My archaic phone diary.

 The inverter in my house wasn't working, there was an electricity failure. My mobile phone switched off and I was in a fix. "How do I make a call to the electrician without his number?", I was in trouble here. Nowadays, we seldom remember numbers as we've them saved in our phones. So, as earlier, we don't bother to recollect them.

"Ah! It must be in the phone diary ", I recall and there begins my search.

The brown coloured diary, where we were supposed to jot down name, address and phone numbers of our acquaintances, important contacts of shops, doctors, plumbers, electrician and the community helpers that we needed in times of emergency. That diary used to be in the drawer just below the landline telephone, in the living room.

Now, the landline telephone in the living room is no more there. We've a single landline unit in the kitchen. And there's no drawer underneath.

So where do I look for the dairy. I massaged my forehead and head in order to supply some extra blood to the brain, thinking, in case it works more promptly. "Brown diary...brown diary, where are you?", and I hoped it would reply, "Here I am, here I am, how do you do?". But no, I searched the living room, bedrooms, even the 'pooja ghar' cupboard, but my efforts turned futile.

Now, before it was evening and the natural light ditched me, I had to do the needful, as there was no batti at my place......Aur meri dimaag ki batti ekdum se jal gayi.... The 'store room', that's where you store everything when you don't need it anymore, but in a hope that someday you might. Ergo, today was that someday.

I entered the room, masked. There's always layers of dust in there. It's closed for most of the month, only opened while cleaning, yet I don't know how the dust gets in. Anyway, so this search team of me and my memory started the search operation.

Atlast, I found it. It was still brown, now faded though. I enthusiastically turned the pages, they seemed archaic. Luckily, the ink hadn't foresook me. It did it's job. And this antecedent object took me to a flashback. Old things always have stories attached.

There were all landline numbers of all my near and dear ones, hand written, of course. The name, address and numbers were written in a specific manner, alphabetically. For some addresses there were certain landmarks suggested, somewhere there was a drawing like a tiny map to reach a certain house. GPS, has made our lives simpler these days, I know, but remembering prominent signs was one thing we did previously.

When I read the phone numbers, I could recollect, me, dialing these, by heart, without peeping into these pages. How I blindly dialled numbers and called my loved ones. In emergency, numbers of doctors, nurses, school, colleges, neighbours or relatives, everything was down pat. We never goofed up or felt panic, because we knew verbatim.

This brown diary made me think how my memory isn't used at it's optimum now.  How we are very much dependant on technology and when something of this sort happens, we panic.

I dusted the diary properly, dialled the electricians number from the landline.I cleaned the diary and placed it back in the drawer of the living, where it originally belonged.

PC: Canstockphoto

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Old things are better than new things as they've got stories in them ~ Kami Garcia.

If you like my blog hit the heart button ♥️, there's a comment box for suggestions and comments, for more, keep following!!!