A Tale of Two Ts

S, who I went to school with, and his wife, T1, decided to call it a day in Bombay and move here to Toronto. Unlike most families that move, S stays behind to wind up and sends wifey dear ahead alone, with instructions for me to do whatever I have to help her settle in. You know… park her in my apartment till we find her one, then go out and buy everything she needs to get it ready before the family arrives, health card, driver’s license, etc., etc., etc. All the good stuff that new immigrants have to do. So, T1 flew in. I picked her up at the airport, brought her home, and from the next day on, we started on the great immigrant settlement process.

One of the first things we did was to go get her a bank account. Bank manager asks T1 her name, punches it into the computer, and a puzzled look crosses her face. She says, “Oh, I see you already have accounts with us.” T1 says, no way. I only got into the country yesterday. “Well, well,” says the bank manager, “what a coincidence. You have someone with the exact same name in the city.”

Now, T1 has an uncommon name. That there are two with the same name in the city is intriguing.

Anyway, we forgot about that after a few days of hectic apartment hunting and other such strenuous activities. Perhaps about a week or 10 days later, my Hotmail account blew up for some reason and I lost my address book. Now, I don’t communicate with that many people via Hotmail. I pretty much remember all five or six in my contact list. So I added everyone back manually and let MSN Messenger send out the standard email, saying OJ has added you to his contact list.

And I get an email from ‘T1’ saying, who the hell are you? What do you mean, who the hell am I, I fire back, it’s me… OJ. She writes saying, I still don’t know who you are. Ah, I say to myself, she wants to play email games. So back and forth we went. More than half a dozen times, I’d say. Each time, she’d reply swearing she doesn’t know who I am. But always polite.

So one evening, when T1 and I were driving somewhere, I said to her, “Okay, have you had enough fun with the emails?”

“What emails?” she asks.

“You know, the ones where you’re refusing to recognize me.”

“I have no idea," says T1, "what you’re talking about.”

“Are you serious?” I ask. Absolutely, she replies. And she is.

And then it dawns on me… oh crap, it must be the other woman with the same name in the city!

So I go home and write an apologetic email to her, who we shall refer to as T2, saying sorry, this was a case of mistaken identity. And she replies saying, hey, no problem. Wow! So I wrote saying since she’s being so nice about this, the full story may give her a bit of a kick. And I explained what had happened. T2 is amazed that there’s another woman in the city with her name. I wrote, wouldn’t it be a blast if the two of you met? And so and so forth, we traded emails. And then one evening, I get a long email from her, with a bunch of questions about me.

At which point I said, this is too much for me to type. Here’s my phone number, call me, and I’ll answer all the questions. And she did. We had a long chat.

A couple of days later, I was in the neighbourhood where she works, and she took a break to come say hello. An attractive young woman. Very friendly. Very Bengali (which she is), but being born and raised here, also very Torontonian. And, a bit disturbing to me, trusting enough to come out and meet a stranger she ran into on the Net. But, I felt completely at ease with her right from the get go. We chatted briefly standing there on the sidewalk and agreed to meet some evening after work.

T1, meanwhile, is in tizzy that I actually made contact with her namesake. The story of how I met T2 was making the rounds at Joe’s, our local watering hole. Our common friend SR would tell anyone who'd stop to listen the story of how OJ met the two Ts. Soon, people were beginning to ask me, so, when do we get to meet this T2?

Finally, I did get them together. We went out one night to a rock club downtown and drank and partied till late into the night… the two Ts and I. T2 also came over to Joe’s for dinner another evening and met some of my friends there. Just before Christmas, the manager, who I'm friendly with, and who was quite taken up with her, asked me to bring her along to the restaurant's customer appreciation holiday lunch. Which she came for and we had a great time… not the least because of all the free food and booze.

So… T2 and I are now good friends. And T1 takes credit for bringing us together. Which, of course, is true.

And for me… one T was great. Two Ts? Even better.