Yesterday evening I was at the station to catch the train to Chennai after a 3-day weekend. As is the normal practice, my parents, wife & son had come to see me off and we are all talking on Platform-1. The train's arrival was announced and since it would be coming on Platform-2, I move to that platform.
A distance of some 10-metres (and 2 railtracks) separate the 2 platforms. Earlier my son would not even recognise me once I moved to the other platform. But as he grows older, he sort of understands that I am going away and this time he tries to jump towards where I am standing, from my wife's arms. He wants the 4 of us (me, his mom and my parents) to be always near him and even if one of us moves away, ever so briefly, he starts bawling.
Anyway, the train arrives and I get on. There is a brief 1-2 minute wait before it will leave. So, I stand near the door of the train looking at my folks and saying goodbye. And that is when I see a girl (actually woman - mother of 2 kids now) talking with my parents. Even though she has changed quite a bit since the time I last saw her (13 years ago), I recognize her as a friend of my sister's.
Actually, they met each other due to taking the same train to college and over time became
thick friends and she has come home many-a-time too. My parents know her well too and so they catch up with news on each other. There have been many friends of my sister's who have come home and whom I have met, but I am not sure I would be able to remember most of them. But the moment I saw this girl, I could recollect her immediately, due to two reasons.
First being her strange way of letting others know that she is missing them at that particular moment of time. In the mid-nineties, when there were no cellphones and even a landline was a big deal, when I was home on vacation, occasionally I would hear the phone ringing. If no one was around to take the call, I would abandon what I was doing and rush to the phone. But many a time, I saw that by the time I reached the phone (say after 3-4 rings), the phone would go silent.
When this happened repeatedly, it would irritate me no end. But we did not have Caller Line Identification on the phone and there was no way to track the caller. Sometimes after this routine has happened a few times, I would wait near the phone to pick it up on the first ring, but mysteriously there won't be any calls at that time. This happened occasionally and even though irritated, I did not give it much thought.
Then I happened to mention this to people at home and my sister revealed the mystery behind the caller. She said that it was a friend of hers who has this habit of giving missed calls to the person she was thinking of at that time and whom she missed. So, this was her way of telling my sis that she was missing her. But, problem was my sis usually would not be at home when this girl missed her and used her unusual way to convey this to her. Instead, it really ended up irritating me. Anyway, after I came to know of this, I stopped rushing to the phone and if it rang briefly for a few times, I would just ignore it.
This was what struck me immediately after I saw the girl, helping me identify her. Ofcourse it also helped that she had complimented me (not directly, but via my sister) and like anyone else, I do not easily forget people who compliment any attribute of mine.
As the train left the station, I waved to her too and was wondering whether she still uses her missed-call technique of letting those she misses know about it. Must be much easier to do it
today with cellphones than with the landlines of old times.
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