone Actually Rang
Mid-performance, my prop betrayed me in front of my ex.
There is a specific kind of silence that happens in the half second after the phone you are pretending to talk into begins, at full volume, to ring. I have lived inside that silence, and I came back changed.
It was a Sunday, in a secondhand bookstore on Church Street, the kind with staircases like ladders and the smell of forty years of paper doing its slow chemistry. I was on the ground floor, in fiction, holding a novel I had no intention of buying, when I glanced up through a gap in the shelves and saw my ex.
Meera... Eleven months since the breakup. She was in the poetry section, because of course she was, wearing the green kurta I had once told her made her look like the month of August, and she was laughing at something said by a man whose back looked confident.
The human brain, presented with this, has three options. Walk over and say hello like an adult. Leave quietly like a coward. Or lift your phone to your ear and begin speaking, with animation, to absolutely no one. I would love to tell you I agonized over the choice...
"Haan, haan, tell him the deck is ready," I said to my dark, silent phone, striding toward the exit with the urgent gait of a man who is needed elsewhere. "No, no, the Mumbai team can wait. I will call Ashish myself."
There is no Ashish. There has never been an Ashish.
Under pressure, my imagination produced an entire corporate thriller and cast me as a man with a deck.
I was four steps from the door, mid-sentence, phone pressed to my ear, when it rang.
Not vibrated. Rang.
My mother had borrowed the phone the previous weekend and turned the ringer to maximum, and the ringtone was still the default marimba, that bright, bouncing tune which is, in every country on earth, the official anthem of you have been caught.
The bookstore went quiet the way only a bookstore can, forty strangers politely not looking at me with their entire souls.
And from the poetry section above, clear as a temple bell, I heard Meera laugh.
The phone rang against my ear like the universe clearing its throat.
It was not a mean laugh. That was the worst part. It was a delighted one, the laugh I had spent two years trying to earn on purpose, and I had finally landed it by being publicly dismantled by a marimba.
I did the only thing left to do. I answered the call. It was my grandmother, who calls every Sunday, and who opened, as she always does, at parade-ground volume.
"WHY DO YOU SOUND LIKE THAT? ARE YOU IN A HOSPITAL?"
"I am in a bookstore, Amamma."
"GOOD. BUY SOMETHING RELIGIOUS."
When I hung up, Meera was standing at the bottom of the stairs with her arms crossed, the confident back nowhere in sight. "Who were you talking to before your grandmother?" she asked. "Because the screen was dark. I could see it from up there."
"Ashish," I said, with dignity.
"There is no Ashish."
"There is no Ashish," I agreed.
What was supposed to happen next was mutual polite death, two people nodding and backing away into their separate decades. What actually happened is that she bought me a filter coffee at the place next door, and we sat with the awkwardness like a third guest at the table, and somewhere in the second coffee... the guest left without saying goodbye.
The confident back turned out to belong to her cousin, in town for a wedding. I did not ask why that information improved the taste of the coffee. She did not ask why I had staged a phone call rather than say hello. We both knew both answers.
She told me she had read something I wrote during those eleven months, an essay about why safe poems lose, on a site we both used to read when we were together. "You wrote a whole essay about risk," she said, stirring her coffee slowly, the way she does when she is about to be right. "And then you hid behind a dead phone in a bookstore."
She was not being cruel. She was being accurate, which between the two of us had always been the more dangerous thing.
I went home that evening and lined up my awkward social moments like suspects, the fake calls, the sudden fascinations with my shoes, the abrupt interest in menus I had already memorized. Every one of them was the same moment wearing different clothes: a person I had feelings about appears, and I perform a version of myself that needs nothing from anyone.
The fake call was not a reflex. It was a policy.
I had been running it for years, and it had cost me more conversations than I could count, including, possibly, some of the last good ones I might have had with her back when we were still an us.
Here is the part I did not expect... We are not back together. This is not that story, and I have stopped auditioning for it. But we are something now, two people who can sit in the same coffee shop on purpose, who forward each other terrible poems, who show up. There is no tidy shelf for that. I have gone looking, read half the poems about memory ever written, and the closest I can come is this: some people move out of your future and into your past, and if you are very lucky, they stop by.
A month later I wrote about the marimba. The whole scene, the dark screen, the invented Ashish, my grandmother demanding to know if I was hospitalized. I put it up where strangers could see it, filed it under new beginnings because there was no category called deserved humiliations, and Meera left a comment that said only, "Ashish deserved better." He did. He was a good man. I made him up, and even I thought so.
I changed my ringtone that night. Not to something quieter. To something louder, an old Kishore Kumar song my grandmother approves of, so loud that there is no pretending the phone is anything other than exactly what it is.
It went off last week in a silent office, in the middle of a meeting, a full orchestra of 1972 erupting from my pocket. Twelve heads turned. And I picked it up in front of all of them, unhurried, a man holding nothing in his hand but a phone that was actually, gloriously ringing.
"Amamma," I said. "No. I am not in a hospital."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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