The Best New Year Greetings

(A short story written on the occasion of NEW YEAR’s DAY 2016) 
 

From the Pen-APN

With tearful eyes a lovely girl walked away from the college hostel waving a sad farewell both to her hostel and her college. On that day, her father had come with a strong resolution to take her to a new college. And she, like a good girl, came with all her belongings. Her old friends had walked with her up to the hostel gate to bid her adieu. She was sighing sorrowfully and her face was buried in her palms to hide her inmost anguish at leaving her old college. 

She had to leave the college and she had gone with tearful eyes to join in some other college.

Although her untimely departure from the college in the middle of the academic session had surprised me, I, being her teacher, did not feel right to enquire much. Moreover, in a big college where you have thousands of teen aged students such incidents are overlooked. So I did not ask her father about the cause and circumstances behind his abrupt decision to put his daughter into a new college.  But that girl’s crying innocent face had lingered in my mind for many days…….

For a good many days that girl’s name was still on the students’ attendance register although she had already taken her Transfer Certificates. By mistake, the office had forgotten to strike off her name from the attendance register. As a result, while calling the roll numbers, in the class, I used to mark absent against her roll number.

One day the clerk handed me a newly updated attendance register and in that new register her name had been excluded from the existing students’ list……   

Life goes on.

When the old year draws to an end, another year spreads its colored wings to have a new start. It was New Year’s Day. I was playing with my five-year old son. My son was laughing and giggling with me. At this time the polyphonic ringtone of my mobile called my attention. An unknown phone number was flashing on the screen. When I picked the call, a sweet voice of a girl from the other side conveyed me one of the most happy and bubbly New Year’s Day greetings. The cheerful voice unmistakably belonged to that girl who had left our college in teary eyes and grief-stricken voice. Suddenly, a kind of love that I invariably feel for my son got channelized through my mobile and I asked the girl, “What about my little doll? Is she crying anymore?” A happy reply came, ‘No Sir,’ and then it was followed by a wave of delightful giggles like that of my tender-aged son’s.

That day I had just talked a few words to that girl but I was really happy because it made me realize that if I had a daughter, I would talk to her like that. And it was truly awesome to feel like a daddy of a beautiful girl.