my grandmother tells me in their times when ‘Mahabharata’ was telecasted every Sunday morning neighbours crowded in our house from two hours ago the only building in the entire colony with a black and white TV set so you had Sardar aunty’s saag and Aiyyar uncle’s uttapam with Shreemad Bhagwatgeeta playing in monochrome in the background and i sit before Netflix alone and stare at the screen all day my grandmother tells me in their times they never left the people they loved and always stitched back the holes in their skirts waited five months for the mango pickle to relish putting it out on the shared terrace every afternoon under the sun she says there was no YouTube back then and recipes were passed down tongues she says they awaited replies of letters for two months without a flinch of doubt of being replaced and i check my phone for the tenth time in an hour she tells me they cycled miles to schools which the Britishers had built and in the barter system you could get orange candies in exchange of two hands full of grains my grandmother tells me houses back then did not have calling bells and i have realized love does not come with a barter tag she tells me they used to walk holding hands with friends and i carry people inside glass screens in my pocket she tells me people had less resources back then and my grandfather still remembers theorems he had learnt forty years ago every elder in my family reads the newspaper every morning without the need to prepare for a GK section exam and my best friend returned drunk last night for the nineteenth time in a week and still does not recognise her surname as of now my grandmother tells me she has found her long lost friends on the internet and has been speaking on the phone non-stop to her classmate she called after thirty years my grandmother often tells me i have started speaking less as i have been growing up, and in a muted whisper i scream we are a generation of displaced anger, and 140 characters.
