the encounter (an incomplete short story)

She looked at him for a while. Verbal bile rose in her throat, she swallowed it along with her urge to destroy the false shibboleth of ideas he was building out of his life. His voice droned on in the background while she sipped her tea with all the concentration she could muster. “I had my GRE the day she got married. I called her and she spoke to me as if everything was normal…as if…” He turned away to wipe his tears and she smothered the laughter rising from within by a violent bout of coughing.

green, blue and cigarette smoke

He lit another cigarette. She looked at him reprovingly. “You tempt me to smoke more than my quota.” The statement received an apologetic glance and smoke floated away into the still evening. “I should hook up with a man who has a car. Its hard to get around in this place without a car!” He looked shocked and said with a sigh that wasn’t too hard to interpret, “Women!”

I don’t know why I said it! Why do I want to be cruel?

She had hated his emails. They were pompous and studiedly literary. The kind of mails you wrote to heads of graduate programs if you wanted in – the kind that tripped from Kafka to Toni Morrison to Rushdie, the kind of mails that were a little out of breath with all that intellectual running around. Yet, she had written back. It was nothing more than a token of belonging; the false comfort of knowing, of comprehending and of being comprehended.

a shell of known realities, an experiential ghetto

She found his note tucked in the crevice between the door and its wooden frame. It said that he had come to meet her. It said that it was a long walk from his place to hers. It said that the airlines had lost his luggage. And it said that he was sorry to have missed her. She left him a note too. When she had returned his call and had similarly missed him, she had said that they were star-crossed.

an endless deferral of expectation

The waitress spoke much too fast. The syllables dropped from her lips and scattered in air before she could gather them into sense. Her response was calm and self-assured. She was irritated by the confusion in his eyes, a blatant mirror of her fear. She closed her order with a fake smile. She had been told to smile. “Always smile.” So she did, continuously and meaninglessly. Whenever her eyes met with a stranger on the road, the waitress at the table, the cashier at the supermarket, she footnoted her words with that smile. The space where she could have just comfortably ignored the other person was no longer available in this world filled with smiling strangers.

She stood near the telephone booth and pretended to look into the street. A car stopped at the light and the man driving it looked curiously at her forcing her into a realization that she hadn’t chosen a very appropriate place to stand and wait for her companion. He spoke to his mother as if he were a child of ten. He alternatively whimpered and giggled; he spoke loud enough so that she could hear him even if she stood at a discreet distance.

My mother is the most important woman in my life…even my wife will be second to her.

He was overjoyed when they had met because she shared his language. Accustomed to a metropolitan Babel, she had trouble participating in that enthusiasm; he spoke to her in their language so her friend could not follow a word of what he spoke. Her friend called him a cultural chauvinist and she remained silent.

Its almost as if he tries to create a private zone with you in it…

It was embarrassing to acknowledge him. Someone had whispered that he stank of cigarette smoke. Someone else had said that he was crazy. They were part of a sort of an orientation program. Everyone there was nice – it was mandatory to be nice, most were paid for it, for the others, it was the only interaction they had in that city and they didn’t want to fuck up. Close to three days, the strangers had formed a minor community, complete with its likes and dislikes, who it included and who it wanted to leave out. She was liked and included…

She avoided his gaze when he had asked her if she was angry. She had said, “of course not!” in that fake, high-pitched voice and turned away. She spoke on the phone for an hour as he waited for her to end her conversation. She was afraid to talk to him.