Hold on to, or free, all those ghosts in machine?
This may not be a top-of-the-mind question during a pandemic, but it’s one that’s been niggling me: What does one do with the mobile number of a person who has passed away, a number who remains a ‘contact’ within one’s grasp?The answer should be simple enough. Since the phone is primarily an instrument of communication, and given that the person is no longer alive, there is no reason – never mind way — one can communicate with her or him. And even if one does believe in the afterlife, any connection that one may wish to make with the dead is not via the mobile phone.So, with the ‘contact’ now permanently unavailable, what is the need to further clutter up one’s phone book? As it is, storing innumerable, needless numbers – many of them quite often responding with an ‘Out of use’ or ‘Does not exist’ message – deserve frequent spring cleaning. But having the number of someone who is now beyond any signal is more than cluttering. It can be, well, unnatural.But humans do have a habit of clinging on to superfluous, pointless objects. Some out of sheer indecision. Some because of an insecurity over not being able to find something, if and when required.Most people, barring compulsive discarders, store piles of papers, notebooks, diaries, trivia, besides gigabytes of digital files in the belief that these will come handy ‘one day’. It almost never does. So, why not junk these, and remove those ‘contacts’ with no one at the other end?Unless the phone of the departed has been passed on to someone else, the number will be discontinued. So, why this quandary? In this pandemic world, with death becoming so personal and palpable, this dilemma is overpowering. People are constantly being pulled asunder by guilt and reason.The fear of remorse is the primary cause behind fingers being unable to press ‘delete’. By erasing a number, one asks oneself, will we obliterate the deceased from our memories? Can we not wait some more time for the memory to become distant?But buying time reflects indecision. Postponing a decision hardly disentangles one from the deadlock. One will face the same set and sub-sets of questions when another ‘contact’ goes.This clash – Shall I remove it? Shall I let it be (for a little more while)? — is grounded in personal vulnerabilities. With death in the time of Covid not discriminating, not letting one keep pace with the speed of disease-to-death, there is no knowing when we, too, can become a ‘contact’ in someone’s phone waiting to be deleted. By pushing back our decision to delete a ‘contact’, are we protecting ourselves from oblivion?The ‘contact’ is the mere tip of an iceberg of memories that lie beneath the surface, rarely intruding while we navigate life’s choppy waters. On getting an ‘opportunity’ to halt briefly and look back, a sudden death — of a family member, of a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance whose number you once fed into your phone – unfurls memories. Of past meetings, past conversations, last exchanges.The mobile is, for so many people, life’s primary gadget that prompts our recollections. Even outside the photo albums and audio files it stores, the phone has become the keeper of our memories. Without the phone, who or what will help us take our jaunts into our past?But it is time to resolve this ‘Will I? Won’t I? Shall I? Shouldn’t I?’ predicament. We are a product of our memories, the way the essence of each civilisation is its — recollected and/or invented — memory. True, a lot of human conflict takes place over the selective distortion of memories and transposing them on to ‘history’. Collective memories may change because of politics. But personal memories are less easily alterable. They lie, for one, in the contents of our phones we choose to keep and those we choose to delete.
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