The lockdown, The phone & That friend

Auditory Hallucinations - It’s a real thing. Go on, Google it. And no... I don’t have them. I assure you I’m sane as of right now. Even though my mother never had me tested. Oh come on! Even you would think of following that though with this line.
I was introduced to the term auditory hallucinations somewhere in grade 11 I think. Yup, Grade 11 psychology. Don’t judge me for remembering text book stuff from grade 11, I already admitted to being a weird nerd child.

I was in Delhi then and living in a PG and studying for medicine. I had a cellphone. The small black Nokia one with a torch at its head and a boyfriend who was then in Pune. Ya, I was in love. The kind of love you think “only” you can provide and no one else in the world can love anyone the way you love your guy and all that. I swear if you haven’t experienced this kind of love when you were that age, you just missed out on the most innocent and unfiltered kind of love there is. My brother apparently still has a pillow from my Delhi days where I wrote his (the boyfriend’s obviously) name. Actually now that I think of it, it’s been some 15 years. My brother should really throw away 15 year old pillows.

Sorry, got carried away. Coming back to auditory hallucinations - A 15 year old girl, a cellphone, new found first love and a long distance relation. You do the math.

One or the other way, even with calls & texts costing a bomb those days, I was still stuck to it. If there was no call, I’d wait for it while looking at it (like you do at your screen when you want the wetransfer to upload faster. Suit yourself and believe if you want that your starring is speeding it up!)
I’d hear it ring even when it was switched off. (Ya, those days, I cannot remember exactly why but once a while people would turn off the cellphones. Or did my parents lie to me?)
I seriously looked at my cellphone more than I looked at myself in the mirror after I saw Preeti Zinta in Dil Chahta Hai & permed my hair. (There was only one photo and I destroyed it. Hah!)
So ya, at one point of time I had serious auditory ‘cellphone’ hallucinations. Or I was just a kid in love - one and the same actually.

Point being I remember that ringing very evidently even today (the fake one). So for the last few years, I have stopped being so crazy about the cellphone being on me at all points of times. (No I will NOT use an android and I’ll still sell my kidney to buy the iphone or in my case, keep repairing it even if I don’t care about it being on me at all points of time! Apple... are you reading already?!)
So its not just possible but very likely that my phone might stay in the bag which is in the car while I’m out scouting or it can stay in the house on charge while I’ve run down for an errand and so on and so forth. A lot of times it’s left in my bag which is kept in a trunk in the craft service table so my colleagues call up other colleagues around me to get me! Yup, true story. And no, I’m not proud of it.

I work in film production so that phone is kind of genuinely required to be on you at all times. It can break hell loose if you don’t answer a call, followed by a text message, a whataspp and then a call again which all came immediately seconds after the other by the way just when you put the phone away and not in the three hours that the phone was actually on you!
Ok you get the point and sure, I do get a lot of flak from my friends & family as well for not being on the phone when they called or for responding after a few hours and sometimes a few days. Alright relax, I’m working on it.

And then the lockdown.

Let me tell you something about this lock down. My extremely sweet parents and their care taker came to visit me for a few days and got stuck in the lockdown with me. So of the 2 bed rooms and the living room of my house, my dad took the living room, their caretaker took one bedroom and I took the smaller bedroom in the day. At night the caretaker and dad swaps. My dog and mom have all the 3 rooms in the day and their respective rooms in the night. If you didn’t get the above breakdown, don’t bother. It wasn’t important at all. It was just to say that I got the small bedroom for the lockdown so me and my phone both live here now :-p

And here begins our life’s problem!

Who is going to ignore whom? Who is going to get to whom faster? Will I check you 50 times in the day or will the phone ring 50 times in the day and I’ll check it maybe once or twice and respond to all together. (Haha... I wish I was that loved but no. I mean to say TOI notifications!)
Ok, you can say that I might be going a little bit insane if I’m having a war with my phone. But hey. If you are checking it 20 times a day for an update, a message, a call or a notification, so are you! (Ya, I know I’m cheap like this sometimes :-p)

For all those people in the country who I can reach out to and you are checking your phones an obnoxious number of times, hold on tight. It’s going to get tougher for a bit and then it’ll calm down. Like a withdrawal or a crush turning you down! But hold on really tight. It’s only just beginning. Yep. I’m super experienced that way. :-p

Use that phone and call someone. If you called ‘someone’ too many times, call someone else. Grab a book. Do 60 squats and get your dream thighs. Don’t rearrange your already arranged cupboard. Put on some music and jump. If its still getting damn difficult, call me. (It’ll be like the blind leading the blind but I get you and I’ll try). If you have friends who you know are anxious people, use that phone and call them. If they are aquarians, call them more! I know there is a ton of awareness & gratitude going around for a bunch of things and its wonderful to see so. But adults are stupid people. They say one thing and mean something else all together. The stupid ones do that a lot actually.

I’m not an influential millionaire. I have not been mentioned in the Times Magazine or the Forbes. But I might be all those things after the lockdown. So yeah... go on, take my advice. Call your anxious friends and ask them how many times do they check their cellphones. Or just ‘how you doing’ will also work. Actually that might work better than the cellphone question. If they aren’t sounding honest, check on them multiple times a week. It’s all in small observations and tiny gestures that relations are nourished and people flourish even in dreary times like these. Uff! I’m a poet and I didn’t know it!

Anxiety is internal. Its not a disorder always but it can get really heavy to handle. 30 days of isolation especially alone in a city without a warning can throw people out of mental balance and we won’t even know what happened. So speak. Whatever it is, don’t close yourself in just because you can.
Stay safe, stay sane, reach out, and get your mothers to get you tested if you have doubts. Hah! Yup, I had to do that again.

P.S Pic Courtesy : Nitin Parmar
Back Dated : 27th March 2020