Mother Calling

Wish your father a happy birthday, my mother said repressively as she handed the phone over to my dad. This was 20 years ago, they had retired to the little hill town in which they lived and I was working in Mumbai; she was calling at 10.01 pm to take advantage of the quarter STD rates that started at 10. I gave a guilty start, I had been planning to skive off work the next day and go camping, could I have possibly forgotten my father's birthday in the melee?

A half hour conversation later, it turns out my mother had simply swallowed up 24 hours by mistake and advanced my fathers birthday by a day, but absolutely forbade me from mentioning the fact to Daddy. "After all beta, the cake and halwa were both made and eaten today for his birthday, please do not enable him to get a double dose tomorrow — his blood sugar is through the roof."

She also extracted from me the fact that I was doing a bunk the next day, that I was going off with some people she hadn't heard of, spent some time rooting for biographical details of the dramatis personae involved, asked directly how much they earned in the present and what their projected future earnings might be (in the event that I were to decide to marry one or more of them on the campsite), issued some dire warnings about "knowing my limits" (may I just say that for many years my mother tried to make me and "my limits" BFFs, but she didn't exactly er...succeed fully) and assured me several times that God was (despite my malingering, non limit knowing, father-birthday-forgetting ways) watching over me because she had expressly instructed Him to.

Twenty years later, the truth can finally be revealed. All mothers at the other end of a telephone line acquire a strange melange of superpowers - they can sense when a crime is in the works, swoop in, issue instructions to prevent it, make you feel guilty about an infraction yet to be committed, gather random intelligence, conduct specific probes, give life advice, cover themselves with piety, and change the Gregorian calendar to suit their needs. And do it at a quarter of the rates the government or telecom companies would ideally like to extract from them for this.

The maternal phone call is an institution, one that we spend the first twenty five years of our life trying to skid out of. It is the equivalent of a brain suck through a probe inserted in ones behind. (And about as comforting, at either end). It manages to infuriate, incense, madden and exasperate. It's a trick, like Draupadi's sari — a never ending affair, one in which the best recourse is to make oneself comfortable, get a sandwich, a drink and a pension plan and settle in for the long haul. A mother calling is a weather system, arrangements to manage it can be made, but escape is not an option.

Funnily enough though, escape isn't even what's on anyone's mind. Because in direct proportion to the rolling eyes that "Mum calling" flashing on the cellphone engenders, there is also comfort. There's joy, reassurance, reaffirmation. There's a palpable connection to the home or the world and one's sure place in it that's been left behind. As a flip side to the ongoing deep cover intelligence gathering that is the main purpose behind the telephone call, there's the sweet certainty that no one is more interested in one's narrative than one's mother, and her very curiosity ensures that she's a captive audience who can't or won't disappear randomly.

A mother at the other end of a telephone line is equal parts priest and scandal sheet, confessor and shrink, doctor and chef, anchor and lifeline. There's an endless supply of homespun wisdom, eating tips and some jadi-booty type remedy for everything from a career splutter to a broken heart, on tap.

There's always some dressing down on the menu, from not exercising enough, ("you're more intelligent than I am, why do I have to tell you this?") to exercising too much ("no one likes the stick look, khaate peetey ghar ke toh lago"), some snippet from the news which needs to be discussed urgently, a pep talk in disguise for when the maternal instinct determines a jackboot to ones posterior is a medical necessity and for dessert, there's almost always some random neighbourhood or family gossip that's sure to make one feel intellectually or morally superior. (Till the next phone call, when another snippet is sure to make one feel the exact opposite.)

Show me a phone call with a parent that doesn't have some elliptical ferreting about the state of ones significant relationships and some laser guided precision surgical techniques to extract information when elliptical ferreting fails and I will show you a phone call from a father ("Hello, beta, all well? Health good? Watching cricket? Filed your taxes? Speak to your mother.")

One might assume that as the years go by, the peculiar quality that makes a mother's phone call a mother's phone call may abate, but it absolutely doesn't. The balance may switch subtly, the check on the metrics of emotional, physical, financial and dietary well-being may now be conducted on both sides. But no matter who you are, and how you're currently faring in the Life Vs You battle we all wage everyday, there's one place where you will be completely nanga, and made to feel like an errant school child, a blithering dithering idiot, an all conquering superhero, and the only person who can save the world, all rolled into one. And THAT'S the true worth of the maternal phone call.