Reality, rearranged.

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.