The Sixth Day (Part 3)

Day 2

“You have no new messages” – his cellphone displayed the same message for the forty seventh time in the last forty seven minutes. As he continued his diatribes against the poor network and things related, his watch testified that he had now been waiting for a full six hours in that “stupid” leather jacket she had bought for him. He was prepared to wait for more.

As the perspiration started running down his spine, he decided it was high time he took off the jacket, only if temporarily. And as he was in the process of doing that, the phone rang.

He tried to shrug off the jacket but it won’t budge. He made a valiant effort to pull it off with his straitjacketed hands as the phone went on buzzing. Hands weren’t doing the trick, he buried his teeth, against his pro-vegetarianism resolutions, into the expensive animal hide. The phone stopped ringing.

Fifteen minutes later, he was rushing off his bike as the jacket lay still on the couch.

He met her at the designated place. She had her head clasped in her hands. As he greeted her, the headache-ridden smile on her face was evident. He offered her tea, coffee, pizza, ice cream and his head in that particular order. She would have none of it. Then, she exclaimed – “You know why I asked you to come here?”

He looked around at the tall pillars and the Victorian sculpture of the building, tried to make some pseudo-romantic guesses but only managed to descend a grade further in her eyes in terms of his emotional intellect.

“This is the place I wrote you my first letter from. This building used to be the city’s post office”, she winced.

His mind went back to that framed letter that had remained closeted in his drawer since ages, and the emotion that had overwhelmed him when he had first read it. He saw a second version coming.

She turned around. “I’m really worried about my promotion. Hope everything works out for the best”, the concern in her voice was unmistakable.