Riya jumped out of bed. It was a Saturday and she was going to brunch.
The Riya of a couple of years ago would have raised her eyebrows - brunch was too fancy-schmancy for where she came from. Not anymore, she thought, as she smiled at herself in the mirror and even did a little jig for good measure.
Being twenty-six was fun. Being that, and earning, was priceless. The city was new, yes, but it had started to feel like a second skin. She had a job she liked, a gym close by, and enough of a social life for her parents to worry.
Not that she wanted her parents to worry, no no. But everyone had thought, including her, that settling into this new life, with its unfamiliar places and people, would be difficult for her. It was so different from her hometown, that oasis of comfortableness, where all the “neighbor-aunties” knew the exact time of her birth and the date she’d got her first period.
Here in the city, having gotten lost a few times, it felt like she had finally found herself.
She was beginning to understand what she was made of, the things she would do and those she wouldn’t, nobody here to care either way. Only herself to answer to.
In short, her life in this moment seemed awash in a roseate glow. Except for one tiny thing.
There were times she felt a bit..lonely. If only she could find..
She was jolted out of her thoughts by the auto-rickshaw she was in plunging into a puddle, splashing muddy water all around before emerging with a bit of a flying maneuver. It was an unusual type of puddle, no doubt with aspirations to lake-dom, but lying imprudently in the middle of a busy road. Riya found herself airborne for a second or two, before landing with a thud, rattled and undone.
The auto just carried on as if nothing had happened, and indeed, no lasting damage seemed to have occurred, neither to rickshaw nor to its human occupants. She was about to settle back into her seat when she noticed that her phone was not in its usual resting place - her hand.
With growing horror she remembered putting it on the seat next to her, to tie her hair up, just before the auto had leaped off the edge and into that dratted puddle. Now she frantically applied the third degree to that innocuous expanse of rexine, but it stood its ground, shiny and smooth with no phones marring its landscape. A quick search under the seat met with a similar fate.
A thousand damnations!
She tapped the auto-driver on his shoulder and requested him to stop. When that gent heard what had transpired, he understood the gravity of the situation right away and seemingly well-versed in this sort of calamity, took an immediate u-turn and braked to a halt. In happy ignorance of the animosity radiating from his fellow drivers, he urged Riya to go find her phone, assuring her gallantly that he would wait.
Riya didn’t need to be told twice. She jumped down and started to retrace her steps, eyes peeled to the ground.
It was a minute before she realized she had an audience, a band of street children were following her with uncontrollable glee, as she stared into puddles and peered into gutters. She realized how ridiculous she must look and smiled wanly at the children. The thought occurred to her that losing a phone was probably not the end of the world.
She was rewarded for this flash of acuity, as almost immediately she arrived at what looked like the mothership puddle her auto had descended into and then out of. Sadly again, it was absolutely deficient in mobile phones.
She looked up and seeing a few shops lining the footpath, decided to enquire.
Truth be told, the mission was starting to seem increasingly more futile by the second, and so with no great expectation, she went up to the stationary shop closest to the crime scene and asked if anyone had seen a fallen phone.
And wonder of wonders, the fellow at the counter said that he had!
Then as she stood there dumbfounded, surrounded by a knot of shopkeepers, an incredible tale emerged. That of a young lady with a towering profile striding into the stationary shop, phone in hand, asking if they knew who it belonged to. Ramesh, from the eponymous Ramesh Stationary, did not. The girl, with a steely glint in her eyes, had then marched up to each of the shops in that line. Fortune favors the bold but alas, in this case, they had all given her the same flaccid response.
Not to be outdone, the girl, smart as she was tall, had thought up another scheme on the spot. She had asked for a piece of paper and a pen and Ramesh, having no dearth of those, had jumped to her aid.
Riya was just about recovering from this vivid portraiture when to her amazement, she was solemnly handed over a grubby-looking chit folded a few times over. It was rather less grand than the story had led her to believe, if one was being honest. But the contents inside set her heart a-patter.
Hello,
I have picked your phone up. I have to go to my office now so I can’t wait. You can call me on your phone number and I will tell you where I am.
Sunaina.
Riya’s shoulders sagged in relief. She quickly asked for a payphone, but Ramesh bhai, not to be outshone by anyone, tall or not, offered his own landline. Reeling slightly under the kindness of strangers that had descended upon her this morning, Riya dialed her own number, convinced that this little adventure had met its happy ending.
But instead, she was greeted by the staccato response of a recorded operator saying that the call could not be completed.
It seemed her phone was switched off.
Riya couldn’t believe it. After having gotten her hopes up, this anticlimactic ending seemed especially hard to bear.
“Charging par dala hoga. Aap phir try karna”, said Ramesh sagely. And Riya, having no other option, nodded and then bought a set of stapler pins as a thank you to that kind-hearted raconteur laboring in the wrong profession, like so many of us.
The next few hours did nothing to alleviate her mood. The brunch that only that morning had seemed like such a mark of independence and optimism, came and went with a whimper. Only one of her friends turned up and she too had to leave early. Riya sat sipping her King cappuccino by herself, mulling dark thoughts.
Freedom came with a price tag. Back home, someone would have found her phone. Someone would have turned up to give her company. In that moment she longed for the embrace of familiarity, which even though stifling at times, had its heart in the right place.
As SRK’s immortal words, “bade bade deshon mein aisi chhoti chhoti baatein hoti rehti hain, Senorita” rose out of the mists in her brain, she arose too. It was time to beat the blues and she came out of the coffee shop to find a payphone.
Having found one, once again she dialed her own number, keeping all expectation at bay.
And this time it connected!
She waited breathlessly and then anxiously, as ring turned into ring and no one picked up. Just as she was about to hang up, the ringing stopped and a voice, slightly gruff, but sweet like the manna from heaven to Riya, floated down the airwaves.
“Hello hello, who is this?”, it demanded.
“Hello, is this Sunaina? I am Riya, I got your note, umm, about a phone.”
“Oh, thank god! I was looking for you.”
“Oh! Where are you?”
“I am at a shop near where I found the phone. It’s called..Ramesh Stationary.”
For a second time that morning, Riya was incredulous. Having confirmed that the shop indeed was the same one, she hailed an auto and was on her way, puzzled but buoyant.
It was a scene for the ages. Tall as promised, and superbly assuring, Sunaina stood with a smile on her lips and a phone in her palm, even as Ramesh beamed from beside her like a benevolent winter sun.
Sunaina and Riya, Riya and Sunaina - it was a meeting of the minds. One loved kadak chai, one swore by her three cups of daily caffeine, but it turned out they liked the same kind of music and quiet evenings at home. Most crucially they were both a bit adrift in the big city, in need of anchor.
And so, one thing led to another and on a Saturday quite like the one where our story began, there stood Sunaina at Riya’s doorstep, assorted belongings in tow, both in resolute agreement to be flat-mates and co-conspirators in this heady phase of their lives.
Later that night in bed, Riya gazed dreamily at the small square of sky her window afforded, and whispered a silent note of thanks. To this exhilarating roller-coaster of a city, one minute cold and the other, making magic happen.