......well, at least there would be a monotonous quality to my days, i thought, sipping the tea thoughtfully.....two other colleagues trooped in at just that moment to down another round of endless caffeine......they nodded, perhaps noticed my isolation, but thankfully left me to alone...
We got to know each other quite accidentally.....but i am unsure how or when, except one passing conversation she had had with a colleague, with me staring resolutely at the PC and trying not to overhear the chatter....did it ring a bell? did i know she was going to be the woman in my life? no....not then..........of that i am pretty certain.......what happened after is a blur...how we got talking from there on and how we discovered each other in the initial few days is a misty series of conversations...ah! but i remember...the conversations were seemingly endless..with friends, without....and all of them memorable in some vague way , without knowing specifically why...........in between writing endless code, i would sneak out to the balcony that overlooked a dilapidated textile mill, for a smoke..and invariably, a few minutes later, she would saunter past to get a coffee from the vending machine.......we would steal conversations, in between smokes and coffees, about Kafka and his Metamorphosis, the intricacies of data arrays, black holes, family, dogs, poetry, everything....soon, we found we were having lunch together, or a dinner or two...nothing specific, just, you know, from one lunch to the next...we would avoid talking of weekend dates or movies, just one small coffee break to the next or one lunch to another dinner.......this, i noticed in retrospect, went on for about two months........i don't even know when we exchanged handphone numbers....then the smses started....something like "how was your violin class (she was learning to play)?" or "did you get wet in the rain yesterday?" sort of thing........invariably, she would ask me, "what did you have for dinner?" (i was away from home, i think i said that) or "what book are you reading?" ....soon, those too started taking the contours of intimacy...like office gossip, who was seeing whom, the boss being a meanie and so on........and slowly, as texting became too cumbersome, it became easier to talk.....after work, or during weekends, any time that was idle, not given to specific chores for either of us............one day, i remember, it was a weekend and i had no particular plans.......it was drizzling like it usually does in Mumbai, post the immediate monsoon season.........i was staring at some fracas on the street, from my 8th floor window..........the scene seemed like an action replay of any sport...from up high, it looked like everything was in slo-mo........
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