It can be unnerving hearing a voice extremely familiar, yet being unable to put a face or a name to it.

My father hails from Agartala, Tripura where the paternal half of my family still owns considerable estates/property which have been subjected to various litigations and family drama. However, in the good old days when I still used to wear shorts to school (we wore trousers from 8th Std. onwards), my father used to take me to our home in Agartala atleast once every year. It was there that I had the first taste of having siblings for there were cousins all around. In fact there were 14 of us in all. Several of the older ones were in hostels and colleges across the country and hence you only heard of them. But we, the younger ones, were present in enough numbers to bring down the house as they say. It would be like the cousins already residing in Agartala would be awaiting my arrival for then they could play and sometimes even bunk school for well you only got to see me once a year. And in any case the rest of the families would be busy with my Mom and Dad. My Dad is a superstar in my clan (don’t ask) and my mom is the only city girl bahu in the family and hence subject to a lot of attention. So I was special cause I was from Calcutta (which is like New York to a kid from Agartala in those days) and my parent’s kid and we had a car and all of that (in those days Agartala had electricity for a grand total of 5 hours a day, and cycles were a young middle class college graduates dream - something like having a bike in the city - and there was no cable) and also cause I got gifts for everyone. In fact I'd be given a list over the telephone of what to bring for everyone. Now of course my parents did all the purchasing and hence a lot of demands weren’t met cause they weren’t chotoder jineesh (stuff for kids) but no one really cared as long as they got something. We were kids alright.

The part of the house we stayed in was inhabited by my father’s immediate elder sister (he has five) and her family comprising her husband and two daughters. The younger daughter Munai and I were less than a year apart, she being older. And since my pre-puberty days till sometime after that, we were the best of friends. I remember she would get into all sorts of trouble because I would go out of my way and be a pest to the neighbours and everyone in general, and more often than not, she would be my only companion despite knowing that she would be solely held responsible by my aunt for her and my acts cumulatively. She didn’t seem to care though. The other cousins, including the male ones were a bunch of pussies compared to her. We bought eggs and chucked them into neighbour’s houses through open windows, sat scared out of our wits inside the loo at the farthest end of the pond on our land in the middle of the night waiting for ghosts, got caught and slapped for it by our worried parents who had been searching for half an hour, stole mangoes from the neighbour’s forests (well she did cause I couldn’t climb the trees), and even shat on an evil uncles brand new Bajaj Chetak (well I did, cause she sometimes remembered that she was a lady, and no she wasn't looking, she was the outpost).

She took a lot of beatings for me. But it was almost like a price we both knew she had to pay, and well we were gonna do what we were gonna do anyway, so it didn’t really matter. To her or me. Suddenly now it does, to me.

My father had to return to Agartala last night due to an emergency. Later in the night I got a call from an Agartala landline and there was a girl on the other end. And it was that voice. I knew the voice, but had no fucking idea who it was, except that it was someone I knew very well.

We stopped going to Agartala sometime during my 7th/8th Stds. Munai and I gradually lost touch. I even forgot about her. In the middle I would hear sometimes my father mention that she had graduated from school or that she chose to do a Bachelor’s in English Literature, that she refused to get married, that she tried to get into Jadavpur University for her MA but her father wouldn’t allow it, that she was a teacher in a high school in Agartala. That she’d grown very tall and very quiet.

I spoke to her last night for barely five minutes. We didn’t bother exchanging pleasantries cause well we couldn't recognize each other for a while. She informed me that my father couldn’t get in touch with me cause there was network problem and that she would take a message if I had one. I didn’t. I asked her how she was and she said she was fine, and there was just a little catch to her voice, like she didn’t expect me to ask. Or thats how it seemed to me. She didn’t ask how I was. It had been over 10 years since we last spoke.

Last night a lot of memories came back to me. Memories that were put aside to the immense restlessness of growing up, and perhaps to hormones. Now I can’t stop thinking about her, about our home in Agartala, the way things used to be and the way she spoke last night.