In the Pause Between the Ringing

In the Pause Between the Ringing is a short story from the world of Somewhere, about Iqbal, an inventor, and the first telephone mines in India. As Iqbal waits for a telephone call, the story turns to the history of the telephone in India and the changes its ringing has heralded in people’s lives.

In a country threaded with telephone wires, the instrument appears across different eras: amplifying the horns of Babur’s army near the Chenab, mingling with the shouts of Chalukya craftsmen at the Badami temples, and echoing through time in James Prinsep’s ear as he chisels Ashoka’s inscriptions. William Brooke O'Shaughnessy sees telegraph cables as a way to send restoratives into a troubled nation, much as he would treat veins riddled with cholera.

The story’s history unfolds through telephone directories that become genealogies, exchanges that become pilgrimage sites, and the ringing, clicking drone of telephone machinery, set against the country’s tangled cables and history.