It is sunny and you are a stranger at a coffee shop. She comes in and sits across from you at another table. You look up from the book you are reading and survey her face, note her bead necklace, the multiple utility pen she is using, her notebook, the color of her eyes. You would like to talk to her but you don’t know where to begin and what to say.

You could perhaps tell her about Cairo, the locale of the novel that you were reading. You know a little about Cairo, you know how the narrow lanes teem with all kinds of organisms, human or otherwise and how eyes look at your face, from under the chadors, just as you are looking at her and as she might be looking at you. But you haven’t been to Cairo and can only parrot lines from a book. What if she asks you, tell me how many flights of stairs would I have to climb to reach your one room cell overlooking the minarets? Or what is the color of the suras that you hear every morning, sometimes well before daybreak?

You go back to reading the book. Yet your mind wanders. How to make small talk, this has always eluded and puzzled you. A woman once said that talking you to made her feel as if she was in a KGB’s cell at the Crosses, in Leningrad. You asked too many questions. You said, “I wish someone asked me questions once in a while”. You said, “Sometimes I wish I was in a labor camp, talking to my interrogators, as they rack me.” She doesn’t hear you. You don’t hear her. And the pauses between you seem to be quarrelling with one another, loudly, like two lunatics.

Another time you were introduced to her, this by a friend whom you envied for his suaveness. He had been talking to her for a while, when you hailed him. He said, “Oh come and meet this lovely girl from Delhi.” She looked at your face and calculated your depth. At that time you were wearing glasses that were too big for your face and an old kurta. You were not making any calculated bohemian dress statements. You didn’t think too much really when you pulled out that old kurta from the shelf. Wearing new clothes always made you uncomfortable.

She is indeed lovely. You will think about her even after her name dissolves from your tongue. You take in her understated dress style; she is wearing a long russet kurta with a black print on the front. She has a gun metal locket at her neck and gun metal earrings. She wears no makeup except antimony in her eyes and a black tikka shaped like an elongated rain drop on her forehead. She is quite beautiful; her skin seem to shimmer, a backwater lagoon in Kerala. You want to float on it. She says, “It is nice to meet you. I hope you enjoyed the qawaali concert last night.”

You say, “Yes very much, I fell in love again and again. My heart is now like a door riddled with bullet holes”. She sees you are looking at her earnestly and that you are not joking. She laughs and says “Looks like the music made a poet out of somebody here”. You say you were always a poet. She says then recite a poem for us. You say, you don’t remember any. You say poems cover you like leaves but you can’t recite them because you do not as yet understand what they mean. You say when you eat a poem, the words dissolve and your color changes.

She looks at you, as if you are a weirdo. She was expecting a pithy couplet of say Mir or Ghalib and now you are lecturing to her. You say but I love the gun metal jewelry you are wearing. She touches her locket and sees that you are watching her throat too closely. You say, the big handicraft center where they make this kind of jewelry is quite close to your city. You ask her what folk art she liked the best because you had noticed her supervising the booths where the artisans were working.

She says, oh I like them all but they are so expensive. I wish I could take some back with me. You say you spent yesterday afternoon observing the Warli painters. You say, you were fascinated by the strangeness of those two dimensional painting done using only two colors, white and black, in a pointillist style. You say you would like to visit the villages where the walls are covered with these paintings. You say imagine a world where every surface is covered with myths in black and white.

Your friend says, “Oh, by the way, we are going to a lake this afternoon. Do you want to come with us?” The girl is observing you. You say you would have to think about it. You want to skip Kurusowa’s Seven Samurai after you went to sleep two afternoons ago in the middle of Ray’s Pather Panchali. He says, “You can watch this movie back home later.” You know that you can’t. You don’t know of any place that stocked foreign movies like this in your city.

You turn to the girl and ask her “are you going to watch this movie?” She looks at you as if you are asking if she would watch it with you while you were merely asking for her opinion. She says, “Oh, no I am going to be at the artist’s booth”. She turns and hails another girl who is passing by and says it was nice talking to you and leaves. You turn to your friend and say you will go to the lake. You know you will suffer from intense boredom as the silence quarrels with the lake like a lunatic.