On the 12th of January, I had called up my friends Sultan and Farida in Mumbai to wish them a happy 44th wedding anniversary.
I attended their wedding way back in 1968 and they have always received a call from me wherever they might have been during all these years.
During that call, I found that both of them were well and having a grand time in Mumbai having just seen their only child Shehla, and their two grand children off to Australia.
Earlier, on the 15th of November I had rung Farida up to wish her on her birthday, which too has been an annual ritual that she loves. On the 12th of February, it was Sultan’s birthday, and I rang him up to greet him and found that his mobile phone was not being answered, and Farida’s had been switched off; his land line was not being attended to by anyone and when I had a friend from Mumbai go and check up at their home, no one was answering the door bell either.
I panicked. I thought that something has happened to one or both of them and set in motion various investigations. In the meanwhile, on the 13th inst, I just decided to take another chance and called Sultan on his mobile phone and lo and behold, he answered and laughed when I scolded him for not answering the phone the previous day. They had suddenly decided to fly off to Australia just a few days earlier and when they got a very attractive deal on two return tickets, just took off and did not have time to tell anyone.
My blood pressure came back to normal and I told him to be a little more considerate in future as, at our age, we now keep getting all kinds of news and in the absence of contact, the imagination tends to run riot.
Has anything like this happened to you? Or did I just over react?
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