I remember those days when we would look at the instrument that Graham Bell discovered with reverence and awe. Fleming those days had a separate room for the black instrument. A lone table and chair furnished the room. These bore the scratch and scribble marks, of all the graffiti you cold imagine young lovers etch when they had their dear ones at the other end of the line. It must have been anxious and nervous fingers holding room keys that would sculpt their misgivings and hopes in various figures, shapes and calligraphy, which even the best experts could hardly decipher.
The Room was on the first floor, 'bridge' section of Hostel Fleming. The bridge being the portion of the building connecting the forward arching back wing with the parallel front wing. Hence by establishing the telephone room in the first floor and that too on the centre bridge instead of the side ones, the most strategic and equidistant spot was selected in the Hostel for the Telephone Room. Indeed those who planned the location must have been one like us who knew the use of the instrument.
The telephone boy was in charge of the room. He slept on the floor, his meager possessions kept in a corner of the room. He was often in need, for us to know when the lone instrument was free. He could be bribed and many did so. There were many who waited for long outside the door of the Telephone Room, hoping the occupant busy talking, laughing and joking on the instrument would stop and leave so that those who waited also got a chance.
At last when the previous occupant hangs up, the next person-in-wait would get his much-awaited chance. In he would go, and the number would invariably be that of one of the two Ladies Hostels, namely Skylark or Paragon. Rarely, one spoke to Paradise, or Lords, though these were also Hostels of equal repute, and the only distinguisher being the occupants of the latter hostels were males.
Then came the wait, as the Ladies Hostel phone boy picked up, went down some corridor there apparently calling out the name of the person whom the call was for. Following this either one of the two events occurred. The first was the requested lady would answer the phone. Or else, there would be a message that the occupant was not in the room. Phone boys were intelligent enough with their use of tone and volume of speech to convey at appropriate times what their message meant. At times the tone would hint that the called person actually was in the room, though the message informed politely that she was not. Such a message often left in its wake a broken heart, for which of course the ubiquitous spiritual treatment was always available, at anytime somewhere within the hostel premises! Of course, one had to search for such treatments at the suspect rooms.
If the requested lady answered the phone, then the caller from Fleming could mostly have a jolly good talk for a jolly good time. We were not too interested if the phone boy was eve's dropping and whether he could hear one side of the conversation totally. Nobody had heard of audio-privacy those days, and apparently those who knew were least bothered about it. In fact the converse was true. Mostly, if others listened in, it increased the caller's snob value by many degrees. Often the caller would boast that he had been on the phone to Ladies Hostel.
Then with a sense of victory, the winner caller would return some times to the calm confines of his room and probably go over the conversation, in his mind. He would taste every delectable bit of it over again, and rehearsing other probable ways the dialogue could have taken. It is a learning that the serious connoisseur never misses.
It was no wonder that anyone trying to call Fleming Hostel would find it almost perpetually engaged. However, the occasional "trunk call" as long distance calls were named got through luckily and the phone boy could be seen scampering at top speed, or flying over the stairs, his speed probably in direct proportion to the distance of the caller.
However, today with the ubiquitous mobile, I doubt if they have the telephone room in Fleming. Gone also would be the joys and pangs that one enjoyed or suffered in the telephone room!
