The Phone He Didn't Buy

The counter

A Saturday in March

The phone was lying on a square of black velvet, like evidence.

“Seventy-four nine ninety-nine,” said the salesman, whose name tag said BINU and whose smile said he had already done this four times today. “But nobody pays that, sir. You pay ₹3,771. Per month. That is one dinner.”

“That is not one dinner,” said Rehan.

“For two people. With dessert.”

Rehan D’Souza was twenty-six and edited wedding films for a studio above a bakery in Kochi, which meant he spent his days making other people’s happiest moments look four per cent warmer. His own phone had a crack running from one corner to the camera, so every photograph he took carried a faint diagonal scar, as if the world had been folded once and put back.

The new one, the Vantage 9 Pro, shot video so clean it looked like something you remembered rather than something you had filmed. He had ₹15,000 saved. Binu turned a tablet around on the glass. Chabutra Finance, it said, in a friendly orange. Loan amount ₹59,999. Eighteen months. A processing fee of ₹1,200, “which is nothing, sir, it is included in life.”

“What is the full amount?” Rehan asked. “All of it. If I add everything up.”

Binu looked at him the way a waiter looks at someone who has asked to see the kitchen. He did not know. Nobody had asked before. They worked it out together on the shop’s calculator, which had a GST button and a sticker of a cricketer on the back: ₹84,084, for a phone with ₹74,999 printed on the box.

“So it’s ₹9,085 more.”

“Sir, in eighteen months you will not remember that money. You will remember the photos.”

It was, Rehan thought later, an excellent line. It was even partly true.

The pen is on the counter. What would you do?

• Sign, and take the phone home today

  ₹3,771 a month for 18 months, and the camera starts working for him tonight. Read that version

• Walk out, and pay the same instalment to himselfThe story follows this one

  No phone. The same money leaves his account each month, into savings, until it is enough to buy outright.

Not A Phone

April to September

He walked out. It was not virtue. His bus was coming, and “let me think about it” is easier to say from a bus stop than at a counter. On the bus he opened his bank’s app and started a recurring deposit of ₹3,771 a month. The app asked him to give it a name. He typed Not A Phone.

The first months of not having a thing are the loud ones. Jyoti Menon, who edited at the next desk and ran a food account with eleven thousand followers, bought the Vantage on the very instalment plan he had refused, and at lunch she held it over the table so the whole studio could admire an appam in portrait mode.

“You could have had this in March,” she said.

“I could have had a debt in March.”

“You have a crack in March. And in April. Look at this steam, Rehan. Look at the steam.”

He looked at the steam. It was very good steam.

What nobody mentions about waiting is that it isn’t free either. In June a caterer asked whether he could shoot fifteen short reels for a new outlet, four thousand rupees, phone footage only, “like the trendy ones”. Rehan sent samples from the cracked phone. The caterer replied with a thumbs-up and gave the job to someone else. In August the battery died during the speeches at his cousin’s wedding and he missed the part where his mother, Philomena, who does not dance, danced. Somebody else’s phone caught it. In that version she is small and far away and partly behind a pillar.

₹2,593

He did the sums one night because he could not sleep, and because sums were what he had instead of the phone. If the new camera had brought in even one small job in most months, signing would have paid for itself. One lost reel job was already more than a month of that.

He watched the ceiling fan for a while. Then again: one job in six months is not one job in most months. He decided not to decide whether he had been stupid. Not A Phone received its sixth instalment.

Month thirteen

The following April

Phones, unlike houses and regrets, get cheaper. By the time Not A Phone had grown large enough, the Vantage 9 Pro had been replaced on the velvet square by the Vantage 10, and the 9 sat on a side shelf under a yellow sticker: ₹66,909.

Binu did not recognise him. Binu was explaining to a young couple that the Vantage 10 was not really a price at all, only a small monthly feeling.

Rehan paid in full. The card machine printed a short receipt, there being nothing to explain. He had ₹901 left over, which went almost exactly on a case and a plate of prawn roast, and he felt the particular joy of owning something that could not send him a reminder.

At lunch he showed Jyoti. She examined it politely.

“Same phone as mine,” she said.

“Same phone.”

“Mine has thirteen months of photographs in it.” She was not being unkind. She scrolled for him: her father’s retirement, a trip to Wayanad, four hundred plates of food, some of which had paid her. The account had grown to thirty thousand followers. A masala brand now sent her a cheque each month that was bigger than her instalment. “I have five left to pay. I think I came out ahead. I’m not sure. Did you?”

“Interest and fee I didn’t pay, ₹9,085. Price drop, ₹8,090. I have a spreadsheet.”

“That is not what I asked.”

He thought about the pillar, and his mother behind it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I got the cheaper phone. You got the longer one.”

Jyoti considered this. “Put that on a mug,” she said, and went back to her appam.

That evening he took a photograph of the street outside the studio: the bakery’s light lying on the wet road, no diagonal scar. It was a very good photograph. He has not renamed the deposit. It still goes out on the fifth of every month, ₹3,771, to Not A Phone, and he has not yet decided what it is not.

The other future

The one where he signed

In the other version the bus is late and Binu is quick with the tablet. Rehan signs with his finger. The phone goes home in a bag with rope handles.

It is a wonderful phone. That is the difficulty with this ending: nothing goes wrong. The instalment leaves on the fifth, ₹3,771.32, and by the third month he has stopped noticing it, which is exactly what an instalment is designed for. He shoots the caterer’s fifteen reels in June. In August he films his mother dancing, close up, in good light, and she makes him promise never to show anyone, and he shows everyone.

In month thirteen he still owes ₹18,125, on a phone the shop now sells for ₹66,909. By the time the last instalment clears he has paid ₹84,084 in all. He does not feel cheated. He does notice, the following Diwali, when the washing machine dies, that there is nothing in his account called anything.

Whether that Rehan or this one chose better depends on numbers neither of them could have known at the counter: what the camera would earn, and what the missing photographs were worth. The arithmetic can measure the gap. It cannot tell you which side of it you would rather be standing on.