Loose Connections

It has been decades now since one could snicker at someone caught out by the lack of loose connections. In the India in which I grew up, it was taken as a reasonable excuse for not being in touch to say you “couldn’t get through” on the phone. Telephones went periodically dead. Sometimes you could call out but didn’t receive calls, and at other times, you would get calls but couldn’t make them (prompting you to enlist the very first caller in making a complaint to the repair line); if you did get connected, it might be to an exasperated “wrong number,” and the very few pay phones that were around gave no guarantee of a voice in return for one’s rupee. In any case, most of the country’s residents had no phone at all. In the late eighties, PCOs—public call offices—completely revolutionized communication across the country, cropping up at every other corner, providing local and long-distance telephonic access to the ordinary person. However, there was still a chance that the connection would be fitful or poor.

When someone raised within this wheezy infrastructure was suddenly transplanted into the firm sonorities of first-world technologies, the results were often amusing. The scenario would go something like this: As an excuse for not having been in contact, the person would casually proffer, “I couldn’t get through.” This explanation would meet with a puzzled response: “What time did you call? Did you have the right number? Didn’t you get the machine?” As the questions bored in with great sincerity, the squirming addressee might weakly suggest, “It was engaged…?” meaning what Americans more often refer to as “busy” or “getting a busy signal.”

The disengagement facilitated by this temperamental telephony made comrades of procrastination, delay tactics, rebelliousness, oversights, the need to switch off, a brush-off, or deliberate withdrawal. It went hand in hand with other manifestations of discontinuous engagement that were part of the common vocabulary. There was “loose contact,” which meant, as elsewhere, unstable electrical connections and faulty wiring, although the consistency with which this looseness manifested itself strongly seemed to suggest either a faulty diagnosis or the perception of its value. The inaugural flicker of a fluorescent light tube lent itself to the epithet “tube light,” still used to refer to anyone who is either slow on the uptake or a bit behind the times. And who would want to be anything but with the times and well connected? So completely have connectivity and immediacy become fused with a sense of being au courant that few of us would advocate for anything otherwise. We want to be with it, not to have missed the moment, and mostly, we...