Happy Birthday

Somnath had been a ham for seven years now. It had been a gift from a colleague at office, his only friend in flesh and blood.

“You need something to take your mind off all this gloom and doom!”, Chandan babu had declared two months after his wife’s death. The box with the transceiver, antenna and power supply had lain untouched for three weeks in his living room until one Sunday afternoon, on a sudden whim, he had leafed through the manual. At first he was merely intrigued by how complex it all seemed. He had always been secretly proud of his own technical acumen, and the challenge had proved seductive for him. He still remembered the first time as if it was yesterday, the sheer suspense of it. A moment of silence, followed by a faint crackle of static. His first QSO, ham lingo for contact, had been an Australian who ran a sawmill in Andaman.

“It’s been good ragchewing with ya mate!” He remembered how proud he had felt by his fellow ham’s acknowledgement. When he had disconnected finally, it was midnight. He had been hooked after that. He could escape the loneliness every evening after office. Finally something else filled his mind other than Shorbori. In a moment of elation, he had grasped Chandan babu’s hand and thanked him, “Thank you my flesh and blood friend, because of you now I have so many up in the air.”

The new Bao Feng transceiver had arrived from Shanghai a day before, and Somnath had spent a sleepless night assembling it. He had soldered the final junction and was just about to flick the switch, when there had been a powercut. With a groan, he had fallen asleep, only to be woken three hours later by his morning alarm. Groggy, with bloodshot eyes, he had somnambulated the day at office, his mind fixed on the radio. But once back, his body had finally rebelled. He had crashed on to his bed for five straight hours and had woken up just past midnight. With a Charminar dangling from his lips, he began his  nightly ritual. He selected an empty frequency and beamed forth his CQ call. The relay was set up to hop across frequencies, fishing for a response. He was excited. The new kit meant he could effectively fish for signals as far as Moscow or Perth. While the transmitter searched, he flicked on his transistor, tuning into a breaking news report underway on a news station.

“... official report from the South African Coast Guards are now in, we can confirm that there has indeed been a collision several miles off Cape Town involving the MSC Yolanda. The cargo ship grazed against a freak iceberg. We are still waiting for more detailed reports if the collision has caused a CFC-11 leak, which experts predict could rent a major hole in the Ozone layer over western Antarctica. Huge radio disturbances are expected. In other news, mourning fans from around the world reach Paris…”

Beep, beep beep the beacon on his transceiver glowed orange. It had detected a contact. He muted the broadcast and barked into the mic,

“CQ, CQ, CQ receiving CQ 80 meters. This is VU2SMT in Calcutta receiving CQ 80 meters. CQ, CQ…”

“Calcutta! What is this trip man! I was in Paris, in a bathtub… Pam, honey!”, the reception was clear. The voice was scared, Somnath felt as if he had heard it somewhere.

Somnath frowned, normally no one flouted protocol, even in emergencies.

“Request your QSO please, over.”

“What are you talking about? Are you the lizard king? Is this the afterlife? Mother, can you hear me!”, he howled. From his twanging accent, Somnath would have guessed young, American. Maybe Texas. He was sure he had heard the voice before. He glanced at the dial, the signal strength was moderately strong.

“Is this an emergency? I can broadcast an SOS, but you need to share your location. Transmit your coordinates over.”

“What is this! We were to fly to Marrakesh tomorrow. Pam, girl what is this … ”

“If this is not an emergency, I will leave you alone with your juvenile jokes. Good day!” He cut the contact and stubbed his cigarette out, more than half of it unburnt. Jokers like these riled him, probably some fool who had snuck into a friend’s station. He wondered if he should log in a complaint, but there was something about the man’s voice, his panic had felt genuine. To calm himself, he dutifully logged in the time and contact frequency on his notebook, 3.711 MHz.

Taking a break from the radio, he flipped through the mails that had been piling up on his desk for a week now. Buried amongst all the junk soliciting insurance and miraculous lotions promising a full head of hair was an inland letter bearing the familiar tidy scrawl of his mother. The letter gave off the familiar scent of Boroline, the scent of his mother. Even as he ripped it open, he realised she had remembered what he had forgotten. It had been his birthday. Well, at least there was one person on earth who cared. He felt a pang of pain as he remembered the elaborate birthday cakes Shorbori used to bake. And now here he was, all alone forever, with just the burden of her secret for company.

Dearest Shomu           30 June 1971

I can still clearly remember the day, how you had bawled, those little lungs puffing. The nurses laughed how shocked you looked by life. How time passes. Happy 37th! I hope this reaches you by the 3rd, you can’t trust these infernal post offices. Listen, do not forget to bathe and visit the temple tomorrow. Do this for your senile mother, won’t you. With Shorbori at least I never had to worry about you, god bless her soul.

And have you thought about what I had asked last time, your letter made no mention of it. Tapati is a good girl, you will like her. Maybe she is a little plump now, but you aren’t any Dev Anand either. Another unlucky sailor in the river of life, her husband died four years now. Why don’t you meet her, maybe have a cup of tea at Flury’s.

This house is so lonesome, I had imagined grandchildren playing…”

He folded the letter aside. He knew the last two paragraphs already anyway. The words changed, but it would be the same entreatments, thinly veiled emotional blackmail asking him to marry again. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bear keeping secrets for a lifetime. He was much happier being sad alone.

The orange light on the transceiver blinked again. This time, he flicked it on and pressed listen.

““CQ, CQ, CQ calling CQ 80 meters. This is VU2KIW in Delhi calling CQ 80 meters. CQ, CQ.”

This was more like it. The two hams exchanged signal reports and bragged about their station equipments. The technical banter lifted the vague panic his mother’s letter always left him in.

“Lots of disturbance in the stratosphere tonight”, remarked his fellow night-owl, a retired navy man from Delhi.

“You can tell me about it. Earlier tonight I came across this joker who flouted all protocols, kept mumbling something about going blind, just kept screaming.”

“Random gibberish, I heard it too. People talking in what I guessed to be Chinese, not responding to any of the codes. Its particularly heavy around the 3.7 band. As if they did not even realise they were talking on the radio. I have a theory about it.”

“Go on.”

“This was a long time ago, before independence. My grandmother, then still a young woman, she had an accident, bad case of broken bones. The doctors had to put wires in her jaw to fix them back. After the operation she realised that on certain nights, if she sat in a really quiet room, she could hear songs and voices. At first they were all spooked. Soon she realised it was the radio going on inside her head. They lived in Patna then. On that fateful night of August 14, there was no power. The family sat around the radio, frustrated, unable to hear Pandit Nehru’s speech. Everyone except grandmother. She heard the entire tryst with destiny in her head, even relayed a few passages to her husband and children. I wonder if tonight, something similar is happening. Maybe we are picking up on real people…”

Krrr… pss, the voice was lost in a chaos of noisy static. Somnath froze in the act of searching for a match to light his cigarette. He thought he heard a snatch of song buried amongst the static. It lasted for only a split second.

“Did you hear that?”, the navy man cried.

“Uh huh.”, Somnath managed to blurt. A chill went down his spine. He didn’t dare declare that he imagined his dead wife’s voice in the static.

“I may be mistaken, but I thought I heard a woman singing…”

“I… maybe, I am not sure. Look, it is getting late …”, Somnath finished the formalities and ended the call quickly. He was afraid the voice might start talking. He was afraid what it might say. His forehead was slick with sweat. He put a book blocking the accusing eyes of Hedy Lamarr above his desk, a gift from his wife long ago.

He sank back in his chair, the night was not going how he had imagined it to be.

Tu tut tu tu tut. Someone was trying to send a message by Morse. There was no listen request, the sender did not wait for him to reply back. The message kept coming on, sure as a flood. He grabbed a paper and sat down noting down the letters. Midway, he broke down into tears, unable to continue anymore. The message wished him happy birthday. After that, word for word, it read the final note she had left for him. The note he had hidden from everyone all these years, her suicide note. The beeps went on, accusing, incessant. Thuppp! A fuse blew, silencing the beeps. He lay with his head buried in his hands, the room filling with the acrid smell of burnt wiring.