Of not so smart phones...

It is definitely an addiction. She’s smart, a lovely deep red, looks hot and fits in my hand perfectly. She throws none of the tantrums that an overstrung smart phone does. I mean you can actually hold her any which way and type messages to anyone while being driven at speed over potholed roads - try doing that with an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy and you will immediately understand what I mean. On top of that you don’t have to wave your hand or gesticulate in one fell swoop to answer or more importantly to disconnect the phone – all you have to do is click buttons normally and even emphatically if you so desire. Try being emphatic with a smart phone and all you get is a headache.

So my Blackberry is a thing of beauty and utility while my husband’s touch screen phone to me looks like an unmitigated disaster except for the games. It acts like something I’d give a kid and not something I would want to use while making vitally important calls. I simply cannot send a message on that thing to save my life. It is important to position your nails (I have nails) somewhere in the upper right quadrant of the numbers/letters on the screen if you actually want that number or letter to be typed. Who the hell has time for that? I would rather just use my thumbs and click away at high speed and get the message done rather than vexedly deleting every wrong letter I have managed to somehow get typed. Smart phones are really not very smart or they would come with buttons like any sensible piece of equipment.

The main advantage of using one of those touch-screen disasters is that the children have no interest in attacking my phone but instead make a beeline for my husband’s phone when they have had enough of cartoons and the laptops. My phone is fine for them to listen to songs on but gaming looks so ancient that I happily have had no reason to fear for my phone’s safety whereas my husband’s phone frequently freezes, hangs and locks up after the twosome’s loving ministrations. Such peace of mind cannot be purchased at any price, I assure you.

On top of all these wonderful features that come free with the smart phone, my major grouse is that it is really quite useless for a multitasking wizard like myself. I can answer the phone while doing almost anything. That however is solely under the assumption that it can be operated with one hand (please do not tell me about voice commands). So I click the answer button with one finger, prop the phone under my ear and get on with whatever chore I am performing at the moment. But when my husband is in the shower and yells at me to answer the phone while I am in the crucial stages of making that coconut fish curry, I have to first run and wipe both hands, do the weird swishy wave and attempt to cock the thing under my neck before trying to salvage the finely chopped onions for the tempering – invariably the call disconnects and the tempering gets messed up. If it were my little Curve, that would never have happened – happy fish curry, happy me would’ve been the only result.

Therefore I have decided to rename the smart phone to the ‘oversmart’ phone – smart when least needed and way ‘oversmart’ at all other times. Give me my non-smart phone any day!

This day...

He looks at me with eyes full of pain. I don’t notice the pain or I do, but I choose to ignore it. I am filled with anger fuelled by worry as always. “Why do you just sit there?” “Why can’t you show an interest in something?” “You aren’t a potato for god’s sake, say something!!?” “Stop that weeping – why can’t you just tell me what you feel!” I scream all of this and the pain hits me like a wave.

I don’t cry because I am mad. Mad at a fate that can gift me with a son I do not know how to handle. I worry insanely night and day about what it is he can do with himself. There are moments when I feel carefree but that is only because of one newfound friendship that makes me behave like a young girl after ages. When that ends, I’ll have to go back to being in pain nearly always yet again.

I am not untalented. And yet I have earned nothing for myself monetarily. All the years I spent in so many hostels at college were not of much use except to earn me the degrees I needed to be marriageable material. How could I work when there is no one else to be home for my son when he needed it? So yes I resent him for that as well. All this negative feeling pops up when the worry strikes me hardest. Otherwise I leave well enough alone and we are both reasonably happy.

I realize that life has no answers sometimes and the questions can be very tormenting. I also realize that there is no point beating one’s head endlessly on a wall – the wall’s still there and you have a blasted headache to top it all. And indeed on most days humour comes to my aid and I pull through. But there are always those days that I dread where I don’t see a chink of light in the gathering gloom; where I am swamped with the kind of fear only a mother knows; where I regret every single thing that I have done in my life – today perhaps is one such day. Tomorrow I will be alright – I shall see the shadows for what they are and glimpse the light behind it but for now, I am hard-pressed to simply get through this day.