Who not to call

The Ex Files
or
Who not to call and why


Booty call. It once meant calling up someone you know purely for a one-night (or day or twilight or whatever) stand, no strings attached. But the phrase has expanded to take in a more complex and perhaps ultimately more troublesome kind of phone calls that people make: the phone call to an ex. It’s not the same as a call that split-up couples make to exchange logistical information about children/pets/accounts and other tangled responsibilities. Neither is it a call to mouth off in the you creep I wish I’d never met you vein.
It’s a call that someone, oddly, makes even after they’ve moved on, embraced a new life – possibly in a new city, with a new significant other/spouse, perhaps produced more children/pets. Or they may be in the middle of pursuing some new path, full of all kinds of new demands, which include getting to know and fit into the unpredictable, unfamiliar contours of some new potential partner. Which is all very fresh and energizing and all that, and yet, one fine day, none of it makes much sense, because all the new stuff or the complete absence of it, is suddenly very tiresome to deal with, and your weary, trying-hard mind floats off to a time when you had more familiar, well-worn problems to deal with. Or your mind, badly needing a rest, simply skips past earlier bad times and jumps right back to the good stuff that you and the ex shared. Or perhaps you’ve painted yourself into a lonely little corner, not rushed to make new connections, and you’re missing the comfort of getting together at a restaurant that virtually has your and your ex’s butt shape etched on the seats at the corner table and you both predictably and boringly (but now it seems so comfortingly) ordered invariably the same things and bitched and moaned to each other about other couples, your sister, or the universe in general and felt a little smug about yourselves.
But here’s the catch. When you call an ex, or are called by one, it is highly unlikely that both of you are in the same emotional or situational circumstance. For instance, one day, Jagdeep got a booty call from his ex-wife who’d moved out of the marriage and into the hills a whole year earlier. Stories about how she was living an idyll filtered through to him, and he was sort of ok with that, though sometimes felt horribly left out of a picture that once they’d painted together. But when she called one day in tears about a panther picking up a hillside dog, too close for comfort on her forest-touching property, he could only wonder, and said it out loud: “Why’re you calling me? What am I supposed to do from 180 km away? Go call one of your forest-dweller pals or a ranger.”
His wife Gargi hadn’t called up for him to do something at all. She says she called because the event had so shaken her that she’d almost ‘automatically’ called someone she connected with an earlier, safer, less unpredictable time. “All I wanted was someone to say something like: ‘how terrifying; maybe you need to kennel your dogs at night; maybe you need to fence the property better’.” But Jagdeep’s detached response cured her instantly of any residual emotional dependence on him. “I think he almost got a kick out of giving me that ‘why’re you calling me’ number. I guess I should have called a friend and not an ex, right?”
Right.
“Sometimes you call an ex when you realize that you’re probably headed to die alone,” says Kamaal, hiding the hurt in that realization behind a pretend-bluntness. When he turned 59 and had spent the previous 8 years looking high and low for a new abiding relationship, it hit him that perhaps everything that he believed constituted his charms –a terrific sense of humour, decent finances, a body in great shape, an ability and inclination to treat women well – simply hadn’t amounted to new partnership material, for some reason. “At that time I was low, not mellow, as I imagined I’d be nearing 60…just low. And that’s when I tried to get back in touch with my ex-wife for a drink, perhaps a long evening together, perhaps more… Yeh aakhari shamme hi bujhanay kay liye, aaa I wanted to tell her. But she kindly brushed me off, and I hope didn’t dine out on the story.”
Sometimes a booty call works out – both parties concerned meet up, spend an okayish time together, and scurry back to their new lives, highly relieved that they are so through with each other in every which way. But that’s a rare occurrence, best left to the experts – people who’ve really got their current stuff together, totally. It’s an exercise that should not be tried out by novices and amateurs, though.

GOURI DANGE
(The writer is a family counselor and maintains some ex-files too.)