Jones Diary

It had been an year since I saw this child like handwritting, but I did not have to open the card to really know the sender. Stupid me, I had not even bothered to remember her birthday after I had left college.

Mechanical workshops I thought were normally a 'strictly for men' area, until ofcourse I saw the huge her. Almost 5.7 and large she did not seem out of place inside my college's mechanical workshop as she carried heavy sheets of metal like she was carrying paper. Her face just had a big pair of glasses and an even bigger smile covering almost all of her face and a part of her neck.

I remember the first time I spoke to her, I was wanting a mallet and she did not seem to understand and neither did she bother to. I was so frustrated that I yelled at her and all she did was to grin at me. I walked out of the workshop frustrated and it was almost a day when I learnt she couldn't understand English when spoken or any other language that I knew. I took another day to face her and tell her a sorry in her own language. She smiled again - no it wasn't a grin this time - and gave me a pat on my back and set off to carrying the sheets.

Since I had to frequent the workshop the following weeks, I was getting my back patted a lot and started learning a new language. She taught me the alphabets and the most commonly used expressions. She, I learnt was 30+, unhappily married to someone who spoke her language -I never bothered asking his name- had no kids and lived with her parents. My pats got more frequent as we met everytime I had a boring lecture (atleast two every day), we lunched almost every day together and even spent some time in the evening before she left home.

It was somedays before I knew how to converse (I do not know if its a conversation) fluently, making odd postures and noises. I was amazed at how she could cope up with everything without saying a word. She travelled, she shopped, she worked, she fought and all that without saying a word (not that she did not want to) and She honestly hated people feel sorry for her.

Somedays when I turned my eyes away from a boring lecturer she would be standing at the windows giving me a wicked smile. Somedays she used to even sneak in to my labs and sit beside me mocking an Instructor. She hugged me -the skies would never know why- and cried the day I introduced my father to her. She enjoyed my presence so much, sometimes I felt if I was overdoing something. I loved her presence, she was full of life and had the gut to live every moment although fate had been unkind to her in every way.

It went on until It was last day for me at college, and I was surprised when one of my friends said she did not want to see me. When I found her cuddled in the basement of the workshop with her eyes wet, I broke down myself. We sat in silence for sometime, and with nothing to say, I left telling her a bye in her language- the sign language- because Jones can neither talk nor hear.