The day started as any other, I woke up late (no surprises there...), hit office late (as usual), checked mail... Nothing interesting was lined up for the day and there no surprises sprung up either... another boring day in office. The later part of the day seemed more promising and there were some interesting things set to happen. First, I had plans of leaving early by around 4.30-5(which is really unusual for I'm the kind of guy who stays up late in the office just to avoid rush hour traffic...anyway I usually leave office around 9.30-10.30...).
I left sometime around 4.45ish, reached home by 5.20ish much to the surprise of my mom and with time to spare to wish 'bon voyage' to my dad who was going on a short trip to Japan that day. He was travelling with an old friend and colleague so we said our goodbyes at home and he sped off to the airport in the ubiquitous call taxi and I was left at home on a weekday so early in the evening which I've never been before (for a loong time... to say the least). I was supposed to meet an old friend (from college) after a pretty long time (4 years atleast...) only much later at around 9.
With more than 3 hours to kill and having complete disposal of the television (my moms serial saga starts much later...) I realized what I'd been missing all this while. It felt great to be out of office and at home reminded me of the time when I was a kid studying at school. Seeing all those school kids on the way home must have induced that because, usually I only see other office goers. And, my early departure from office gave me the opportunity to look at a lot of kids in bright school uniforms giggling away in all glory (man! do I miss my childhood). Anyway, I din't do anything interesting. Got bored with television (mom was not cribbing about keeping the volume down or fighting for the remote), drew a complete blank with the days 'The Hindu' crossword (usually on a good day I fill up half of it today, it turns out wasn't gonna be my day :(...), the internet wasn't too interesting as I'd already read up on the interesting feeds of the day in office. Finally, I hit upon and old forgotten habit, reading. I was once an avid reader but fell out of practice lately, and realized that I had quite a few books due to my friends which I'd borrowed long ago with high hopes of completing them in days but lay unattended accumulating dust in my shelf.
So, off I went dusting off one of them and in auto-pilot to my favourite reading spot at home, the balcony only to find it had become a mini storeroom of junk. I've spent hours languishing in the balcony doing whatever I did reading, homework, brooding... but, since I had been coming late just in time to eat dinner and sleep my parents had taken over and filled it with junk. So, I went to the next most comfortable spot the bedroom to catch up on some reading. I was pretty restless and had to take quite a few snack breaks wiping out a large quantity of snack my mom usually hoards up for my dad and me. But, I did put in a good 2 hours on my reading :)
My friend whom I was supposed to meet at around 9 that day called in at around 7.30ish to say he was already free and could improve on the meeting time and would ping me after coming near my neighborhood. Now, he has come to my house only once or twice and I was confident he wouldn't remember it and I was right (ok only technically he only did not remember which door but came to the exact block). By 8.30 we were heading on his bike to our age-old hangout 'Elliots Beach'. We parked just outside Planet Yum's outer wall facing the skating rink (remember that, its important...). We were in and out of Planet Yum with cold coffees for each in about 5 minutes and were on the beat strolling up and down the walkway.
We had a lot to talk about since we'd had very little contact from the time he'd gone to Germany to study and later moved to New York to work. Emailing had never been our forte and my friend was notorious for abandoning email ids. I came as no surprise to me that he had meet a quite a few of our other classmates and knew a lot more about what each was doing than me who hadn't left the shores of Chennai. I think the distance from home and the foreign land have something to do with that, guys who have gone to study or work have always found time to meet up. I guess they have a better incentive for that ;). I also found him to be more confident of himself than he was before. He spent a lot of time trying to convince me to move ahead and see the world and stop wasting my time here(nothing new there I get a lot of that and I personally do dole out such stuff at people willing to listen). Plus we reminisced a lot of the time we spent in college carefree and clueless wondering how we reached where we were with no conscious effort from us. I filled him up on how I got hired (a story by itself) and he filled me up on how he spent his time alternating between studies and clubs and later slogging for a paltry €300 as a Delphi programmer and finally how a chance chat conversation landed him in his current job (and subsequent migration to New York). Meantime one other friend from our class who had just gone back after his 2 week vacation here in Chennai called up from Minneapolis and we congratulated him on his excellent timing and had a whale of a time over phone.
We had walked the length of the beach thrice(2 legs to and fro...), our coffees had long run out and it was almost 11PM when we decided to go home after making plans to meet up after the weekend for which he had other plans. So, off we went to Planet Yum to pick up his bike in which he was planning to drop me home. We reached there to find one single bike standing which wasn't my friends'. We are both not much of panickers and inquired with the security guard if any vehicles got towed away or saw any suspicious activity around the parked bikes. The security guard coolly said he wasn't responsible for any vehicle parked outside the compound, which is where any parking was if ever was being done.
I was secretly feeling guilty and sorry for my friend but, he was taking the whole thing quite coolly. He calmly informed his parents of the loss and tried comforting me! saying, there was nothing to be done about any of this(which is true) and there was no way of preventing such a thing beforehand. In a futile attempt, we decided to look through the entire length of the beach for the now missing bike. We decided to file a complaint at the police box found near one of the junctions of the beach and went across to find it locked and empty. We took an auto to the nearby Beasant Nagar police station to file a complaint.
This was actually my second time for giving a complaint for a missing (stolen) vehicle, the first time was when somebody stole my own bicycle. The general mood of the policemen in both the instances was no different, they first tried to convince us that we had probably left the bike somewhere else and forgotten all about it so, we should go back and look for the vehicle ourselves. A constable spent a good 10 minutes of his time trying to do this and advised us against filing a complaint. He even suggested that we wait near the spot where we parked the bike to see if there were any other bikes that had been abandoned as its original owner had mistakenly taken my friends bike. We persisted in filing a complaint and were directed to the writer.
The writer too gave the exact same suggestions and some more after inquiring how much petrol was left he suggested miscreants might have taken it for a joyride and would dump the bike once petrol ran out. There were two other policemen in the room and they too joined in this fun(?). They even tried to convince us to wait till the morning to see if some irate guy turned up after having mistakenly take the bike in question. It took some more insisting for them to note down the registration number of the bike on the back of some notepad claiming they would look for it during their nightly rounds. My friend and I were rapidly losing interest and confidence in their speech. By which time my friends brother-in-law who was a high-court lawyer advised him over phone to file a complaint if possible or wait till the morning to file a complaint as the policemen suggested. We took the policeman's suggestion of going back to see if the single left out bike was probably abandoned. We arrived just to see a young couple depart on that bike. Our auto driver meantime was filling us up with stories of similar incidents in the area and his own experience with a particular deserted wallet that contained cash.
Realizing there was nothing more to be done we ended up giving the registration number and my friends phone number to the security guard and the auto driver on the auto driver's insistence that he would keep watch for my friend's bike. We headed back to my house in the same auto and for want of something better to do I dropped my friend back to his house at almost 12. He seemed not too worried about the whole incident and claimed that the night was going to be a memorable one to be remembered with nostalgia in later meetings. I did agree with him on that but wished something else; something nice had happened... it is of course wishful thinking. Adversities usually leave a deeper mark on our memories when all the fun and joy merge into one happy halo. I can still recall how ashamed I felt standing out (with the guy who called) of class just few months into college while all the fun moments we spent together seems like a more continuous nebula of time where individual incidents are blurring with time.
So, was this eventful day due to some juju of coming in early? I must admit a lot of old stuff, books and friends were rejuvenated and I had fun but, still feel I would have felt better if March 10th 2006 din't have to end the way it did.