Thursday, June 28, 2012

Lost and Found


The joys of finding some object after having lost it ( unless you have lost it intentionally ) is something of great elation to all of us. Many of us go to great lengths to find the stuff we lost, look for divine intervention and are persistent at finding and in such cases, most probably, we always find them. I have an experience of finding a pendant gifted to me by my friends which I have described here.

We also lose track of people – don’t we? There are some people from our childhood or from our past that we have lost touch with and spend many precious moments in nostalgia about the good times we have had. And however much we want to be in touch with them, somehow destiny wouldn’t allow you to reach them even in these days of technical brilliance, information transparency and availability of all details public social media. Actually I think it is very difficult to hide from public eye these days. Every action of yours, even your trips to the loo in a public space is being tracked. LOL.

Some very precious people from my life too have vanished altogether and many attempts to reach out to them have been in vain – I am persisting and hoping that will yield results. One such instance is my friend Sumai, who kind of left me in the lurch 7 years back. ( I am not sure who left who in the lurch but I guess each of us had a good role to play in that).

I was hoping that time would take the sting away of losing her, but surprisingly it didn’t. We met while at work in my earlier organisation sometime in the year 2000 or 2001 and we were not the same kind, I would say we were kind of opposites – She was quite, mature and grounded and I was all that she was not. She was a Bengali and I was Malayalee, non-resident in our respecitive states and were in Chennai together (that probably is the closest we could get on similarities) Opposites attract and we hit it off pretty well and in a large group we always knew we were there for each other.

We could see the same ironies of certain situation, humour in the most intense stuff around us and most of all we understood each other – quite deeply. I remember she noticing my slightest mood fluctuations, knew my innermost fears and sometimes put my vagabond soul on a leash. We laughed, talked, shopped, worked, gossiped and were partners in crime and humour during those 4 – 5 years that we knew each other (and that’s a considerably long time). We went on for official get togethers, lunches and dinners shared our simple joys and sorrows, cried on each others shoulders, laughed our guts out at most ridiculous stuff and most of all were good reliable friends.

Sumai had to move to Calcutta as her better half was getting a transfer and it was quite painful for all of us in the group to let her go. She did, only after sharing all co-ordinates and numbers - We were in touch initially exchanged mails, called each other, updated our day to day stuff and she even came down to Chennai once after an year and met all of us. I don’t know how and when but I guess we moved away from each other, slowly but steadily, drifting away only to lose sight of each other completely.

By the time reality hit me, I had a server crash, my email account changed, lost my mobile contacts a couple of times and in short lost Sumai. Then there were frantic attempts to track her down. I was surprised our common friends also had lost her contacts and due to reasons similar to mine. I rummaged through loads of mail and pulled out her home contacts, left scores of messages on the answering machine, called her office only to find she moved out of that organisation long ago and was beginning to lose hope.

While rummaging through the mails I also happened to get her email id and I had shot out a mail to her, expecting a reply immediately which did not happen. Anyways in the first place that didn’t look like an valid email address.

One of the days last month I had a message from an unknown number and it had the most profound message – It said “Hi… Sumita”. I literally sat up for a couple of minutes with a wide grin. Called her and it was as though we didn’t lose each other at all. My first question was “where were you, I have been looking for you for such a long time” and her reply was so much herself “ Vincy, you are in a very good position now, so don’t lie” in a very laid back manner. And we laughed and laughed like old times.

Lost, but found.

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