The Voice on the Phone

Every night at ten, Vivek Kulkarni's phone rang.

It rang the way it had rung for six years, three times a night on a good day, once on a bad one, and it never rang for him. It rang for the person he was supposed to be. His mother, in Kolhapur, called at ten to ask whether he had eaten. His wife, Neha, called at a quarter past, from Nagpur, to tell him what the children had done, what the school had said, what his mother had said to her, and what he was going to do about it. His daughter Ira called at half past, if the homework was finished. His son Yash called at twenty to eleven, to say goodnight in the small, sleepy voice of a boy who was eight years old and meant it.

Each call was the same length: four minutes. Vivek knew, because he sometimes watched the clock on the wall while he talked.

"Have you eaten, beta?"

"Yes, Aai."

"What did you eat?"

"Dal, rice. Some sabzi."

"You are getting thin. I can hear it in your voice."

"It is the phone, Aai."

He always said that. It is the phone. The phone made him thin, and tired, and far away. The phone was the reason his voice sometimes went quiet in the middle of a sentence and took a while to come back.

He did not say what he was doing, in the four minutes between one call and the next. He sat in the plastic chair at the small table in the kitchen of a one-bedroom flat on the fourth floor of a building in Kharadi, Pune, with his plate in front of him, and he ate whatever he had cooked, or bought, or forgotten. Sometimes it was nothing. Sometimes he ate a banana and said it was dal.

He was forty-one years old.

He had worked at the same company for fourteen years. It was one of those large software firms with a glass building and a logo that people in his village recognised, and a title for him that his father told relatives with great pride: Senior Manager, Delivery. It meant that he woke at six, and by seven he was on the first of the day's calls with a team in Austin, a team in Bengaluru, and a client in Frankfurt who did not believe that Diwali was a real reason to postpone anything. It meant he sat in meetings until nine at night and answered messages until midnight. It meant that when something went wrong, at any hour, anywhere in the world, the phone that rang in his pocket was the phone that rang for him.

And still, at ten, he took his mother's call. And at a quarter past, his wife's.

He kept everyone happy. That was the phrase he used for it, inside his own head, the way another man might say I look after the accounts. He kept his mother happy by calling. He kept his father happy by going home twice a year and touching his feet. He kept his wife happy by paying every bill on the first of the month, by agreeing with what she said, by not answering back. He kept his children happy by never, never letting them see a single crack.

It had been six years since he had seen his flat without at least one person on the other end of a phone.

It had been three years since he had known what it was to sleep more than five hours.

He did not think of himself as a sad man. He thought of himself as a man who was busy.

---

Ira's call came on time that Tuesday. She was eleven, and she spoke to him with the brisk, slightly formal courtesy of a girl who had decided that her father was someone one had to handle.

"Hi, Papa."

"Hi, Ira. How was school?"

"Fine."

"Just fine?"

"Fine." A pause. "Mama said you are not coming for Diwali."

"I am. I said I am. I will come on the twelfth."

"Mama said you have to go to Kolhapur first."

"For two days. Then I will come to Nagpur."

"Mama said," said Ira carefully, "that last time also you said two days."

He closed his eyes.

"Ira, listen. Papa is doing his best. You know that."

"I know." Her voice was very small. "I know, Papa. I only wanted to say. In the class, everyone's father came to the Annual Day. Yash's also. Only mine did not."

"I was in a client meeting. I told you."

"I know," said Ira. "I know you told me."

There was a long silence on the line, the sort that a child produces when she has said the true thing and does not know what to do with it next.

"Papa?"

"Yes, beta."

"Nothing," she said. "Goodnight."

She hung up. He sat there with the phone in his hand for a long time. The clock on the wall said 10:33. The next call was due at 10:40, from Yash.

He did not cry. He had trained himself out of it years ago, the way you train a limb to stay still. He simply sat, in the kitchen of an empty flat, and counted the tiles on the floor, and waited for the phone to ring again.