Call me on the landline

I may be one of the very few people in Dubai who have a landline phone in every room. Why we have a landline is still a mystery to me because no one ever calls us on that instrument, except of course, my mother-in-law and the silly courier guy. 

The quiet of a lazy, summer afternoon on a Saturday is usually broken by the March of the Toreadors from the opera Carmen, where this beautiful gypsy girl … anyway, why we set this ringtone for our landlines is beyond me.

The music is at once moving and melancholic and I wake up with a start from a much-deserved nap and desperately shut off the phone, but the one in the next room still continues with the march. Boom, boom, go the drums as the strings wail softly.

For some reason there is a lag of a minute or two between the phones in our rooms and we have to listen to the music in the living room even as I shut off the one in the bedroom. 

‘Hi’, says my mother-in-law. No wait, that’s not correct. My mother-in-law has never said ‘hi’ to anyone in her life.  What she does is usually jump into the conversation without any preliminaries.

“The driver is a crook,” she says. “I am sure he siphons off the petrol from my car for the van he rents out. Do you know how much I pay for petrol? I don’t go out much except to the corner park for a walk in the rose garden. I think I will cut his lunch break to 30 minutes.” 

The good thing about speaking with my mother-in-law is that you do not need to respond. As I lie with my mouth open and snoring, my mother-in-law continues: “The last time the crook took the car for servicing, I had to shell out a huge sum. He said the filters needed changing”

Suddenly, she asks out of the blue:  “How often do you change your filters?  Please calculate this for me. If I give him Rupees 800 and ask him to drive me to Dualat Khan from Safdar Jung, how many litres will the car consume?”

Wind direction

All the talk about calculations in my somnambulant state, reminds me of a riddle which was popular during my school days. Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, is travelling to the south of India in a train. The wind is north-westerly and is touching 35 knots. He opens the window and looks out. The question is: in which direction does his hair blow?

The courier guy on the other hand invariable gets lost in The Gardens and always calls on the landline though my wife gives my mobile number and hers.  And he always calls when nobody is at home.    

“I called you yesterday but nobody was home,” he says with a sorrow-filled voice as if we had ruined his day. “Why didn’t you call me on my mobile phone. We all go out to work or school during the day,” I tell him patiently. “I was already near your home so I called on the landline,’ he says. 

My wife does not wish to cut off the landline though I have pleaded with her. “Don’t you remember how difficult it was getting a line in the first place,” she reminds me.
The other ridiculous thing is that the phone in the bedroom is a Skype phone, but since everybody, meaning my mother-in-law can’t be bothered to go through the process of making a low-cost call, we use it as a regular phone.

The only other call we get on the landline is from a mystery caller who invariably calls in the middle of the night to tell us that we won a million dirhams.