Just another farewell

We just happen to meet across an indifferent table.

We hardly speak yet when we do, it is as if there had been a timeless continuity .

As if he knew me and I knew him. Yet he knew not my name and me just half of his.

It is always another first meet query...another first meet reply.

Ours is  a conversation of sorts. It could simultaneously fit into one of strangers and of a lifetime's moment.

It is a noon of another departure. He is already at the table and smiles as he would at a fairly known stranger.

A smile that in early days made me make  a choice of fighting it out  as against an almost decided quit.

The smiles end and the formal exchange begins.

He says he studied where he now works. I nod a nod of an acquaintance but within I try to visualise how he would have been as the tutored. Perhaps he was a silent yet mischievous student.

 It surprises me he remains untouched in his gentle ways inspite of such callous training.

He hardly realises how I listen to everything he says. He speaks as he would to an acquaintance on a train.

He strangely does not mention his wife and child.  He says his dad is in the same broad field as he is. 

He speaks of being at a place where my roots lie. I locate its place wrong but speak as if right...he breaks off at the juncture of near disagreement.

Then he makes his just another farewell hardly realising what it meant to me.

 For him just another farewell. For me a reminder of the pain of a final departure. The pain of what could and would never be expressed.

Nothing bound him to me yet he just gave me such warm gestures that meant the world to me through a journey I was making within.

A sense of gratitude I would carry back with me in just a newspaper.