In other households, when the phone rings in the middle of the night it usually bodes no good. In my house, it means some dizzy friend has once again forgotten about the concept of time difference.

“But it’s morning in India,” one such recent caller said.

“Yes,” I replied. “Too bad I’m in New York.”

Then there are the people who call my parents’ house in India at two in the morning for a bit of chitchat.

“Wassup?” says G, entirely too happy and ghetto fabulous for Ungodly Hour in Sleepy Cochin Where Everyone is Abed by Nine.

“Er, nothing,” I mumble, trying to ignore my father’s scowl as he waits for me to hang up so he can go back to sleep. “Thing is, I’m in my parents’ bedroom…”

“You sleep in your parents’ bedroom?” he asks incredulously. “And to think you used to make fun of me just coz I lived with my uncle and aunt when I was an undergrad.”

“Freak,” I say as kindly as possible. “I don’t share a bedroom with my folks. This phone line, on the other hand, definitely does.”

The good thing about such an occurrence in my parents’ home is that I never need to explain much. Having met my father, every single one of my friends immediately hangs up. Of course, then I have to hear all about it, but since my father is secretly proud of the fact that his little girl is capable of maintaining friendships even across great distances, the mutterings generally die down within a day or two. Once in a while, though, he will ask –

“How come only boys call you?”

It puzzles the parental unit that I don’t know many girls. Well, it puzzles me too.

I like girls. Not in any naughty sense, but in a general way. I am not awkward in the company of my own sex; I have plenty of stuff to bond over; I like discussing things with my girlfriends; two out of my three best friends are women and so on and so forth. And yet, when you look at the overview, I do know more men than women.

I went to school with more men, I played with more men, I studied with more men, I partied with more men, I competed with more men… and so men are my buddies. In college I was the only woman in a group of four to eight guys who went out regularly. To the point that I think they kind of forgot that I was a girl. I certainly found out more about the male gender than I ever wanted to know.

And I don’t think I was anything special or unusual. Or maybe all the women I know are similarly situated. My best friend Sangs, who went to school in our rigidly conservative hometown and ended up with an equal number of guy friends with whom she was most emphatically not romantically involved, once told me about this girl whose marriage plans were cancelled at the nth minute. Apparently she was marrying some guy who’d never looked a girl in the eye before his horoscope was matched to hers and she was a normal kid who’d grown up in the middle east and who’d managed to scrounge some friends of both sexes and different nationalities in spite of the fact that she attended a same sex school and nationalities tended to segregate in her locality. So the hick that she was going to marry [pardon me my condescension, but really!] came to visit or for the engagement or whatever and ended up reading her emails.

I have no idea what he was doing in her email account but he came across her inbox which was filled with “hey wassup” notes from various friends. He was outraged to discover all those male names in there – none of which went beyond the hey-how-are-you stage – and broke it all off. The girl was only too relieved coz she was basically in it to please her mom and dad but Sangs was mad.

“What an asshole,” she said.

Her father agreed. Her father, who has the strictest malayalee father notions on girls and how they ought to behave, was taken aback by this young man’s behavior. “In this day and age,” he said to me. “One has to expect that girls and boys will be friends and that it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

And therein lies the problem – sex and sexism.

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