‘Phone Romeos’ Are Dialing for Love
“He sounded like a creepy Indian guy to me,” Ms. Chakravarty said.
When the police traced the number, the person they found at the end of it was Premsagar Tiwari. Mr. Tiwari, 24, turned out to be a highstrung, pencil- necked man who grew up at a school where his father worked as a night watchman.
Satyavir Sachan, the constable assigned to the case, found that he was using eight SIM cards, some registered under false names, to contact more than 500 women. The activity occupied, by police estimates, two to three hours a day.
Mr. Tiwari confessed readily and with clasped hands he beseeched the police not to imprison him. His phone calls, he explained in an interview, should better be understood as part of his search for a soul mate. “One person is enough to fulfill you,” Mr. Tiwari said. “I have nobody.” He was held for 15 days. An inverse story was unfolding in Bangalore, where Umakanti Padhan, a 16-year- old garment factory worker, tried to call her sister-in-law. She misdialed and found herself conversing with Bulu, a railway worker eight years older.
She hung up, alarmed. At home, beginning at puberty, she had been prohibited from speaking with any adult man, including her brothers and cousins.
Ten minutes later, Bulu called back. “When I hear your voice, it feels like someone of my own,” he said. “I feel like talking to you all the time.”
She agreed. Every night, she slipped out to the roof of her Bangalore workers’ hostel and spoke to Bulu about little things: how their shifts went, and what they had eaten that day.
“He’s told me everything that ever happened to him from the time he was a kid,” she said. “I don’t know whether it is good or bad, but I trust him.”
Ms. Huang said the women she met in Bangladesh were often happy to engage in telephone courtships with strangers; some maintained five or six at once. Phone contact, they told her, was safer because it presupposed physical distance. And it forced the men to listen to them for long stretches.
“It’s one of those boundary- ex- panding experiences that allow you to think about opportunities that were not previously available,” Ms. Huang said. Women described these relationships with “kind of a fearful excitement.”
For the young men, she said, “dialing random numbers is like playing the lottery and seeing what comes up.”
Often, Ms. Huang said, they approach it almost as a competitive sport, vying to see “who is more skilled at keeping a woman on the phone for a long time.”
As for Ms. Padhan and her boyfriend, nearly a year has passed and they still have not met in person.
Her roommates roll their eyes at her naïveté. But when their shifts are finished, they, too, retire to stairwells and corners of the rooftop for the covert nightly call. From there, it is possible to look across the rooftops of other boardinghouses and see others hunched over their cellphones, in all directions, a wide-angle shot of young India in pursuit of love.
In wrong numbers, good listeners or ‘creepy’ guys.