LIFE AND TIMES Sudha Devi Nayak
There can be no worse irritant than a constant ring
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Can there be anything more perniciously insistent than a phone ringing? What can hound you out of your pleasant morning slumber, or even at the dead of night, except for the incessant trilling of this God-forsaken device!
Yet, I must confess, it can be a mesmerizing, spellbinding means to get you hooked on to constant chatter that reduces the carefully prepared dish to cinders in the kitchen, gets the water tank overflowing, and the geyser working overtime, and in the end take an inflated electricity bill.
Not to speak of the Boss who is gnashing his teeth to extinction because there is the earth-shaking decision to take and he just cant get you on line, long distance. Neither can you finish the book you have been trying to read to a deadline because it is not yours, nor write that bit of immortal prose that has been eluding you and requires calm reflection.
There can be no worse irritant than a constant ring when you are descending from an aircraft, trying to collect your baggage from the baggage carousel or even trying to fill up those immigration forms.
Keeping it on silent mode is dangerous as you might just miss that all-important call which would perversely come at that critical juncture. There is no escape from friends, foes, progeny, spouse, colleagues, boss through this damnable device — as everyone around you feel they have a lien on your wretched life. In public places, meetings, social do’s, there is a medley of ring tones similar and dissimilar making for a cell-fusion that is utter confusion.
To illustrate a case in point, my brother rings up with a litany of his woes that take up equal proportions of my time and patience followed up by another call from his wife with a list of her travails. The two lists seem irreconcilable and in the end the only victim is my patience.
Hardly have I recovered from these calls when my sister abroad calls, wanting an update on everything taking place in the immediate as well as the extended family. After I fill her in with all that has taken place since I last spoke to her, my other sister rings up. Hearing of the earlier call, she wants to know every detail of the conversation that took place, liberally interspersing it with her comments.
My children, not being able to get through, complain vociferously that I have abandoned them and I no longer care for them, and it becomes my bounden duty to reassure them that I have not, and assuage their feelings.
Meanwhile, though a Sunday, my colleague rings up saying an urgent meeting has been called and I should be there bang at 4pm, with a power point presentation ready to take the boardroom by storm. Cursing my lot, I look up at the wall clock that looks down wanly to say that while it has been ticking away relentlessly all I did was talk, talk.
But then, how you miss it, and worry yourself sick if you misplace it or worse lose it, or run out of charge and the charger is nowhere in sight or the signals are off.
Where is that eternal peace you had craved for, the salvation of unbroken sleep and dreams? You worry about a hundred things, imagine all kinds of horrors happening to your near and dear ones … and in fact the world can come to an end with a planetary collision and you wouldn’t ever know a thing. The frantic efforts to get it back and put life again on track, you feel, is infinitely worse than millions of those disturbing rings you had detested!
