My Neighbor Again.

This time, he is out of the city visiting his newborn and his girlfriend. Hence I send him an email.

To: neighbor.

From: sunshine.

Dear neighbor,

I am shifting and I need to know what I should do with your laptop and mails. If you want, I can leave them with someone next door, or I can take them with me for the time being. Do let me know as soon as you can.

Seven days later, this was the reply I got.

To: sunshine.

From: neighbor.

Dear sunshine,

Sorry for delaying to respond. I just come back from vacation. By the way, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ENGAGEMENT !!that's a great news!. If you don't mind, I would like to leave my laptop and mails with you. I will tell when I go back to home.

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Engagement? I did not think I had mentioned to him anywhere in the mail that I was getting engaged. I mean I did not even know that I was engaged. All I asked him was to tell me what should I do with his laptop. Much as I tried, I was unable to make a connection between the two. I scratched my head and tried looking for a hidden meaning, perhaps an encrypted message. Maybe he was trying to tell me something important and all I had to do was decode the arrangement of the alphabets. Where was he vacationing? Did he land up in the underworld? I scratched my head and chin until the people around me in the bus suspected that I was suffering from dandruff problems and wasn't taking a bath regularly. Congratulations on being engaged? It was like telling him, I like to eat red apples, and he replying back, congratulations on being pregnant. There could still be some relation between red apples and pregnancy, but what had my moving out got to do with being engaged?

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It took the great brains of G to finally decipher the not-so-encrypted-and-yet-so-subtle message hidden in that single line. Like the starting lines of Austen's Pride and Prejudice (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife), when a single girl in the city moves out, it is a universally acknowledged truth that she has acquired a boy friend and is moving in with him!

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This logic explained a lot. Especially why he had taken a break from the school for 3 months and was diligently performing the duties of fatherhood. 

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Oh, how it breaks my heart to clear his misconception now!

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sunshine.