Following instructions, we had all arrived a bit early to the birthday party. The idea was to get together before Mita (whose birthday it was) could arrive and we would all spring a big old “Surprise” on her.

While mingling with the crowd and making new friends with strangers, I struck up a conversation with this young, handsome young man. After a few pleasantries, our discussion went something like this:

“By the way, I did not catch your name,” I said.

“Amit. Amit Walia.”

“Got it. Wait… Amit Walia? I have heard that name before. In fact that name came up recently….”. I was trying to rack my brains to remember where had I heard that name. (Later realized Mita had mentioned his name when Kushal and she visited us in Atlanta a few weeks back)

“What is your name?”

“Rajib”

“Got it…”

“You know, I am still trying to remember… I know that name was discussed very recently…”

And then he interrupted me.

“Wait, Rajib Roy?”

“Yes”

“Atlanta?”

“Yes”

And then in a few minutes we were able to put the whole thing together. Both of us were in school together – way back in the 70s. St. Xavier’s School, Durgapur to be precise. Amit was two years senior to me.

One of the advantages of my blogging all my life events was that I was able to take him thru pictures of all our teachers from the school. In the last decade or so, I have looked all of them up and visited them from Hyderabad to Ernakulam to Pune to Lucknow to Delhi… name the city and I have gone and visited them.

With each of the names, Amit was getting more and more animated as a lot of memories started coming back to him. Finally I gave him the contacts of a few teachers that he remembered the most and wanted to talk to.

Meanwhile, the birthday girl had started coming our way and we all switched off the lights and went silent in waiting.

I need to sit down with Amit again and go thru our school days in more detail.