this and that.

"Who she?" I want to ask him, but i hold my tongue, it has a habit of getting ahead of itself. Naturally, in the present place that we are in our relationship, I can't be asking questions. Nor can he. But then, he doesn't. And I'm curious.

He's talking now about Casino Royale. My fault. I said, "do you want to come over later and watch Casino Royale? I've finally decided I like the new Bond." Of course, he said no.

"Poor Bond," he's saying now.

"Why poor?"

"He loses his only love..."

"Hahahaaha. You're feelin' sympathetic, are you?"

"...and then realises she didn't love him at all."

"But she does care for him," I say, wanting to add that, "maybe yours didn't care for you at all," but I don't. Because I dont know if she did. Maybe she did care. Frankly, I'm thinking I want some more chai. The sunlight is making it all seem exceedingly relaxed.

"But she does care for him," I say again.

"Only a little. Her true love is that Algerian guy, who gave her that bracelet, who she was trying to save."

"You gave me a post card, which I saved."

We're sitting at the window. An empty street outside, with a few birds chirping. Yesterday, at this time, it was hot enough to have sweat trailing down your back when you sat under the fan. Today, the sun licks my face with a dry tongue, and the breeze teases my just-washed hair.

"I'm going to make some more chai," I say, and get off the ledge, stride to the kitchen with a sense of purpose that I didn't really feel.


i lock the door behind me and i take a deep breath, and plunge my head into the bucket full of cold water, and i let out the loudest scream i possibly can. it goes on and on and on, and my eyes are open so i can see bubbles forming, fragmenting my scream, taking it to the surface and letting it out of the water. suddenly, as the bubbles hit the surface, suddenly, there's a loud eruption of my voice, strangely distorted, as if hearing it under water makes it heavier, louder, deeper, wider.


Making chai mechanically hasn't ever happened with me because I always forget where the adrak [ginger] is and then spend atleast five minutes looking for it.


I go back to my room, with two mugs of chai. I'm slightly disconcerted to find he is still there. He's sitting in the evening sunlight, pointing his camera outside the window. It occurs to me that there's a temple outside my house, red and yellow, shaded by a beige building built in the same semi-Grecian blockish structures that most builders are so taken by these days. It occurs to me that architects don't really do much these days. I say as much. He looks up at me, and says, "That's a piece of shit."

I place his mug in front of him. The mug has a dog on it. "So tell me a newly constructed building whose architechtural brilliance had you blinded."

"I wasn't talking about the architecture."

"Ah. Do go on then."

"The problem with you is that you can't take things as what they seem to be when they are all they seem to be."

I am silent. The sky is pinkening slightly, and the breeze is rarer. I pick up a cigarette and light it. I like to think doing something not immediately related to him shows refusal to respond. My fifth standard English teacher would have said "I will not dignify that with a response." [In the fifth standard, we scrambled for our dictionaries as soon as we went home, those of us whose questions ere not dignified with a response.]

"The girl did not love Bond. Perhaps she didn't even care for him per se, but rather out of humanitarian beliefs thought of helping him out. Eventually."

"You may not remember, blessed as you are with selective memory among other things, that she died eventually."

"So see, it was all pointless, because the Algerian died too. And she died."

"So what's your point?"

"Tell me what you want from me. Because I'll give it to you."

Looking back, that was probably a line fit for the movies, the beginning of something overwhelming. It would have been a lot more than just this. Sitting in limbo, shooting the breeze. It cold have been a lot less than that, making a man in a bid to save another that you loved.

"Nothing. I don't want anything from you."

"Okay then," he said, in the evening light, through cigarette smoke, and packed up his stuff and left.