“Can you take a picture of my friend and myself? We are meeting after a long time. The last time we saw each other was 32 years back half a world away”, I asked the lady at a Reston bar last week.
“Sure”, she said. And she adjusted my phone camera, she looked at me and said “I think I know you”.
I got distracted. “You know me? How?”
She: “That is what I am trying to remember”.
Me: “What is your name”
She: “Xio”
Me: “Z..E..O”?
She: “No. X..I..O”

Name starting with a “X”. That triggered something. I asked her to hold off on taking any pictures. I took my phone back from her, went to my website and went to a particular post. I showed her a picture – “Does this look familiar to you?”

“Yes!!! I took that picture! You were sitting at the other end of the bar with your friend who you were meeting after a long time”.
“You are from Brazil, right? Now I remember you”, I said.
She then looked at me and Debasis and asked – “Is this what you do for a living – meeting old friends?”. We both laughed away.

Turns out Xio was also the same person who I had asked to take a picture of me and Raja – who I met after 34 years from my neighborhood back in Durgapur. That was about a year back and I had completely forgotten that we had come to the same Reston Bar.

All this time Debasis was incredulously following our conversation. “You seem to always have these incredible coincidences when it comes to meeting people”.

And in fact, it was an incredible coincidence that I was sitting at the bar with Debasis himself. That morning, as my office colleague Bob and I took a turn on Sunset Blvd in our rental car to go for a day long meeting with BEA Systems, I showed him the Bechtel building caddy corner from us and told him “Believe it or not, I found out that a classmate of mine from high school who lives in India is visiting US for a few days for work and is right now in that building. I have not seen him from high school days”.

So, maybe it is less of incredible coincidences and more of social media. Without WhatsApp, I would not have gotten this chance to meet the guy who used to be literally next door to me in my eleventh and twelfth grade hostel (dorm).

There was a lot to catch up on. He has kept in touch with quite a few friends from those two years that I had not had a chance to talk to. What bonded us a lot was his late elder sister and my mom who are (were) afflicted by the same psychiatric problem. He has obviously gone thru the same challenges that we go thru with my mom. I was fortunate enough to pick up some tips on the later stage issues that my mom is likely to go thru.

I remembered his parents visiting him very often over the weekends. And they used to bring food for him – mostly sweets. Being his next door neighbor – and therefore highly reliant on me waking him up early in the morning before classes started – I used to get some of the early shares from all those special food his parents used to bring. Unfortunately though, I will not have a chance to meet them again during my India trips since I learnt that both of them have passed away.

Hopefully next time I am in Delhi, I will get a chance to meet him and his immediate family there without having to wait for another 32 years!!

The CFO, who had come to check on the ruckus, just shook his head and went back at this office. What he thought upon seeing Miriam convulsing with laughter almost on the floor and then myself, sitting on one of those big round plastic balls that people often keep in office, with a silly grin on my face – only he will know.

As a brief background, Miriam was the HR head of our department and I had strolled into her office – as I often did – and was fabricating a story – which I also often did. The end goal was to tell her a joke. But she had not a clue of that as I spun a yarn about some fictitious Catholic girl called Mary Rose who I had met in Mumbai when I was working in the SEEPZ area. As Miriam kept on taking in the story – hook, line and sinker, I proceeded to expound on the topic of my heart being stolen by this Mary and how that drove me to great heights of poetry. Except that I was terrible in writing poems. But that never dissuaded me from expressing my fondness for this lady with some choice placements of even more choice words. I gave an example to Miriam…

Mary Rose
Sat on a pin.
Mary Rose.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi…. And then it hit her!! The suddenness of the ending and the ultimate realization that she had been totally taken in for a ride made Miriam guffaw out so loudly that the aforementioned CFO – who was a few offices away – had to come and inspect for himself! I am sure he went away thinking I must have asked for a raise and that was Miriam’s reaction!!!

That was the year 2000, as I reckon!

Nearly 17 years later, I caught up with Miriam in DC area last week! She was waiting patiently for me at the restaurant after my flight got delayed. I am glad she did. I would have killed myself for missing an opportunity to meet this wonderful person after having missed her a couple of time earlier already.

Of course, no meeting with Miriam is ever complete without we talking about Mary Rose. On the other end of the spectrum, she reminded me how I had made her intensely furious once. I think this story is best told by her. But as she recollected – we were in a meeting – my manager, my peer group and she from HR. She had just finished laying out some HR transformational change (Miriam thought it was Banding) that she wanted to do. At the end, our manager looked at us. One by one, everybody gave a thumbs up after some engaging discussions with Miriam. Finally, it was my turn.

As Miriam explained, it was apparently a scene out of a movie called “Twelve Angry Men”. I do not watch movies at all, so I cannot vouch for it. But in essence, when Miriam thought she had wrapped up everything, I piped up for ten fifteen minutes and must have said something completely incoherent, but at the end of my talk, one by one each one of the peers retracted their thumbs up. Finally, our manager concluded – well, it was a consensus. We would not move forward.

Consensus, if you discount Miriam that is. That evening, at our watering hole in the Omni hotel bar, the two of us had to sit in a corner far away from our compatriots, with me getting yelled at by a much red-faced Miriam. I kept sipping my Oban 14. I can take a lot of yelling with a Oban 14. She is the one who did not drink 🙂

Like we reflected last week, we grew up so much together thru those laughters and those fights. I have always admired Miriam as one of those rare HR persons with an incredible sense of business and I would not be what I am today without some of those shoulder rubbings I had to do with her earlier in my career.

The one person I bitterly missed during dinner is her husband Waleed who I have never met but have quote a few common interests. Both of us play the tabla, are runners and mix cocktails. There are not too many people with whom I can discuss singers like Ahmad Wali, Komal Rizvi, Akhtar Chanal and so on. There was a point of time when Miriam got into another argument with me over dinner. She thought Gul Panra was from Afghanistan (where Miriam is from) and I was sure she was from Iran (I love the rendition of one of her Farsi song s- Man Ahmad E Am). At one point, I left the dinner table, walked out in the rain to the parking lot – much to the wonderment of the restaurant staff – grabbed my iPad from my car and came back to the table. Then I looked up the singer’s history.

Turns out Gul Panra is from Pakistan!!

You see, through all those laughter and fights, sometimes, we used to be both wrong!!!

May your tribe increase Miriam!!