Woh Panch Din

Two jobs and three years back, I met a girl in my office. She was cute, bubbly. We never had anything in common, and never spend much time together except for the odd chat and lunch.

My first conversation with her had been a few months before I joined the office she was working in and it was nothing short of disastrous. It was on a friend’s phone and I got pissed with him being on his cell all the time and sent an SMS to everybody on his call list saying: Fuck You.

She was on that list.

I had never dreamed that I would meet her, and that too at close quarters. She had a lovely voice and I would always tell my friend that she sounded nice and ask him if she was cute. He hated her and thought of her as a pest.

I still remember, quite vividly, the first movie I watched with her. It was Monsoon Wedding. And I liked it quite a bit, though my Hindi is not very good. After the movie, I had to get her friend an auto. I haggled with the autowallahs for 15 mins doing that, and as we walked to parking lot, she ragged me about how patient I was with them. That was our first real conversation.

When I joined for work – this was only my second job – she was most helpful. Work was fun the first few weeks and become more so as I got more responsibilities. However, we never quite managed to get that much time together.

Later, I switched jobs and cities, and for months kept e-mailing her. She would always reply. She too had moved jobs, but remained unsatisfied with work. These mailing sessions were for me a feverish affair, and for her, I guess, for her they were routine. I would write long, excited mails about the movies I saw and the books that I read. She, on the other had, would write about her travels and her family. There were weeks when we even wrote to each other thrice, something I have done only with a very few people in my life.

Then, one day, she paid her cousin who lived in the city that I worked in a visit. I had five whole days with her, and we spend much of it with each other. I certainly had my tender moments with her. I don’t really know how she felt.

In all, we had a good time together and it had me wondering whether we had more in common that I had first thought. I told her about my feelings and naturally she was appalled. I was too, thinking that I was such a fool.

An year after: She got married to a guy from my hometown. She is a bit of a juggler, has too many balls up in the air all the time. The guy she married is more calm and more like me. I couldn’t help thinking that I had a lot in common with the guy she ultimately married. And that he was luckier.

I met her over a month ago, a year and a half after her marriage. She has done well, and I haven’t done too bad myself. She told me how she had met her husband and how she had fallen in love. She said it was a good decision, despite the fact that he is not so romantic.

And yet I had this nagging thought in my mind. Should I have paid more attention to her when I first met her? Would that have made a difference? Probably not. But one thing though: I have some wonderful memories of her and she said she did enjoy her time with me those five days, after all.

When we met, it was like old times. I opened up after a while and began talking a lot. It was friendly and nice and an affirmation that I was still a nice, decent person. It was good to know that, and sometimes only a girl can make you feel that way.

I was not very desperate, I knew then, not a random hitter on girls, not yet.