The Sixth Day (Part 6)

Day 6

“Your smile is glittering as brightly as the glass door of the coffee shop”, he uttered, shifting his glance from the doorman cleaning the entrance door to her.

“Was that a compliment?”, she asked, bemused.

“Did it sound like one?”, he replied.

There was a momentary silence.

And then, both of them burst into laughter, on a joke that only the two of them could understand. But then, did it need to be understood by someone else?

His phone rang again. He saw the display, and stood up, excusing himself from her presence and started to walk towards the door.

“What?”, he scathed into the speaker, visibly miffed.

“Nothing sir, just wanted to apologize to you. We could not accommodate your recommendation of the out of turn promotion your friend.”, the voice from other side spoke.

“What? Are you insane…”, the voice interrupted before he could express his bewilderment, “Sorry sir, but we had to promote an employee whose performance had been too exceptional this year that it could not have been ignored. And we had only one vacancy.”

“Do you know my friend’s name?”, he queried, gradually coming to terms with the turn of events, his voice tinted with pride.

“No, sir.”, the voice replied.

The Sixth Day (Part 5)

Day 4

“Why are you disconnecting my phone?”

“I can’t talk right now.”

“Go to hell”

Day 5

“Don’t be angry. She must have a genuine reason”, he repeated to himself, as his indifferent eyes scanned through another cursory turn of the newspaper pages. As he ran out of pages to turn, he scanned the room – searching for some other means to calm his thoughts with. It is amazing how the littlest of things can trigger off a volcano when your anger is close to reaching its escape velocity. This time, it was the familiar ring of his phone. He swore as he searched for the source of the sound, unable to locate the contraption buried deep beneath the piles of strewn about clothes. He finally found it. The ringing had stopped. He was about to shatter the instrument to pieces, as it rang again.

It was her call.

“You know what? I got promoted.”

“What? When? How?”

“I just got off the phone with my boss, he told me I’m getting a raise from next month, and my own office. Can you believe it – my own office?”

It took him some time to digest the information. As the words assimilated themselves into his brain, his anger seemed to evaporate away in wisps of fume. He forgot why he was angry.

“That is brilliant. I am so happy for you.”, he shrieked into the phone, his voice louder than hers.

“Thanks. I could not have done this without you.”, she replied.

“Without us”, he corrected.

The Sixth Day (Part 4)

Day 3

“Why can’t you behave yourself in public?”

“What did I do now?”

“Couldn’t you have been a little nicer when my friend was around? No, you had to throw your tantrums at that exact moment, didn’t you?”

“I was as nice as I could have been given the way you have been talking to me today.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is about?”

“Yes. I was hoping you could have at least appreciated my coming to town to meet you.”

“Then don’t come if it is such an inconvenience.”

“I can’t understand you. You don’t believe in public display of affection but have great affinity for public display of anger.”

“Yes, you can never understand me. And you will also not understand how tense I am about my promotion.”

At that moment, he got up on the pretext of attending a call on his cellphone and walked out of the restaurant. Five minutes later, he returned with a small teddy bear clutched in his hands. It elicited a feeble smile from her.

The people in the restaurant had been treated to their share of entertainment.

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.

The Sixth Day (Part 2)

Day 1

“It is supposed to be a proper date today, and I promise not to make any more foolish loose comments”, he repeated the refrain for the seventeenth time since morning, as he tried to tame a stubborn cowlick with his dilapidated comb.

As he was taking car on to the driveway, his eyes fell onto the newspaper he had forgotten to pick up in his haste to be ready in time. He got out of the car, picked it up, placed it on the front seat and climbed back into the car. As he was turning the keys, he made an effort to glance the headline. His heart sank as he read the topline – “Chief Minister assassinated, Statewide bandh declared”. “Perfect”, he exclaimed and banged his head onto the steering wheel.

Life plays small tricks with us as we meander through the maze it set up for us to negotiate. But the same life also creates clandestine furrows to circumvent the maze walls.

Dust kicked up in generous amounts as the jeep screeched to a grinding halt in front of the palatial residence. Had Martin Scorcese or Quentin Tarantino been around, they might have scampered for the camera. As a pair of big leather boots stepped out of the vehicle, she pulled the curtain to the side to catch a glimpse of the burly moustache-clad man. She could hardly stifle her giggle.

“Good morning madam, I am Inspector Hari Om Tripathi and I am scouting all houses around here for outside visitors”, he spoke in a burlesque accent as her mother made tremendous effort to comprehend. “I believe there is one member of your family who has come to visit from outside town”, he continued.

As fear of the cop mingled with the incomprehensibility of his accent, the lady finally spoke with much effort,” Yes…err..it is…er…my daughter”.

“I’m afraid she will have to come with me for a few hours”, the return to his normal tone had almost given it away before he redeemed with a burly “to the police station, of course”.

And they were off.