Quondum, writes Shweta Bachchan

Quondum bygone; that one was; former

It is mid-afternoon on a bright and brilliant spring day. I am fortified after a large meal and trying to get through a terrifyingly good read on my Kindle. My daughter has insinuated herself into a spot near me on the sofa and after tapping away at her phone, with the kind of concentration it would take to launch a missile, has fallen asleep.

Soon enough, my eyelids start giving way and I have to make an effort to stay awake, because afternoon naps at age 17 are cute -- it's a hard day's work balancing hormones and zapping zits -- but at 40, the connotations are far less flattering.

It is a distant memory, which gets more vivid as I remember it. I am laying on a giant bed. My mother is flipping through a phone book. It has large, black tabs embossed with gold letters in a bold typeface. She uncaps her ball point pen and is noting down contacts in a deliberate hand, her letters are stumbling all over each other the rotund 'O's and 'A's have bullied the 'R's off the index and forced them to take refuge in the column reserved for numbers.

She always sits on the very precipice of the bed, but never topples over. It is something that I have thought about and it makes me giggle. She picks up the receiver of her rotary telephone, it is Granny apple-green. My mother's tastes run to the neutral beiges and whites, this gaudy telephone lying right by her bed would have been such a source of irritation to her. She pulls a pencil out of her pen jar and hooks it into the dial using it to drag the plastic circle in a series of sequences that used to be the way people made phone calls back then.

I drift off to sleep. I wake to the robotic sound of the VCR ejecting, its mechanical flat head is aloft as if curious to see what lies beyond its jumbled innards, all that whizzing and whirring must be so cumbersome, my mother puts a fat brick of a video cassette into its gaping mouth and presses the play button.

She adjusts the volume -- it must be well past 4 I reckon, afternoons are always so serene, my grandmother takes her siesta then and we are encouraged to be as quiet as possible. Downstairs my grandfather would be busy in his study, replying to endless letters, daubing at the paper with his ink blotter, perhaps stopping to refill his pen with ink, royal blue from a squat glass bottle.

Come four o'clock and the house stirs to life again, my mother's TV screen is a bright blue with the words PLAY written in one corner. Then the music starts, my mother walks to the VCR and presses the pause button. I am instructed to go out and play before it is time to prepare for dinner and then eventually bed.

A series of sophisticated clicks, later, I come to. My daughter has surreptitiously taken pictures of me while I inevitably gave in to my fatigue and fell asleep, and is at present sending it out to hundreds of like-minded teens via Snapchat! She is giggling! It is a brazen time; we wouldn't have dared touched my mother's phone without her prior consent, let alone use it against her in blatant mockery.

I grumble something to her and leave the room. Later on, I catch myself getting nostalgic for a time gone by, where our manners were delicate even though our machinery was awkwardly dumpy. I miss those days, the days of my youth, of VCRs and videocassettes, Enid Blytons and Ludo, Thums Up and Simba chips.

It was a simple time, irrevocably lost, and we are the poorer for it if only we take some time out from obsessively peering into our phones to remember quondam times with quondam people and recognise that afternoons we sleep through today will be the memories of tomorrow.