Mobile waala pyaar

She is a 21-year-old student, he a model. She has four Facebook ids and two WhatsApp profiles. Last summer, an unlikely love affair bloomed across the campus lawns of Banaras Hindu University and the modelling studios of Mumbai. Shilpa* fell violently in love with the six-packer, the sort of heady rush which is unconcerned with geographical distances. Texts, emojis and photos were exchanged feverishly. She got her friend to take pictures, wearing just her underclothes. Pose, click, click again, choose and send. Two blue ticks on the WhatsApp screen. He had seen the photos.

He made a plan to visit her. She was ecstatic, making lists of all her favourite haunts in Varanasi. But the meeting never happened. He called her and cancelled, his father was unexpectedly arriving from London. Caught in half-truths, heartbreaks and arguments, the affair fizzled out. Was it ever the real deal, she wonders now, and will probably never know.

A few years back, in a school essay on ‘Cell phone and Youth’, 20-year-old Rizwana, also from Varanasi, wrote eloquently on how life had changed for their generation. “I scored a nine out of 10 in the essay,” she says with pride. “There was a time when I would wake up to the sound of my grandmother’s reedy voice ringing through the house. Then I’d look at the pictures of gods, mutter a quick prayer. Now, I wake up to vibrations, the phone always under my pillow. The first thing I do is check for messages,” she wrote in her essay. Phone in hand, the online world on her screen, there always looms the possibility of many friendships and, perhaps, even love.

India has 900 million mobile subscribers, 117 million smartphone users, and 213 million mobile internet users, which means 77 out of 100 people wield mobiles currently. A seven-country survey released in June reveals that 74 per cent Indians sleep with their cellphones, many take their phones into showers, and quite a few are willing to give up sex (for a weekend) to hold on to their phones. Hand-written forms of communication have been replaced by 160-character SMSes, and social networks and WhatsApp groups have rendered irrelevant the confidantes in whom we once confided our deepest, darkest secrets.

The cellphone gave us new freedoms of privacy and anonymity, of being online and always available, of oversharing and falling in love. It also gave service providers the nerve to advertise chatting apps with cheeky campaign lines — ‘No point saying I love you if there are no witnesses’, and ‘All our lives we’ve been told not to talk to strangers’. It is this freedom that 20-somethings Harshad, Naved and Shakir exercise, sitting astride cycle-rickshaws at their Sunday baithak in Chandni Chowk, shooting ‘blackmailing videos’ of each other, flirting with their lady loves, whose messages they check every few minutes. It is this freedom that our domestic help exerts when her mobile blares Dolafzon ki hai dil ki kahani and her latest boyfriend calls. It is the sound of freedom, and of love.

Nine years ago, Sunayna* was working in the credit card division of a bank in Delhi. Just out of college, this was a part-time job where she took calls from harried customers and patiently told them about new schemes and cards. Dev* was one of them. When they discovered they shared a language, Bengali, the official communication turned personal, more familiar. He replaced the bank’s helpline number with hers. Slowly, a relationship began to blossom. They spent hours talking to each other, often through the night. “I shared a room with my mother and brother. I spoke softly, mostly I would just listen to him. Sometimes, the sun would come up before we would hang up,” says Sunayna, who is now married to Dev.

Nothing cements a relationship more than a covert conversation held in hushed tones and interspersed with laughter. Love affairs progress, tiffs break out, and shayari happens, aided by the luminous mobile phone. But not all mobile- waala pyaar have happy endings.

Take the case of X and Y. Holed up for the last month at the Love Commandos’ secret shelter in Delhi, the couple from Udaipur district have sought protection from their families. Theirs was an office romance. When a vacancy opened up at X’s firm, he made calls to all the candidates who had applied for the job. He fell for Y at once, “ unki awaaz bahut achchhi lagi (I liked her voice a lot)”. Y got the job, and for months they sat across each other in office not saying a word. At 5pm every day, they would return to their respective homes, pick up the mobile and talk. For a long time, they didn’t meet outside work, their courtship unfolding one call at a time. Last year, X and Y got married. Having run into family trouble since then, they’ve turned to Love Commandos for help.

“Facebook sepyaar shuru hota hai, aur phone pe prem ki khidki khulti hai (Romance starts with Facebook. And the window of love opens on the phone),” says Sanjoy Sachdev, chairman of the organisation that helps runaway couples. In the five years of its existence, Love Commandos claims to have dealt with more than 40,000 cases. “And almost all of them began with the mobile,” he says. It seems that the main protagonist of the “love revolution”, as the Love Commandos call it, is not a person or religion but the mobile phone.

(*Some names have been changed.)