Let It Be

Summers ago. Home wifi down, as per usual. And me, staring into my phone, desperately refreshing my inbox. Hoping for work. The world outside didn’t care I had problems, so it carried on. Rude.

My phone lights up briefly with an Instagram story my sister has sent me. Of her crush standing with another girl and honestly what am I supposed to do with this garbage? Then I hear her door slam and know there's going to be drama in five seconds. She thrusts her phone into my face and I read the words, ‘I Look Better.’ She accidentally sent him the catty comment she meant to send to me. Now she looked like the total psycho she didn’t want him to know she was. This was a problem. Taking her phone, I hit ‘unsend’, except nothing ‘uns' itself since Vodafone decides at that exact moment it has had enough and all network disappears. “I didn’t pay my bill! Oh god!” she yelps and grabs my phone. In her frenzy to access her account she hits wildly at any notification that pops up onscreen.

Which in turn converts my phone into a stone.

She’d just agreed to the dreaded software update.

We’ve all been there at some point. We’ve all seen that Apple logo glow smugly back at us. And we've all, at least once, accepted that blind panic means running towards mom, that wise adult who was currently in the middle of a ‘Forwards Frenzy’ across multiple WhatsApp groups. Grabs her phone unceremoniously, realises mom doesn't have Instagram, freaks out, downloads, signs in, deletes – – 6.8 minutes of pure, uncalled for, high-octane action.

Because, the crush had already seen the message the second it had flashed across his screen. And he’d already replied with an ‘I agree’.

Though nothing eventually happened between them, that afternoon as I heard them laugh over the phone while seated at my writing desk, I learnt a lesson that holds true till today – sometimes problems sort themselves out. This desk would somehow, someday overflow with work. Till then, in the immortal words of The Beatles, Let It Be.

For Hindustan Times Brunch