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.

In the beginning you converse with her even after she had left. You know you are only talking to yourself but your inner mouth doesn’t shut up. It dredges up all the forgotten oddities stuck in the cobwebs of memory; it goes on a walking tour of the haunted places. She says she wants to keep talking to you but other things keep her and it is quite late and both of you have to go to sleep.

You say yes yes and then begin to tell her of how you would like to sail down a river, either sacred like the Ganges or pristine and primitive like the Amazon. You say you had read somewhere that biologists discover about two new species every day in the rainforest. You also say they don’t know how many are dying. You talk about a poem you read somewhere written for this creature still not known to man and hence secure in that unknowing. And very slickly and quickly add that sometimes you feel she too is one such creature, imaginative and mysterious. You didn’t do it because you are trickster but because you want her to feel good, even if it is not entirely accurate. You already know some of the contours of her life and in that knowing mystery of the surfaces had already lifted like a fog.

Her voice softens, you don’t see her face, and this is a telephone. Sometimes you don’t even hear her voice; you just read her words and conjure for her a voice. She says you are wonderful and yes how she wishes she could float down the river with you. You know she hasn’t taken this trip before and it is possible that she may not take it after this. You say that once crossing one of the distributaries of Ganges, two river dolphins rose beside your boat, like two silver coins. You say every time you crossed a river, on the spine of a bridge, you dropped a coin for luck. You say once she was there too beside you, at the door of that railway compartment, as the train clanged its way across the river. And she dropped a coin before you did, for the year you will not be able to see each other and for your next meeting. You kissed her lips hungrily, breathing the smell of her chap stick. She was afraid someone might surprise you both and pushed your face away but didn’t let go of your hand. Across the river was the city where she would disembark, you know more than a city, it’s a country that will swallow her. And you had to go further than her station before you return.

She suddenly says, “Stop! Who are you talking about? This is not me.” You say yes it is you and all this is a dream I saw. If she had pressed you with the date of this dream you would have told her the truth. Yes it was not her exactly, but then it could be her and it indeed feels like a dream. She says sometimes she doesn’t understand you and that you seem to be talking to yourself. She is intelligent and sensitive, so she notices these things. She grows doubtful again, unsure. You can feel your voice sounding foreign even to your own ear, the tones where your speech differs from normal style, quiver a little more awkwardly.

You stammer a bit, speak circularly, use in fact twice, at the beginning and the end of every sentence. You say oh you didn’t realize it has been more than an hour since she said she has to go to bed. She yawns, yes she didn’t realize you have been talking for more than two hours and all she wanted to do was to check on you and see how you were doing. You say, thank you for your call. I enjoy talking you to you very much. You don’t want to sound too lonely, which you are or give her the impression that you don’t get to talk this way much anymore. So you sound casual and say, sleep well, hope you get enough rest, take care of yourself. She says you too. You say thank you again. A few years ago if you said thank you for a conversation, your friends would have laughed at you. Now you indeed feel thankful that you got to speak out aloud. Even though you write in a journal, it doesn’t talk back to you or say I would like to float down a river with you. She says “Bye” and you say “Bye”. This time you put down the phone first before she can. So that you don’t say thank you again and sound like a fool.

In the end you keep conversing with her even after she had left.

It is late night and in his hand Gao’s Soul Mountain is cradled, a phantasmal weave of nightmares, fables, dialogues and those old memories that he rather not recall. He nevertheless presses on. This perseverance is to develop a taste for fire, to be the observer of the crucible in which one might be cooking in. All that talk, that voice in particular, appears surreal now and not quite false. Is it then the passing of time that amplifies the hidden false notes and brings their frequencies into the auditory range of one’s clear eyed judgment?

The untruths, not lies because lies require a studied deliberateness, piled at the door like snowdrifts and when the time came to leave, he had to dig through those words, like a sniveling dog, to get back to the surface. He had to lick each word he wrote with his tongue. First was the word love as was the last, with that sharp sound, eeee, now quite blunted with too much overuse. It now lays in the morgue of words, with a fate of being bloated, useless, meaningless, a bone with the marrow sucked out.

…

The moon, last night eclipsed, now exhales occasionally, white plumes (or are they clouds?) that make it fall away from sight. Last week’s rain meanwhile, compacted the golden brown leaves, thumbprints of a summer sun, into another fraction of an inch of hummus; that thin layer from which everything powerful, the oaks, the hemlocks and the maples, spring forth. Death has to be danced by Nataraja, god ringed by flame, for Brahma to create. Time is cyclical.