Dialling up the nostalgia: Poonam Saxena on the rotary-dial telephone

What a thing it was: an object to marvel at in the home, a medium of drama in films and books. How strange that now, when we can call any time, we seldom talk.

I was clearing out an old cupboard the other day, and among other bits of flotsam, I discovered an old, clunky, black rotary-dial phone.

It looked like something out of an ancient past (which, in a way, it is). It was also a trigger, unleashing a flood of memories and a collage of scenes from old Hindi films and novels.

“Phone songs” have always been popular. The best-known is still probably the cute number Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon (Kiya Hai Vahan Se Telephoon), from the 1949 film Patanga. There was also the sensuous Maine Ek Khwab Sa Dekha from Waqt (1965), where Sunil Dutt, lying in bed in a nightsuit, and Sadhana, reclining on a circular, pink bed in her own home, sing sweet nothings to one another across the distance that separates them.

For lovers who couldn’t find a way to be alone, the telephone offered a rare intimacy, especially if the device in use wasn’t the family one plonked in the centre of the hall, but rather (oh, joy) a private extension one could use in the comfort of one’s room.

Either way, it was a common phone line, of course, so even a conversation with a classmate could be fraught with peril. I remember devising an elaborate code language with my school friends, so that no one listening in or passing by would be privy to our secrets. (I realise now that the code was in fact a dead giveaway that something silly was afoot!)

All this, of course, was if one had a telephone connection at all. These were very hard to get. One filled out an application, waited a long time, visited government offices to fruitlessly ask: When will I get my line?

This made the phone a precious item, even a status symbol.

In his darkly funny, surreal 1977 Hindi novel about the film industry, Scene: 75, Rahi Masoom Raza (who also wrote the dialogue for the 1980s TV serial Mahabharat) writes about how possessive people were about these devices. Bholanath Khatak, a bill collector with futile Bollywood dreams, who has been elevated to assistant sales supervisor at a private company, has a phone at home, which makes him feel superior to everyone else in his Bombay housing society. So jealously does he guard his status symbol that he locks it and won’t even give his wife the key.

Meanwhile, in Rajendra Yadav’s novel Sheh Aur Maat (1956), set in Bombay, the telephone plays a not-unimportant role in the start of a new romance. A college girl named Sujata is slowly falling for a writer named Uday, only to have his chawl roommate tell her that Uday exclusively makes friends with people who have phones. He can’t have extended chats from public call booths because there’s usually a queue. So this is how he chooses his friends. Indeed, when he visits Sujata at her parents’ home, he immediately asks to use their phone and has a long conversation with someone.

Trunk calls were even more of an event. One couldn’t just pick up the phone and dial an outstation number (that came later). In the early years, one had to call the telephone exchange and “book a call”. There was an almost ceremonial vocabulary around this momentous occasion: trunk calls, lightning calls, PP (particular person; the person one specifically wanted to speak to).

In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s brilliant comedy Chupke Chupke (1975), trunk calls fly thick and fast in the first half hour. Prashant (Asrani), who lives in Bombay, gets a trunk call from his friend Parimal (Dharmendra) in Allahabad. As soon as the call is connected, he starts yelling, “Hello! Haan! Prashant!” Dharmendra promptly yells back, “Haan! Main hoon! Parimal!”

Soon after this high-decibel back-and-forth, Haripad (played by David) also books a trunk call, again from Allahabad to Bombay. Getting a trunk call is an event of some importance, so when Raghavendra (Om Prakash) receives this call, he calls his wife into the room. The two men converse with each other at the tops of their voices (naturally!), in full view of this concerned and curious audience of one, punctuated by many bouts of “Hello!? Hello!?”.

All this seems comical now. But here’s the irony — having acquired the freedom to talk to anyone, at any time, in complete privacy and convenience, at almost no cost, there seems to be an aversion to calling at all. The ringing of a phone is considered an intrusion. Why talk if you can message?

I am told that if you call without first messaging, it had better be a dire emergency.

I guess I’ll just go back to clearing out my cupboard!

(To reach Poonam Saxena with feedback, email poonamsaxena3555@gmail.com)