Everything that begins...

Three years ago, in Bombay. Café Ideal, five in the evening of a balmy day, sitting by the window listening to the waves and watching the traffic go by. Put ten bucks in the jukebox and then another ten and then another and then another till there is half an hour’s worth of Kishore-RD magic lined up. Order a beer. The place is still half empty and so you can play RD comfortably. In another hour or so, it will move to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, and in another hour, devolve to Kumar Sanu. Sit by the window, watch the waves splash, watch the easy traffic flow.

I was just out of college, a young English literature graduate head full to bursting with the Great Indian Novel I was destined to write in the coming years; meanwhile earning my beer by taking on freelance reporting jobs with whichever newspaper would commission one or whichever newspaper Professor Gupta could get to give me one. Jeans, khaadi kurtas, long hair parted in the center, beard. I was so entranced with myself that I was not merely creating characters, I was living one. As the great comedian once said, I did not just brood, I brooded at the world. The melancholy of Kishore and RD (aided a lot by Gulzar) was a perfect fit. And so I would come to Ideal around 5 in the evening, get a beer, play Kishore, read some and listen to the waves splash. And then I would just drink as the café slowly drifted into Morrison and then Sanu territory. Except, this evening it doesn’t. Not till six, not till seven, not till seven thirty. RD plays, Kishore sings, the jukebox keeps going. And so I call the waiter, and ask. And he says that she is the one playing. And as I turn to look at her, she stands up from her table and turns and all I see is a mop of shoulder-length, wavy black hair. She leaves.

How clichéd.

***

Sunday through Thursday I wait there everyday and listen to Dylan and Morrison and nothing happens. And then, Friday evening, just as I am about to take the first sip on my beer, she slips onto the bench in front of me.

‘Waiting for someone?’

I just stare. I don’t know that she is her at this point, but I am already captivated.

‘He told me’, she says, pointing to the waiter who has answered my question every evening with a polite ‘No, Sir’, ‘What are you drinking?’

‘Budweiser.’

‘That is donkey piss’, she says and orders a Kingfisher for me. She has taken charge of the evening.

She speaks to me, I imagine we speak of music and writing and our shared love of RD and Kishore and the Mangeshkar sisters. I say I imagine we spoke of them because she agreed to meet me again, and then again and again, and those things, I imagine, do not work out because you have stared at her for three and a half hours straight, evening after evening, too enthralled by her smile, her eyes, the curl of her lips as she twisted them ironically in response to some stupid comment I might or might not have made, her laughter…ohh her laughter! Her laughter, like they said in the clichés, like the gurgling of brooks, like the chimes of the wind chime you put in your doorway, like that magical, melodious sound you hear so often in literature but never in movies; because no human person in front of a camera can ever pretend to having that kind of laughter; she just laughed with me that night and a hundred more nights and we listened to Kishore and Lata and Asha and RD and Gulzar and we created a world in a place aptly called Café Ideal with the waves listening to us and us listening to the waves and we both believed the world was, and would be beautiful…