Earlier this week, my father announced on our family WhatsApp group, that he had surrendered our landline number of over 30 years.

The response from my sister and I was swift. Well kind of, my sister lives in another time zone and responded after a few hours.

I felt bereft. Let down. Betrayed. Didn't a decision like this warrant some kind of family meeting? Were my parents allowed to just surrender our landline?

To be clear, I haven't called this number in years. I usually call my parents on their mobile phones, and it's almost always a WhatsApp video call. In fact, no one calls our landline anymore.

But surrendering it felt like a part of my childhood was gone. I know that's so over the top and unnecessarily sentimental, but this is my blog and I haven't written for a while, so I can do as I please.

Our landline was a reminder of simpler times, when phones were just phones. Nothing else. You could make calls and receive calls. Can you imagine that?

I remember getting that landline. I was in class 6 in Madras. Satellite TV had just come in that year. I had a pair of pink acid washed jeans and had slyly convinced my father to buy me a pair of Woodland Shoes for Rs. 3000 from the recently opened store. You were either Camp Bold and the Beautiful or Camp Santa Barbara. You either had a landline or you didn't. (Though of course this changed in a short span of time and landlines became commonplace.) But in those early heady days, ah the thrill, the feeling of superiority in announcing you had a phone at home. And then the thrill of writing that number on the back of Pooja Tandon's Geography Classwork Notebook. And then sitting by your phone when you got home, yelling out 'It's for me! It's for me!' when it finally rang.

I spent so much time by that phone. Hunched over it, talking in low tones so no one would hear what I was saying (nothing fascinating. Just the usual cribs about too much homework and why was so-and-so such a cow? And did this person really have a boyfriend in college? How scandalous! )

In later years when we got a cordless phone, I was freed from having to do this, and would take the phone into my room and shut the door. Sandhya and I would discuss the Mills & Boons we had read, comparing Penny Jordan's heroes to Sandra Marton's. Whether we preferred Italian counts or French businessmen. How we would never be so mousy and submissive as some of the heroines. Rajina would call me before every single exam in a heightened state of agitation. She hadn't studied enough. She had too many chapters left to cover. What should she study? What experiment would come? Was Boyle's Law important.

As a student of an all girls school, co-ed tuition centres brought the opposite sex into my life in a way they hadn't been present anymore. It was fine to exchange numbers because we were obviously only going to talk about studies and tests. God promise we did.

First crushes, first boyfriends, first break ups, first big fights with your best friend that you thought you'd never recover from (and which was far far worse than that first break up), first patching up with your best friend, prank calls - receiving and making, waiting for your sister to call every week from hostel, waiting for her to call from a country far away. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

So much waiting for the phone to ring.

I'm trying to think of why I'm so sad about the surrendering of this phone. Yes it's nostalgia, it's memories and all that. But I didn't really feel this way when my mother chucked all our cassette tapes out. Or I got rid of my walkman and disc man. Maybe because those things happened when I was younger, but this loss, at this stage of my life seems intolerable. As the world burns around us, I yearn for the past. It's reflected even in the books I've loved recently: Jerry Pinto's The Education of Yuri and Kamila Shamsie's Best of Friends. Books set in a time when I was young and things didn't seem so awful. (Though Shamsie's book is set in a time of great upheaval in Pakistan, but just reading about two teenage girls who love George Michael and read Jackie Collins made me feel comforted.)

I think of my own children now, and their mostly online existences. Online hangouts made common place by Covid-19. Discord communities where their lives and loves play out. Instagram DMs filled with memes and videos that convey how they feel. There's no sweet agony of waiting for them. Everything is instant. In the here and now.

When my boys come home from school and rush to join an hangout with their friends I yell, "Didn't you just talk to them at school? What can you possibly have left to say?" I hear my mother say those exact same words to a 13 year old me. Still in sweaty pinafore, braids unravelling, reaching for the phone.

I guess some things don't change.