Even after the latest hug between President Asif Ali Zardari and Yousuf Raza Gilani in Multan, all still might not be well. This was stated by Islamabad residents who recently saw the former prime minister lunching at a local café.

The former prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, was spotted at an outdoor café - Table Talk - in Islamabad, having lunch. People who saw him said he looked "sad" and his eyes looked "dreamy".

While the former premier was having lunch, a young girl, about eighteen to nineteen years of age, sitting across the table walked up to him and said: "In my view you were the best prime minister of the country."

Mr Gilani smiled but it was not a full smile, the kind one would normally proffer to an admirer. According to people sitting across the table, Mr Gilani looked "lost."

A bureaucrat stationed in the prime minister secretariat, who had served under Mr Gilani, knows the lost look quite well. "Even in official meetings at times one felt that the prime minister’s mind was elsewhere," he said.

Comparing Mr Gilani to Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, the bureaucrat said: "The new prime minister is a good listener and is more focused."

Even parliamentarians who visit the prime minister house regularly had something similar to say. According to legislators, Mr Gilani carried, what in the modern lingua franca would be called a "zoned out" look.

"Whenever we went to the prime minister house - during Mr Gilani’s tenure - we knew that we had only a few minutes to say whatever we had to say because after that he would stop paying attention," complained a legislator.

But some friends of the former prime minister disagree. According to them - perhaps like Musharraf – Mr Gilani was more of an evening person. At private gatherings in the evenings, there was never a problem with the attention span. He was chirpy and in command of the situation and the conversation.

But at the restaurant, all one could see was the prevailing sense of loss that was all too visible in his facial expressions.

While Mr Gilani was having lunch, in walked Shireen Mazari. Looking at the security around the restaurant for the former prime minister, she loudly expressed her disgust and called the whole thing: "Obnoxious."

However, other diners at the restaurant didn’t seem to have a problem with the security arrangements.

"This is the same area where Salman Taseer was assassinated, so if the former prime minister is accompanied by his guards, we don’t have a problem. We should respect the fact that he is the former prime minister of the country," said one customer.Two tables down, a senior citizen who has followed Mr Gilani's career, had this to say: "He was a competent speaker of the National Assembly but an incompetent prime minister."

A former friend of Mr Gilani had the following complaint: "In his last days he had become a bit arrogant." When asked how?

Supposedly at a private gathering, when he was prime minister, Mr Gilani had boasted that he now sat on Z.A. Bhutto's chair.

Ironically, these days, he is housed in the Sindh House. A location where no matter which chair one sits on, one ends up getting a panoramic view of the Judges Colony.

No wonder then that an interior designer in the city argues that the sad look on Mr Gilani’s face could just be a case of "bad Feng Shui."

But another resident sees the irony in the former prime minister’s current residency. He draws a parallel with Emperor Shah Jahan, who after losing power was housed in a compound that overlooked the Taj Mahal.