Short & Sweet

This was a long due…..

A few days back, my mom called me up in an absolute state of panic….ok, it was not really that much, but, she was unquestionably hassled or puzzled. First, I thought it was earthquake as she is terrified of those. Then I thought it could be my little niece and nephew worrying her, and the troubled grandmother had called me for some break. But, it was something else. Something I did not contemplate, something much more serious which needed my instant consideration and assistance.

The position was like this. My dad (65 +), was using my mom’s cell phone to make a call and incidentally happened to see a SMS in her inbox, which read “Love You.” The SMS had come a few months back and none of them had even seen it before. But, now that he had seen it, he had been asking her about who this friend of hers was? Who had been sending such romantic messages to her? And all sort of related questions. Seems to me that he was suspicious ;)

Obviously she didn’t know and to figure this out she called the “clever me”.

It took me a while to understand the situation as this came to me a bit unexpectedly. For a moment, I could not make head or tail out of it and thought it must be some wrong number who had SMSed her. I asked her to check the date which was of last year. And then recall…recall…and I got it!!! Who else, but, I was the culprit here.

The story is…that last year during Diwali I went to Delhi, my home. Since, my phone is on roaming there, as I always do, this time also, I had borrowed my mom’s phone to be in touch with my friends there. One particular day, my friend A and I were making plans to have a get-together. She had been calling me up several times and I had been sending messages to her about our plan. Where? When? Who all to tell? Who all to not tell? All this and more.......When we make such important plans, it takes hours. After a point of time we were conversing over SMSes and during the end of one such conversation A sent me a message saying “Love you.” This is a usual way of saying bye for us and close the conversation for time being.

So, it was A’s message I had not bothered to delete from my mom’s cell, ignorant of the fact the one day such a situation could arise. I told my mother the entire thing and recited A’s number to her (987…….) to ask her to double check that the SMS is from this number. Of course it was. She breathed relief, but, what she could not understand was why two girls should say “Love you” to each other (generation gap there) and then finally ……...finally she laughed and my dad sitting behind her also laughed and anyone who ever heard this had laughed and would laugh!

All said and done, I am delighted that my dad is still so passionate about her that he questioned her on seeing the SMS.

I am also wondering what he would have done if he had seen some of the other SMSes from my female friends and many of them from A (She is going to kill me for this) which go like… “Will call you in a while sweetie,” I love you and miss you loads,” “Love you loads my dearie, Goodnight….sleep well” and so on…..