Walkman

Who’s he? She’s asked him during the interval of the movie. Unwittingly the tall guy had come and plonked himself in between them. Both of them had been too polite and shy to protest and ask him to move. They were a huge group of friends out for a movie together. But as always they wanted to sit together. He silently cursed the tall guy for depriving him of the opportunity to sit next to her in the dark cosy comfort of the movie theatre.

They were inseparable in college too. Most of their time was spent whiling away in the canteen. They laughed they joked they cracked up on the silliest of things. And they heard their music together. He had a little green Walkman and they would share one earpiece each listening to Neil Diamond, Rod Stewart, Sting and The Beatles. It was the soundtrack of their lives.

They drifted apart over the years. Even in the later years of college there was a distance that had crept up between them. Like the tall guy in the movie theatre, he now felt a permanent block in between him and her. An invisible wall which he could not get beyond. Somewhere along the words had dried up.

They still spoke to each other but the intensity and spark had gone. At times he felt she was too polite and nice to cut off ties with him completely and spoke to him out of her sheer goodness. He started disliking her for this very reason.

He knew it was his inability to express his true feelings for her which was the reason for this chasm. Maybe she waited for him to say something at least and then moved on. He kept reasoning internally but could never get himself to accept his own shortcomings.

It was the last day of college. Like most of his other friends he was a bundle of emotions that day. The very thought of moving away from people who he interacted with on a daily basis for the last five years was killing him from inside. Will I see her again he wondered. Will we be in touch even now? Questions to which he had no answers kept on haunting him all day. He sat in the crowded canteen lost in these thoughts. Feeling all alone in the midst of the canteen crowd.

His thoughts were broken by a tap on his shoulders. She was standing next to him with a smile which always cheered him up. She bent down to give him a hug and then sat next to him. She took out the green Walkman from her bag. You’d forgotten about this hadn’t you she said as she handed it over to him. It was lying with me all these months. Don’t worry we’ll remain in touch. The phone is always there she smiled at him gently adjusting his hair from his face. She put the earphone on her ear and the other one on his.

Neil Diamond sang

You make it feel like Christmas

Even when things go wrong

I hear the sounds of Christmas

In your song

All day long

Copyright (c) Pratik Majumdar, 2021. Any article, story, write-up cannot be reproduced in its entirety or in part, without permission. URL links can be used instead