Did she just blame us for not smiling?

Do you remember your school days? I am sure all of you will be excited and nostalgic now about how fun those days were, your friends with whom you share a lifelong friendship now, etc. And school day memories are such that we keep going back to them whenever we face any similar situations that we might have faced in school. Recently, I had one really nostalgic moment. Trust me, the feeling was just the same.

We all have heard about loving thy neighbours. Neighbours are your next door people who become your immediate friends outside home gradually but in the same premises. You meet them, you greet them or simply know them. Today, as I speak to you, I choose to share a rare experience about one of my encounters with my neighbours here in Bangalore. I grew up amidst neighbours who were my relatives. So I could never relate to the type of neighbours who were shown in the television serials or the movies. But this desire of mine got fulfilled in a very interesting way when I moved to this new house in Bangalore.

My apartment has a lot of families who are either living their retired lives and have moved in to enjoy an old age life and are taken care by the children. And then, there are the flats occupied by working bachelors. You will often find these retired folks taking a walk in the long corridor together, discuss about the people living in the apartments, gossip at times about who they saw with whom, etc.

Now, we, my flatmates and I stay in a place, which is quite strategically located between the flat of the Secretary of the Society aka the apartment and the Vice-president. So, both of these families have the men in the leadership roles and the women to feed them information.

One evening, when one of my flatmates and I are at home, watching movies, our doorbell rang. I went and opened the door only to find my neighbour lady, an aged Bengali woman, walk in. No, not walk in, she barged in. Dressed in her night gown, hair tied into a bun and chewing paan, so yeah, bright red lips. While she chewed paan, she asked me to call my flatmate out. Both of us thought that it might be some apartment issue that she’s come to inform us, but her face said something else. She looked angry.

She asked my flatmate, I have something to ask you. Looking at her face, I had quietly went back to my room. She continued, today, while coming back from office, you saw me standing at the corridor with Mrs. G. You saw me, right? She nodded yes. There, you did something that you shouldn’t have done. A, my flatmate, stood stumped and confused and so did I, in my room of course. With confused expressions on our faces.

A asked, what exactly happened Aunty? Aunty replies, you did not smile at me. Like you do every time. That too, when I was there with Mrs. G. Do you know what she told me? Look those girls do not smile at you anymore. What happened? They smiled at me just today morning. Now you tell me, won’t you feel insulted if someone comes and tells you that your neighbour did not smile at you? I was called back in the room.

We stood still. Was she scolding us for not smiling at her? Really? We tried telling her, that there was a phone call that she was attending and she did not notice her. She accused me of the same thing. She refused to listen to us. She rejected our reasons. We had no intentions of insulting her by not smiling at her. She felt insulted and she made it clear. She barged out that same way she had come.  

Here, our neighbour came to us not to ask for sugar but to scold us for not smiling at her. The entire concept of having a neighbour turned upside down for me. We didn’t have any answer as to why it happened.

There she left and here we felt like school kids who had no answers as to why we did not do our homework. I remembered how teachers asked us why isn’t that we haven’t done our homework? We never had any answers because no answer can satisfy her brain and mind. I felt absolutely nostalgic.

She angrily walked out leaving us wondering, is this also a reason why your neighbour can knock on your door? Blame us for not smiling at her? Well she did.