Wrong Number, 1999
A misdialled call in Vijayawada, a night operator who knows every number by heart, and a year of talking after midnight.
The phone in our house lived in the passage between the kitchen and my parents’ room, on a crocheted mat on a wooden stool, and it had a lock on it.
Not a lock on the house, a lock on the phone. A tiny brass padlock through the hole of the number one on the dial, so the dial could not turn. My father had bought it from a shop in Besant Road after the STD bill of 1997, which nobody in our family discussed. He kept the key on the same ring as his scooter key. You could receive calls. You could not make them.
What my father did not know, and what I learned from a girl in my typing class, was that you could dial without the dial. You tapped the two little white buttons in the cradle, quickly, once for one, twice for two, and the exchange could not tell the difference. Ten taps for zero. It took patience. I had patience.
So on the night of the fourteenth of January, 1999, a little after eleven, with my mother’s blood pressure doing something frightening in the next room and my father on a bus back from Guntur, I sat on the cold floor of the passage tapping out the number of Dr Murthy’s nursing home, counting under my breath, and I got one tap wrong.
“Krishna Residency, good night.”
A man’s voice, calm, a little amused at the hour.
“Is this Murthy Nursing Home?”
“No, madam. This is a hotel. You’ve reached the switchboard.”
“Sorry. Sorry, wrong number.”
“Wait. Don’t hang up. Is somebody unwell?”
I don’t know why I told him. Perhaps because he asked properly, as if he wanted the answer. I said my mother was dizzy and her head was hurting and the tablets were not working, and my father was not home.
“Murthy Nursing Home is four-seven-six, three-one-two,” he said, without a pause. “But at night Dr Murthy doesn’t come. Call four-seven-four, nine-eight-eight. That’s his house. Tell his wife it’s urgent, she’ll wake him. She pretends to be strict but she isn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know a lot of numbers. Go, call. Your mother first.”
Dr Murthy’s wife was not strict. The doctor came on his Lambretta in a sweater over his banian, gave my mother an injection, told her to stop eating pickle with every meal, and went home. My father came back at two and never knew any of it.
The next night, at eleven, I tapped out the hotel number again. I told myself it was only to say thank you.
“Krishna Residency, good night.”
“It’s me. The wrong number. From last night.”
“Ah. How is your mother?”
“Better. She’s angry about the pickle.”
He laughed. It was a good laugh, low and surprised at itself. “Tell her the pickle is innocent. It’s always the salt in the rasam nobody suspects.”
“How did you know Dr Murthy’s home number?”
“I’m the night operator. Ten at night to six in the morning. Nobody calls a hotel at night except husbands checking on wives and wives checking on husbands, so I have a lot of time. I learned the directory.”
“The whole directory?”
“Not the whole thing. Doctors, chemists, police, the railway enquiry, Prasad Bakery because guests always want cake at midnight for some reason. Four hundred numbers, maybe.”
“That’s mad.”
“It’s a quiet job,” he said. “What’s your name?”
I thought about it. I was twenty-three. I was the only daughter of a man who padlocked telephones.
“No names,” I said.
“All right. Then you’re Wrong Number.”
“And you’re Night Operator.”
“It’s very dramatic,” he said. “Like a film. I like it.”
That was how it went, the whole of that year.
He worked six nights a week. On the seventh he was off, and I found that I hated Wednesdays. On the other nights I waited until my father’s snoring had found its rhythm and the street dogs had finished their argument, and then I sat on the floor of the passage with a shawl around me and tapped out the number. Local calls were cheap, and my father only ever checked the STD column on the bill. That was the miracle of it.
We talked about everything. I told him about my B.Com results, which were second class, and the typing institute where I was learning shorthand because my father said a girl with shorthand could always get a job in a government office. He told me about the hotel: the businessman in 204 who ordered the same plain dosa every night at two and never ate it, the honeymoon couple who fought about a cow, the time the whole third floor lost power and he had to calm forty guests by telephone, one after another, in four languages.
“You speak four languages?”
“Telugu, English, Hindi, and the Tamil a man learns in a hostel.”
In June, India played Pakistan in the World Cup in England, and we both stayed up, he at the switchboard with a little radio, I with my ear pressed to my uncle’s transistor that I had borrowed and hidden under my pillow.
“Did you see that catch?” I said afterwards.
“I heard it,” he said. “The commentator’s voice went up so high I thought he’d swallowed the microphone.”
He had his own way of describing things. When I asked what the hotel looked like, he told me how it sounded: the lift that sighed between floors, the kitchen boy who sang film songs flat, the particular squeak of the revolving door that meant someone tired had arrived. When I said the bougainvillea outside our gate had come out purple, he said, “Bougainvillea smells of nothing. I’ve never trusted it. Give me jasmine, at least it announces itself.”
Sometimes he asked me to describe the moon. I would go to the window at the end of the passage, stretching the cord as far as it reached, and tell him where it was over the Indrakeeladri hill, how much of it was there, whether it was the yellow kind or the white kind.
“White tonight,” I’d say. “Like the inside of a coconut.”
“Good,” he’d say. “Tell me again tomorrow.”
There were things he would not do.
In August I offered to write to him. I had very good handwriting, everyone said so, and I thought a letter would be something to keep.
“No letters,” he said, quickly.
“Why not?”
“Just. No letters. Promise me.”
I sulked for two days and did not call. On the third night I called and said, “Are you married? You can tell me. I’m not a child.”
He laughed, and then stopped laughing. “No. I’m not married. I promise you, Wrong Number, I’m not married and I’m not a smuggler and I’m not a film star in disguise.”
“Then why?”
“Because,” he said, “some things are better heard.”
I let it go. I was learning that with him there were doors, and he would open them when he chose, and pushing only made him go quiet. I was also learning, though I did not say it to anyone, not even to the girl in my typing class, that I listened for the click of the line at eleven the way some people listen for the temple bell.
By November the whole country was worried about the year 2000. The newspapers said computers would think it was 1900 and planes would fall out of the sky. My father withdrew some cash and kept it in the steel almirah under his veshtis, just in case.
“What will happen to your switchboard?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s older than computers. It’ll think it’s 1950 and carry on.”
There was a pause on the line, the kind that has something in it.
“Wrong Number,” he said. “Let’s meet.”
My heart did something undignified. “When?”
“New Year’s Day. The first day of the new century. Evening, six o’clock. Prakasam Barrage, the Vijayawada end, near the third lamp post from the corn seller.”
“How will I know you?”
“You won’t have to,” he said. “Don’t tell me what you’re wearing. Just come and stand near me and say hello. I’ll know your voice. I’d know it anywhere.”
“And if I’m too shy to say hello?”
“You’ve talked to me every night for a year,” he said. “You’re not shy. You’re only pretending, to keep it interesting.”
On the first of January 2000 the planes did not fall out of the sky and my father’s bank balance was exactly where he had left it. At half past five I told my mother I was going to my friend’s house, and took an auto to the barrage in my green silk half-saree that my mother had said was too good for an ordinary evening.
The barrage was full of people. Families, couples, children on their fathers’ shoulders, a man selling balloons shaped like fish. The Krishna was wide and brown and slow below us, and the sun was going down orange behind Indrakeeladri, and there was a smell of roasted corn and lime and chilli powder from the cart near the lamp posts.
I counted. Third lamp post from the corn seller.
There was a man standing there. Tall, thin, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, both hands resting on the iron railing. He was not looking at anyone. He was facing the river with his head a little tilted, as if listening to something far away.
He wasn’t looking for anybody. Nobody waiting for someone stands like that, facing the wrong way. So it couldn’t be him.
I walked past. I walked to the end and came back. I walked past again, slowly, my heart going like a typewriter. He did not turn. Every man who glanced at me was the wrong man, too old, too young, with a wife, with a moustache I could not forgive. At seven the lamps came on. At half past seven a policeman told me it was getting late for a girl alone. At eight I took an auto home and cried into my pillow so my mother wouldn’t hear, and told myself I had been a fool for a voice.
I did not call that night. I lasted until eleven o’clock the next night, and then I sat down on the cold floor of the passage and tapped out the number so hard the cradle rattled.
“Krishna Residency, good—“
“You didn’t come.”
“You came,” he said, at the same moment.
“I was there from half past five to nine. Third lamp post. You walked past me three times.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You walked past me three times,” he said again, softly. “Your anklet has a bell missing on the left side. It goes chin-chin-chin-tuk. Very irregular. It’s the first thing I ever heard about you that you didn’t tell me yourself.”
I sat very still on the cold floor.
“The man in the white shirt,” I said. “Facing the river.”
“I was facing the river because the river is noisy and the people were noisier, and I wanted to hear you coming. And you came. And you went. And I couldn’t run after a girl with a bad anklet through a crowd of four thousand people, Wrong Number. I’d have fallen into the Krishna.”
The doors. The letters. The moon. The cricket he had heard. The four hundred numbers learned by heart, because a man who cannot read a directory has to carry it somewhere.
“You can’t see,” I said.
“Not since I was nine,” he said. “I wanted to tell you. Every night I wanted to. And every night you described the moon so well I thought, one more night. Let her think I’m a smuggler for one more night.”
I laughed with my hand over my mouth and my eyes running, and on the other end of the line he laughed too, that low, surprised laugh, and somewhere down the passage my father turned over in his sleep and the springs of the cot complained.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Same place. Six o’clock. Face the river.”
“And you’ll say hello?”
“I’ll say hello,” I said. “And then I’ll tell you what the moon is doing. And then, Night Operator, you are going to tell me your name.”
On the third of January, at six o’clock, the third lamp post from the corn seller, I walked up behind a tall man in a white shirt, with my anklet going chin-chin-chin-tuk on the stone, and before I could say a word he turned around and smiled in exactly the right direction.
“Hello, Wrong Number,” he said.
The moon, for the record, did not come up at all that evening. It was the wrong week for it. So I described the river instead, and the corn seller, and the balloons shaped like fish, and when I had run out of things to describe, he told me his name was Sudhakar.