March 08, 2009

Most people respond to phone calls with the time-honoured casual greeting of “hello?” On the occasion that my mother got her very first mobile phone call, her immediate response was a rather panicky, “Kuch baj raha haye?” When she realised, however, that it was her new little companion, she exclaimed, “It’s ringing! What do I do?” This isn’t eccentric though. You see mobile phones were a new phenomenon to have hit the middleclass, and few apart from the younger generation were tech-savvy enough to welcome these little widgets with open arms.

I remember those countless attempts at reasoning with my mum as she poured over her little red phone diary, always searching for one phone number or the other: “Ammie, why don’t you just use your phone to store the numbers? You won’t misplace anything in there.” The response I used to get was one of absolute disregard followed by a ‘hmph!’ and another tortuous rustle of old diary pages without an upward glance.

Despite our ceaseless efforts though, Ammie refused to learn to put the phone to good use. And so it was our daily ritual — my brother’s and mine — to punch in any phone numbers and press the ‘call’ button every time mom had to make a phone call.

At social occasions as well, a similar preordained ritual would follow when old acquaintances would come up to exchange phone numbers: we would quickly whip out our mobile phones and punch in their details. Then we would devote a full five minutes to mom as she sifted through her purse to fish out her little red notebook and a ballpoint, alphabetically make her way down the letters to the appropriate initial and then make scrupulous notes while we dictated the contact details of our relatives.

We had come to accept the fact that Ammie would never change; she was just not designed to adapt to modern technology. She did not need the hassles of carrying around these modern gadgets or fingering her exciting little laptop or browsing the Internet, just like her countless peers who had more important things to do in life.

The day before I was to leave for England, Ammie took out that little red notebook from her purse for the umpteenth time to make sure that she had my new phone number correctly jotted down. “Make sure you call on the landline when you reach there,” she said once again as we packed my suitcases. I promised to call every day without fail. The next day, I was gone.

Here in England though, it has been more than six months hence. My new job only allows me to call my mother over the weekends. Sometimes, I even forget to do that because I am “too busy socialising” or “doing house chores.” Other times, I am just “too tired to call” or “the time difference is too inconvenient.” Karachi during such instances becomes a distant reverie and it is easier to forget.

Once again now, it is another day on the job, another evening out with new found friends. As we laugh and chat loudly, my mobile phone throbs and bleeps, jolting me out of my capricious little bubble. It is an SMS from Pakistan; and not just any SMS, it’s from my mother! “Look I can SMS now. Why have you not called?”

And just like that, Ammie bridges the timeless distances between us with a handful of words. Soon after, I call her and learn that it took her a good three days of practise to get it just right; now she is all around me, keeping track of everything I do.

A week later, I find her in my email box, asking about my day; apparently, she has been working on her computer skills with my brother the whole of last month. And today, she is asking me about a “very interesting community called Facebook” and “Tum chat par kis waqt aao gi?”

Because you see, sometimes in this cold country — where children forget their parents and the wondrous places they originally come from — even too little becomes too much to do. And then ordinary women like my mother — who “cannot adapt to modern technology” — do extraordinary things out of love to put the world back in order.

This is fantastic, I tell myself, it will be so much easier for mom to be on top of her contacts list. So I ask her, “Ammie, I need Mamu’s phone number. Can you look it up in your phone and give it to me?” Ammie pauses and then says, “Let me get my red diary.” Perhaps some things will never change after all. So just like the old times, I hold the line for my mother.