Hold the phone!

The year was 1998, and I had just got my first job as a sub-editor at an English language daily in Kolkata. The salary: Rs5,000/- It wasn't grand, but it meant financial independence, or so I thought until I found myself spending a good portion of what I earned on phone calls to my then-boyfriend in Pune. It was far more convenient to call from the PCO booth next door as its glass-fronted cabin afforded far more privacy than home, where the landline was placed right in the middle so everyone could hear when it rang. It also meant that everyone could hear you speak. My boyfriend and I would tie up to call by turns, deciding on a day and a time in advance. But it was always after 9pm, when the 'pulse rate' would drop from Rs7 to Rs4. Even so, a half-hour conversation – and what's a half-hour between sweethearts? – would cost a cool Rs120. If you called up even once a week, it meant Rs480 – nearly 10 per cent of what I earned. Our phone calls were forever see-sawing between expense and sentiment.

Today's generation, living in an era where one can reach anywhere in the world at the press of a button and where call rates have crashed to fractions of a rupee, will never understand how limiting too expensive phone calls were – and how liberating public call booths, or PCOs, were.

But for our generation, young in the 1990s, PCOs were a lifesaver. Unlike our parents, we weren't bound by the home telephone to keep in touch with each other. I could call mother from the market if I had forgotten to ask her something. She, in her time, would have had to make the long trudge back. I could make secret assignations over the pay-phone, spending just a one Rupee coin, and no one need ever know.

PCOs, in those days, like the mobile recharge-wallah nowadays, near-ubiquitous as thousands of poor, middle-class unemployed had jumped at the opportunity to start a small business, something that required low initial investment and guaranteed steady subsequent returns. "Uncle", the PCO booth owner I frequented, for instance, had tried his hand at several jobs before he opened a PCO. In the seven years or so I knew him, I saw him go from one phone-line on a makeshift table to three glass cubicles. Business was good, and so was the company it brought. Uncle and I would chat for hours about this and that – he soon became something of a relationship counsellor, someone I could speak to freely. It got so that I suspect his wife got a little jealous of our camaraderie. Towards the end, she'd always be there when I went to make or receive a call.

The mobile revolution was definitely a boon for all of us, but it's sure taken away the romance of the PCO.