↓ the memory lane...

Yesterday, while I skimmed through some dusty old pages of my memory, I came across an incident which I thought was worth sharing (well, just because it was freaky). Its a long one, but trust me, you would like it. Here it goes...

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I spent the first two years of my undergrad in a university hostel after which I moved to Rawalpindi from where I used to take the university bus to get to the university and back home everyday. Some of the fellows who took the same bus later became very good friends of mine. I remember we used to take the bus back home a couple of hours after noon and by the time we reached Rawalpindi it would still be quite hot in summer. One of those summer days the weather was somewhat pleasant and before we could enter Saddar, our bus was hit by a van from behind. Luckily, no one was injured. Since it was a government owned transport and there were supposedly some standard operating procedures in place that needed to be followed before the bus could move on with the rest of its journey. Most of the people rightly guessed that it would be a while before the bus could move. Me and my friends got off the bus to take public transport to our homes but with the weather relatively pleasant we decided to walk for a while. Instead of walking along the the main road, we agreed on taking the less polluted roads through a residential area which was probably  a shortcut for all of us back home. This was somewhere near the Rawalpindi polo club, if my memory has not gone blurry, and there lived some quite rich people. Often one could see the name plates at the houses stating ranks of retired military personal and their children with prefixes of Dr. and Engr.

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As we walked and talked and giggled at jokes that now sound naive and somewhat stupid, the cloud cover that was making the weather mild and pleasant disappeared and we started feeling the heat of the sun. Naturally cursing our decision to walk and jokingly blaming each other we diverted our course and starting walking towards the main road. All of a sudden an old man wearing an extraordinarily white Shalwar Kameez  emerged from the wide brown gate of a bungalow we were passing by. One could not see a single gray or black hair on his head and he was not bald either. A few wrinkles on his forehead and at the edges of his eyes coupled with his eyebrows pointing upwards at the outer ends made him look somewhat scary. He was clean shaved and the heavy circles beneath his eyes represented his old age. His eyes had some sort of anger which meant something along the lines of we having been caught red-handed committing some heinous crime. Finding such a scary-looking angry old man in such hot weather on a summer afternoon was quite unlikely. Well, us walking there and then, was also more than improbable. But it was anything but weirder than the old man walking straight up to us and saying what he said. With a strange grin on his face he spelled two words, "h-e-a-l-t-h-y and w-e-a-l-t-h-y". Without pausing he went on to say "what are these words". It was not a question he asked because he wanted to know, it was clear that he knew very well what they meant and was testing us for something and he seemed pretty damn sure we were going to fail whatever the test was for. Baffled by his appearance, his walking up to us, his facial expression, the anger in it and his mode of addressing us with no intro to the context or the conversation, none of us could say a word for a few seconds. With his patience shrinking, his expression turned sterner and he rephrased the question. However, it still did not answer the question we were asking each other without saying it 'what is the point?'. A few moments passed and my stubborn expression implying 'Say anything, who cares' pushed one of my friends to say the two words with a pronunciation of -th- as in they or mother and tell him what it meant. The crazy old person looked relieved as if we had been proven guilty. He then corrected us by explaining us that it was pronounced  with  a -th- as in therapy or throw and how most of the people get it wrong. He went on with his speech for a few minutes. With nobody around in the heat of the summer day and the awkward situation, it felt creepy and we all agreed by conversing through our eyes that it was time to leave. Just as abruptly as the conversation had started we concluded it keeping the level of politeness as high as possible. After all he was an old man and deserved respect no matter how crazy he seemed. We thanked him for correcting our mistake, promised we would pronounce it correctly from then on and said goodbye.

For the next hundred meters or so none of us said a word or looked back and we all knew why not. After we were clear enough from the place we looked back and the old man was not there, he had probably gone back into the house. We all burst into laughter and tried to keep it down and the comments about the incident continued till we all reached our homes.

Maybe the old man was crazy, maybe insane, maybe he had read too much, or maybe he was just too old. It could well be a million other things, and I wouldn't know which it was. But I do wonder if the those friends of mine actually remember the incident or not. Maybe I should ask them the next time we talk. Maybe I will. I definitely will.