the Pause button: when only one thing matters

My wife was expected to be at my house to receive my sister, and usually she’s pretty punctual but today she just wasn’t around.

Maybe she’s left her mobile behind. Try to forget it and get back to work – either she’ll get back to me seeing my missed calls, or my sister has anyway said that she’ll let me know.

Trying to work… but long time… no phone.

Called my mother in law who was busy with my son, and said her daughter had left. Then her brother who was at work and had last spoken to her quite a while ago. She was absolutely untraceable.

Waiting… waiting…

Called my mother-in-law again… what was the last thing Vijetha had said before leaving… any clues about where she’d gone? There was some talk about buying a new dress for the baby but not possible that it could take so long and no contact with anyone… She had left on a small moped. Contemplation of all kinds of possibilities became inevitable.

Waiting… waiting… finally cancelled a conference call I had in the evening, and left the office on a bike with a colleague. I didn’t know what I could do. Maybe go along the same road and see if she’d gotten stuck anywhere. But atleast do something… anything…

All these things are going on, and suddenly life presses on this Pause button. Everything that may earlier have felt good or bad or grand or mediocre, now was distant and irrelevant. Suddenly it felt like someone had switched off all the noise of life and there was just this one thing that mattered more than anything else.

Finally on the way, the call came from my sister’s phone and it was my wife. It seems she’d kept the phone somewhere in a cupboard by mistake (inside her purse) and couldn’t locate it. She was surprised to know that I’d been looking for her, and so I just keep it to a short hi and bye. Returned to office, and sent a follow up mail to my conference call asking them to ignore my previous cancellation message.