True Tales

In the 1980’s when our son attended school in Mussoorie, India at Guru Nanak’s Fifth Centenary School, it was impossible to communicate with him except by mail or actually getting on a plane and flying over there. We were scraping by financially those first few years so we relied heavily on the postman and the little blue aerograms he sent regularly. The first two-and-a-half years he was there I didn’t hear his voice except for a fifteen minute tape recording my husband brought back in 1984.

When the school moved to Dehra Dun, we would make arrangements for him to call us collect from The President Hotel. We’d answer, then he’d hang up and we’d call right back. It was a fifty/fifty chance we’d connect again. Often we got a recording of an operator speaking Hindi, which we deduced meant the phone lines were all taken and we’d have to keep trying in hopes we’d get to him before he’d gone to the bazaar or to get tikkis at his favorite restaurant. The times we did get through the lines were alternately filled with static, constantly cutting out or abruptly disconnecting. Many times you could clearly hear the conversation of another party on an adjoining line.

The most common of all reception difficulty though was simply very poor reception, the voice on the other end of the wire so faint, as if you were speaking through two tin cans. We were frequently reduced to shouting. The times of these calls was usually around twelve or one in the morning to allow for the time difference. We were living in Guru’s House, an ashram with twenty people, where most everyone got up for sadhana at four a.m. The quarters were tight and the walls thin. So there we’d be, with a rare opportunity to speak with our son thousands of miles away, it’s the middle of the night, and I’d be screaming at the top of my lungs, “What do you mean you don’t have any underwear left?”

Just a couple of years ago our son (now grown) spent some time in Dehli and I was always amazed at how I could pick up the phone, dial the number direct and get him on the line immediately, hear him as clearly as if he was in the next town over. Well, okay, nine times out of ten it worked that way. It is still India after all.

August, 2004