He knows if he reached across the table and pulled her jaw to his, she wouldn’t resist, she would give in gladly, the jaw with that serrated scar. She said she got it when she fell off a bicycle learning to balance her weight on twin circular rims. If she could she would have preferred wings. A sparrow’s would be sufficient to lift her frame, now nearly all bone, into space. He knows so much about her without asking or being answered to. The creak of her laughter, like a safe’s tumblers falling into place to reveal lambent stones – agates, rubies, crystal. The next stone her thoughts would leap to from the one they both stood on, holding each other by the elbows.

But he doesn’t. Apart from his shyness, a promise holds him back, the iron code that he had placed around himself like a diver’s cage sinking into a spiral of sharks. Does fidelity come before love is a question he will often ask himself later? He can’t knife the mask he has donned, out of his own choice, from his skin, and he doesn’t want to kiss her with its lips of plaster, of burred wood. He knows ahead that he will regret it in the years to come, even as he might console himself for keeping his conscience clear. Then why did he come? To test himself? To hold his timorous doubts to sea air?

That he is now yoked to his own kind. That the color of hair that curtains his eyes as he makes love is that of his own, black. That she is a strange continent made up of three different countries, and as many etymologies, and epics. That her hair is not black but polished copper, a tangle of wires pulled out of their colorful plastic sheaths, conducting currents, music, thought. That he can’t look into her eyes for long because years later an archeologist would find him supine in their jade or a vintner breaking open a cask would find his brown skin scattered in their green wine.

[1] My pins to the map.

My terrible literary habit began when I was given a paperback copy (Indian Thought) of R.K.Narayan's "Swami and Friends" about 17 years ago, off the stacks of Wheeler's at Vishakapatnam Railway Station by my father. This tattred and yellowing ( for me 'debut' too, as it was for Narayan) novel is now held between two pieces of cardboard and secured very carefully in my bookshelves! Wheeler's, in whatever railway station they operate, usually do have an interesting selection of random good books. On a recent yatra to Hyderabad, I found V.S.Naipual's "A Turn In The South" at these folks - I had never read it, even though I currently live in south-east U.S., the subject of that travelouge!

in response to Kitabkhana's Reading in Ranchi

[2] Indian Trains

I was thinking of you and your cities (Dublin of Joyce, London, Bombay etc) as I was reading this review ( www.nytimes.com ) last night.

Also this post made me remember a school-yard nemisis (against whom I had to do battle for a few years to satisfy my parents craving that I be "Class First") who could recite the names of each railway station on South Central & Southern Railway. Besides it seems to me that this identiy of being "Indian" is to be able to instantly recall the smell of those 'bogies' (boogeys?) of yore.

Do post further notes on your Indian yatra.

in response to Dejavu's Notes

It also occured to me, just now, that Buoyantville has been around for three years and ten days now.

What will archaeologists find if they ever dig in here?