Never Again! I Hope

Yesterday was a moonlit night. I said in an earlier post that my current favortie song too is suhani chandni raaten ... (pleasent moonlit nights ... though it never quite means the same when you translate it). But yesterday was horrible.

I have had a smiliar horrible experience before. Long back (more than two years now) my younger nephew one fine day did not turn up home after his playtime. He is a tall (over six feet even then) and responsible lad, so when such kids don't turn on time you get worried. He also calls up from a PCO or a friend's mobile (he has declined an offer of mobile phone for so many times, saying it will be too distracting, that kind of kid I am talking about, and he is still in school).

So when it became an hour later after his playtime, we started calling his friends. Could not find much. Then my elder nephew and husband went out of home carrying one mobile with them. They went to the place where he plays football, to a few friends and another one hour slipped by. I was franatic by that time, because he is after all just a kid.

Sometime later, my husband called to say that the kid has contacted him on the mobile and they are going to pick him up from a particular spot because he took a shared cab that took him to some other place. To this date we are not very clear why the cabbies let him off so far away? Was it for 20 rupees extra that they charged? Anyway, I knew we were very very lucky to get him back just after a few hours of anxity, all in a single piece. It was a freak accident. In fact, yesterday only he called me up to say he is going to be late by twenty minutes because their friend's bike has got a flat tire. And he turned up within next 10 minutes.

But later, yesterday I got a call, this time about an adult who failed to turn up after saying he was going out for 10 minutes. Well, you give adults a longer rope. You do not hit the panic button till much later. But when it became 12 at night all of us were getting worried.

Till 3 in the morning we stayed awake, hoping for a call. This person was also not carrying a mobile (well this was not my husband, even though he too refuses to carry a mobile. Anyway, he knows how much I worry if I do not know where he is and he is getting late, so he makes a point to let me know, always. Or else, I tell him I will empty our joint account on silliest of the things in this world. He has not tested me till date). So, all we could do was to wait for his call. He was also staying someplace else so I kept asking for update every half an hour. Finally, after three I fell into an exhausted sleep waking every 15 minutes. Woke up at six in the morning and started driving to the other place. When I was almost there, I got a call saying that the person has arrived in the morning.

That is when I realized that sometimes suhani chandani raaten ... can become daarawani chandani raaten (pleasent moonlit nights can turn nasty) just like that without any warning or reason.

Twice, we have been extremely lucky. And I sincerely hope this was last time, for my entire lifetime, when someone I know did the vanishing act on me. In fact, once itself was much more than enough.