Did You Miss Me?

‘Did you miss me?’ He continued with his soft whisper, ‘I missed you so much.’

I have one square meter of office space. There is a partition two feet high between me and him. His prematurely grey mop of hair keeps bobbing above the partition. If it was some spiky top that kind of adolescent talk would have fitted better. A week or two after that overheard call (when was it - last December?), I saw them in a pub downtown. Both are young, late twenties or early thirties. He was looking bookish (maybe that is a well-cultivated look) and she was dressed to impress (a sleeveless top with plunging neckline, trendy bangles, rings poked everywhere, makeup to rival ghetto art). By some quirk of fate, they sat in the booth next to mine and across the partition I heard the same old,

‘Did you miss me? I missed you so much.’ If it wasn’t for my pint, I would have stood up, gone across and given him a rough tap, just to get the record moving.

I heard her much-lisped reply, ‘I misshhhed you shhoo shhhoooo muchh muchhh muchhhh.’ I finished my pint quickly and left the pub.

Their phone-talk (or rather his talk only since I never saw them together again) did not really follow the seasons though that would have given it a poetic touch. To say that they were hot and passionate in winter, warm and cuddly in summer, morose and demanding in spring, lethargic and relaxed in autumn or something like that. But that is just the poet in me.

‘Where were you this weekend? I waited for you.’ He listened to her lengthy explanation. That was in May. I remember that because I waited at the airport for my mom-in-law that weekend, a wait five hours long but with a silver lining. She had canceled her trip (there is a God in heaven, of course).

‘Did you call? Oh, my mobile must have been on silent mode. But I didn’t see any missed calls.’ That was a few days later.

Around then, there was a call which he took in the conference room. He seemed cool after, till he started attacking his keyboard.

‘How are you? Yeah, year-end rush, you know. Boss is really keeping us busy.’

That was news to me because I am that Boss. But he kept himself busy and the calls got rarer though still regular. They talked about the weather, even politics and current affairs. Reminded me of talk during family parties (with the weather for starters, then tucking into corruption or sports as main course and going back to the weather for dessert, checking once in a while if the other party is there or not and if it is the same or not). Then there were calls with long silences. Maybe, the other side was doing the talking. They never do.

A few days back, as Yogi Berra once said, it was déjà vu all over again, ‘Did you miss me? I missed you so much.’

ps. Wish you all a Happy 2013.