On a cold, wet night in November, when the
rain came down howling and shrieking like a madwoman in an attic, Mrs H. went
out to meet her lover.
The night was suitably dark and brooding,
and wrapped in her thick woollen shawl, Mrs H. looked as mysterious as a
married woman should when she goes out to meet her former paramour, hurrying
under the streetlights, her face half-hidden by a red polka-dotted umbrella,
her heels splashing in the puddles, her unruly hair slipping out of the loosely
knotted bun and flying behind her in the wind.
They were to meet in a tiny
hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served cold soup and dumplings in weathers
like this, when people crave something warm and familiar. She looked at her
watch as she pushed through the rickety old door marked ‘Welcome’ and entered a
seedy room with a few tables and chairs arranged haphazardly against the wall.
Pale yellow lamps quivered on thin wires over each table, and threw sharp,
shifty shadows on the peeling red walls.
The room was empty.
Only the kitchen, a tiny window in the
back, with its sounds of clinking glass bowls and the rich, thick smell of
boiling soup indicated that there were indeed people around. As she pulled out
a chair at the nearest table, a thin, lanky man with shrewd black eyes and pale
brown skin, materialized out of the darkness, and with a leer, he bowed over
her table and handed her a tiny piece of printed paper that had the audacity to
call itself a menu. She hardly glanced at it, she knew the place so very well,
and muttered something to the man. He smiled, an oily, ingratiating smile, and
withdrew discreetly, leaving her alone. She took off her shawl, pulled down her
scarf, lit a smoke, and waited.
It had been thirteen years since she last
saw M. Thirteen years since the night, not unlike this one, when they had met
here, at this very table perhaps, and decided that it would not do for them to
be together. They had no money for one. They had no jobs. And they, neither of
them, were ever the kind of people who could live off love alone. Besides, they
had plans. Of living exciting, ambitious lives. Of studio apartments and
vacations by the sea. Of meeting exotic foreigners in the dining cars of
railway coaches halfway across Europe, of making strange, sweet love to them in
cheap hotel rooms and writing songs about them when they were done. They wanted
to live, not love, they agreed. Love was too commonplace, too mundane for them
to waste their lives over it, they had decided, over a bowl of cold soup. It
would be different if they were rich. But they weren’t. And that was that.
Her watch beeped. Eleven-thirty. He was
never punctual, she remembered.
Then suddenly, like he had been there all
along, he appeared at the door, his hair dishevelled as always, his shirt
dripping in the rain. He walked in casually, with that exaggerated
deliberateness, like he had all the time in the world, that had made her fall
in love with him all those years ago.
He came up to her with a smile, the slow,
lazy smile that he had always had, that went all the way to his eyes.
‘Hello, N.
You look as beautiful as ever.’
‘And you, of course, were never anything
particular to look at.’
It was incredibly easy when she had thought
it would be the hardest thing to do. They started up the conversation like they
were never gone, like the thirteen years between them was only a single, lonely
afternoon easily forgotten, like their lives had been left, unused, unopened,
gathering dust on a shelf ever since that sultry afternoon when they decided to
put it on hold. And it was here, at this table, in a dingy little restaurant on
a cold November evening, that life was reopened, a little rusty with years of
disuse perhaps, but still eminently workable. It was beautiful, it was perfect,
it was too good to be true.
Which of course it was.
For it wasn’t a cold, wet November night,
it was the middle of June, with its stifling, sweltering heat, the kind that
seeped into your skin and left you exhausted. And they weren’t in a tiny
hole-in-the-wall romantically hidden from the eyes of prying strangers but a large, well-lit, depressingly wholesome
coffee shop—‘No Smoking Please’—where all around her, young twenty-somethings
expounded vociferously on love and life, making her feel old and drained and
exceptionally out-of-place. And there
weren’t any thick woollen shawls or tiny black heels, only a slightly misshapen
printed-chiffon salwar-kameez and sensible flats that doubled up as walking
shoes, and matched the black of her large, ungainly umbrella. And the man
sitting in front of her was someone she barely recognized, someone with a pot
belly, a loud, checked shirt and one of those annoyingly complacent smiles that
seemed to constantly draw attention to the remarkable fact of its owner’s
success. He expounded steadily on tyres and the state of the tyre industry in
the current economy, interspersed by long, uncomfortably long, silences where
she occasionally mumbled feebly about how excellent the coffee was.
And slowly, with tremendous effort, they
managed to make a few banal observations about their ridiculously mundane
existence—how the price of vegetables were rising, how the metro was a boon to
the city, how their kids were doing well in school and how their neighbour’s
cat kept them awake at nights in their two bedroom-with-kitchen rented
apartment with the tiny veranda that opened on to the view of a convenience
store and a twenty-four-hour chemist and druggist.
And they talked of how good life had been (with
its old familiar comfort of unvarying pay checks and electricity bills and six
o’clock news on the sofa before the dhobi came to collect his pay), how
perfectly ordinary life had been, as someone else’s husband and wife.
