Wrong number, Mister!

‘This number has been on my phone for a while now, but who’s this?’
I knew it was a girl, I knew her name, what she did and where she was, but I sent her this message like a dumb flirt.

She messaged me back; I almost had a black eye. I forgot about it for a while before calling her again. I must have spoken to at least three or four voices, all of them blasting me like there was no mercy in this world.

Two days later I had a call; one of those four voices spoke to me. She told me her name was Anamika, which I knew was a lie and I told her my name was Kumar which she probably thought was my full name. She was sorry for me, sorry because her friends were rude to me and she did not mean a thing. Protective friends I thought before we spoke for quite a while that day, when we hung up I knew both of us were smiling.

I called her back a day after, this time she wasn't alone, I was hearing her friends talk about ‘these bad boys’ and there was guilt for a few days. I didn't call her and neither did I answer her calls, though there weren't too many of them.

I answered her call that night, more because I was drunk. I told her my name she didn't like it, she told me hers and I confessed I was only a flirt trying to find a friend when I called her. She was angry and was terribly upset, she did not believe people called up strangers to make friends; she hung up, so much for my being truthful.

We did not speak for a week before she called me up.

She had some exam the next day and she just said “wake me up after an hour, okay mister” and hung up. I had a book 'Acts of faith' by Erich Segal in my hands. The next morning when I went to bed, I had finished the book, woken her up six times through the night and it was 6.00 am. She called me in the evening and said "you are a good guy" but added after a pause "sometimes"; I think I loved the book.

The following week, I had a terrible ulcer and I was almost crying in pain when she called me. To this day she doesn't know why she cried that day over the phone. Our calls were more frequent in the days that followed and I bore the brunt because she was still at college and I was working, when I did not call her for a few days, she would call me up only to tell me what a 'miser I was'.

Our birthdays fall a day apart, that year I sent her a box of chocolates and had my drunken friends sing her a happy birthday over the phone and she cried, again but not before she said “thank you beggar”.

I met her two months later at an old fort near her college a place near my home town, wearing a black Tee, she loved black. She was huge, she was not pretty at first sight, she loved chocolates and more importantly she had two of her beautiful protective friends with her. She didn’t like me either I guess, because she said “who do you think you are, the angry young man? Stop frowning at me and.. and drooling at them“.

I took her to my house the next month; in retrospect a bad decision because she loved my parents more than me. She called my father by an actor's name, my father laughs at it to this day; he doesn't laugh much. I noticed she was pretty when she laughed. She frequented my house until she had to leave college.

She went to work a few months later at a hospital in a neighboring state; our calls became less frequent, though we spoke at least once a week. A train I once traveled was passing through her place and she was at the station in the middle of the night smiling; standing besides a frowning, shivering-out-of-cold friend.

Railway stations have since become our only rendezvous, I only saw her every time she left home or when she was at her college to get her papers. She soon left to her home town to live with her parents and work from there, a city in a far northern state.

She still calls me up, when she is angry, when she is scared, when her brother is back from the gulf, when her back hurts, when she wants to cry, when she wants to laugh, when she has seen someone look like 'the stingy beggar' or simply because she thought she should disturb Mr. KUMMAARRR.

It’s too bad she always laughs at my proposals and worse because I do too...