The homesick Indian students I knew therefore never called home. They couldn’t afford to. Most of us were here on scholarships; once tuition and room rent had been deducted, we lived on less than $100 a month, and a one-minute call home, even for a very special occasion, meant skipping a couple of meals. One ingenious Calcuttan friend–let’s call him Chattopadhyaya–devised an elaborate stratagem to give his folks news of his welfare. He would ask the operator to make a collect call to India, where his parents were primed to say they couldn’t understand the operator’s mangling of his unpronounceable moniker. At this point he’d chime in, saying to the operator, “My name is Chattopadhyaya!” in English, followed by several phrases of rapid-fire Bengali, communicating all the essential news. His family would then respond to the operator that they did not know the caller and declined to accept the charges. Mission accomplished at no cost, Chattopadhyaya would wallow for hours afterward in the luxury of knowing his parents 8,000 miles away had actually heard his voice. You could do this only so often from home before the phone company caught on, so Chattopadhyaya pulled his stunt from several different pay phones around campus.
What a difference technology makes. The decade of deregulation and innovation in the 1990s saw a steady decline in the price of international telephone calls from the United States. At first Indian expatriates had to choose from rates around $1.20 a minute offered by each of the big telecoms. (If you paid a monthly fee of $3, you could bring it down to 72 cents, and you thought you had a bargain.) But the 21st century dawned with an ear-bending range of options from niche entrepreneurs that have left the telecom giants in the dust. I found one that billed me 59 cents a minute and offered air miles as well. But its connections were unreliable, so I shopped around some more–and discovered a company that, for an up-front payment of $200, allowed me to call my mother in India for 1,000 minutes (and the calls usually got through). I could talk to her for an hour and pay what I’d have had to for a minute when I first came to America, and in dollars that are worth a lot less today.
“That’s nothing,” says a friend who prowls the area of Jackson Heights, Queens, known as Little India. “Haven’t you heard of phone cards?” I hadn’t. Turns out these little glossy rectangles have become to 21st-century America what dirty postcards were to the boulevardiers of Nice in the 19th. They’re hot sellers, and every time you find one you like, someone on the next corner offers something better. They’re credit-card size, and carry ethnic motifs like pictures of the Taj Mahal, along with an access number. You have to scratch off a silver strip at the back, rather like a lottery ticket, to reveal a code. Enter it on a touch-tone phone, and the distance to India disappears till your money runs out. Call home for as little as 9 cents a minute.
Geography, today, is history. But technology marches on, connecting us ever more easily and cheaply. Rumor has it that my old friend Chattopadhyaya has figured out a way to call home on his computer, using the Internet. For free, of course.
