It was a Sunday evening. I was done studying and was sitting on my couch, having some hot soup, when the doorbell rang. I was home alone and was not expecting anyone to come at this time. I opened the door and there stood an old woman. She was wearing a blue saree and maroon rimmed spectacles. She looked very tired and weak. Her face looked familiar but I couldn’t seem to recognize her. Her confused and nervous expression suggested that she did not know who I was either.
Before I could say anything, she asked me whether I was alone at home. My mother had been teaching me not to tell strangers that I am home alone but did not tell me exactly what I should say if someone does happen to ask me that. Should I lie and say that there are people at home? But what if she is here to meet someone else from my family? As I was contemplating what to do, the woman softly asked, “Will you help me?”, completely changing the topic from the previous question. Without waiting for a reply, she handed me a paper with something written on it. I took the paper from her hand and looked at it. It seemed to be some kind of address. “Can you tell me how to reach this place, son?”. I looked at the paper and did not know where that place was. I told her that I did not know the directions to that place. She then told me to check the location through the mobile application. So I got my phone and put the address in the app. It was somewhere in Thane, far away from my house. When I told her this, she got shocked and asked me to check again. At this point, I was a little frustrated, yet I checked again and got the same results. This time I showed the woman my phone, proving that the place was, indeed, in Thane. She took a look at my phone and suddenly fell to her knees and started weeping out loudly. I did not understand what to do. It was so sudden that I just froze in my spot for a few seconds before going and comforting her. I told her to come in and sit and went to the kitchen to make her a cup of tea. She soon stopped crying and told me that it was very important for her to reach that address the next day.
I did not ask her why, as I thought it would be rude. The address she wanted to go to was very close to the Thane central bus station. So I told the woman that I could buy her a bus ticket to the Thane central bus station. After listening to me, she got very happy and told me to go ahead and book the ticket and that once she gets to the Thane central station, she would be able to go to find the address by asking someone. As I was booking the ticket, the thought that I was being scammed kept on flashing in my mind. What if she is here to steal money? If I get scammed, what will I tell my parents? I just kept having these thoughts again and again. But when I saw the price of the ticket, my suspicion seemed to vanish a bit. It was only 105 rupees and no one would scam someone for such a low price. But other thoughts started creeping in my mind that maybe this ticket thing is just an excuse to enter my house and that maybe she stole things from the house while I was making tea. I put these negative thoughts aside and just booked the ticket, printed the ticket out and gave it to her, after which she thanked me and left the house.
The peculiarity of the incident kept me up all night. The next morning I woke up and went out to play table tennis in the society game room. While playing, I happened to look at the picture of the first ten people who had bought houses in society. In that picture, next to Mrs Verma stood a woman resembling the one who had come to my house the previous day. I knew Mrs. Verma extremely well as she was my best friend Samar’s grandmother. So I soon went to Mrs Verma’s house. She let me in and made me a cup of tea. She told me that Samar was not home and got a little confused when I told her that I was here to talk to her. I showed her the picture of the woman and asked her if she knew her. Looking at the picture she exclaimed,” Oh! That’s Meera, an old friend of mine.
Poor lady! Wasted her youth looking after her son and when her son grew up, he abandoned her and left her after a dispute. She spent her old age trying to reconcile with her son. Her son, that brat, had not even given her the address to his house” I thought to myself that maybe the address she gave me was the house of her son. I took a sip from my cup of tea. I thought she was done when she started again, “She died trying to find her son. Her son did not even attend her funeral. I have heard that she actually did find her son’s address, but couldn’t go there due to her bed-ridden state. Promise me, you will never do that to your mother” I thought I heard her wrong and said, “Wait, did you say she died?” and she sighed and said,”5 years ago”. In total shock and disbelief, I asked her if she had a picture of her with that woman and if she could show that to me. When I saw the picture she showed me, my hand went cold and I just felt numb. The woman in the picture was wearing the same spectacles and certainly was the woman I had helped. My hand started to shake and I just froze there, trying to comprehend what exactly had just happened.
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