20 May 2012. 10:07 AM. "...Mother Hen continued"

Just put you to sleep. Sang "amar bela je jay" while doing it. Strange thing is, when I was growing up, I hated Rabindra Sangeet. I was a bit of a British twit. I liked Neil Diamond, Julio Eglesias, Harry Belafonte, etc. But the  more you're growing up, the more I'm trying desperately to cling on to my roots.

You're born in Delhi. You'll grow up to be a Delhi chick, complete with the latest in fashion accessories, swinging ponytails and a swagger. And that's fine. But I also want you to know where I came from. What I heard as I was growing up. What you would have quite possibly sung along to, had we been in Calcutta, and not Delhi.

But back to Mother Hen.
[Where were we, incidentally?]

Oh yeah. The part where I had just discovered that she was deaf and dumb.
Damnit. You just woke up. How can you sleep for five minutes? I can hear you and Mother Hen giggling in the bedroom, so I assume all is good.
I can continue with this post.

So, after I went back to my seat, my desk and in general my life, I asked around about this strange deaf and dumb girl. I was shocked when I was told that she was, contrary to belief not just functioning fine in terms of sight, sound, logic and voice but also quite the friendly sort.

Which really meant, I was doing something wrong.
Hard to believe, I know - but there it is.

The next day, I tried again.
Early in the morning, before anyone with a clean conscience would come in, I went and sat with a plomp on her desk.

One doesn't ignore people sitting on desks in the morning. I had cornered this girl-who-refused-to-talk-to-me.
Now all I had to do was wait.

The wait was a medium one, just over a couple of hours. She came, deposited her bag obediently and raised her eyebrows in the same fashion as they she had raised them before. Some people aren't very flexible when it comes to showing emotions.

Hopefully you won't get that from her.

I wasted no time and flipped out my phone.
"We have the same phone!", I said with some amount of enthusiasm.
Her eyebrows maintained their phenomenal height.
"So?"

Right.
No easy way to answer that.
The woman had me. There was no logical answer to the question I had put to her.

So?
So you and me should start talking?
So what's your deal, mad woman?
So I should take you for a coffee?
So we should marry off our phones in a typical Maharashtran fashion?
So one of us should change our phones?

While I hemmed and haw-ed and did various permutations and combinations of various possibilities of answers, the girl in question walked off. To something more mentally challenging no doubt.

It was only after weeks of trial and error that we finally got talking. She came across as a smart woman, your mother. Friendly in a "touch me once and I'll punch you where it hurts" kind of way. And we started to get along fine.

In a year or so, Ogilvy moved.
And not to left behind with the times, so did we.

She rented a small PG in Phase 3, Gurgaon. I rented a one-bedroom flat suspiciously close to her. We spent a lot of time getting to know one another, accessing each other's pros and cons. Unknown to either of us, we had started dating.

And like most dating cycles, this one too would have broken had it not been for that lunch in your mother's house which I was invited to.

But Mimi, more of that later.

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