Devaki left the scene as easily as she had entered, and they decided to see each other again a few days later. And it was there, in that rickety coffee shop in Connaught Place, called Madras Coffee House, where Karno said to her that they should get to know each other better. It was Karno who had picked their meeting place this time. She had never been there before and curiously fixed her gaze towards one of the damp walls with its plaster tearing off; a characteristic feature of most decrepit Delhi buildings. The high ceilings made every sound echo.

“Have you ever seen someone drown, Karno?” she suddenly asked.

It was the strangest thing anyone had ever asked him. A close second would be that time Murli, his dearest friend in school, had asked him in the eighth standard if he had ever eaten the ice cream part of a Cornetto and then jerked off inside the cone. Karno’s best friend was Murli, and the irony wasn’t lost on either of them.

“Have you, Karno?” she asked again.

Karno shook his head. “Why? Have you?”

“Yes. During our summer vacations, we used to visit my grandmother in the village in Bengal where her ancestral house was. Among the local kids who I had befriended, there was a lively young boy; I think everyone used to call him Jamun, because he loved eating blackberries so much. Everyone said he was an ace swimmer. So the day he climbed a tree next to a pond to pick mangoes and fell in the water, no one bothered to look. Even when he didn’t come up after a few seconds, all of us who were playing near the pond thought he was joking with us. By the time some of the older boys felt it had been too long and jumped in, it was already too late.”

“That’s just terrible,” Karno said.

“That’s not the saddest part, K,” she said, her gaze intact. He treasured that minuscule fraction of a second in which her mind must have decided to replace Karno with K and wanted to tell her how strangely joyful that made him feel.

“Four days later, the villagers found his body. It was not even a mile away from his own home. But he had simply vanished for those four days. As if he had fallen through a deep cleft inside the earth.”

She continued after a pause.

“What do you do when you’re lost so close to home? And are not found when you need to be found?” she said.

Karno couldn’t decide what could be an appropriate response to what Devaki had just narrated, so he closed his eyes and invited her home. “Will you … come home … some day?”

She was, in every sense, a strange character. She accepted Karno’s offer but insisted he also call a few of his friends and introduce them to her. Karno wanted to spend time alone with her, but she seemed persistent. Could it be that she thought he would expect them to have sex if they were alone in the house? But the thought hadn’t crossed Karno’s mind even once. It was not that he wasn’t attracted to her. He was, and amply so. But he had rushed into forming attachments too many times in the past and suffered, and this time he wanted things to be different. He wanted things between him and Devaki to grow at their own pace, even if it seemed languid at first. They had met in the aftermath of a chase, and now they deserved slowness. He didn’t feel the instant desire of puppy love which convinces people to seek immediate companionship. Instead, he wished this to be like catching a slow-moving train. One that’s about to leave the station, the whistle has been blown, but there’s enough time to jog alongside before finally grabbing the handle and taking the leap.

Obviously, Devaki was unaware of all of this. Karno’s thoughts were only a part of his own world. They had just met a couple of times, and he was already asking her to come home. In her mind, he was still somewhere between a friend and a potential rapist. He decided to call over his only two friends in the city. She seemed delighted, more than he had expected her to be. It almost felt like she had agreed to come over only to meet them. When she met Rhea and Sandip, she transformed. There was the same electricity in her eyes, but her smile was consistently wide throughout the evening. That she made a conscious attempt to charm them wasn’t too hard for Karno to notice. No wonder she won over the room so easily. It wasn’t that she became a different person. But the manner in which her body swayed around the house, as she moved from one conversation to another – from the price of potatoes in the market to Leonard Cohen’s last love letter to his beloved – if someone had told Karno that she had been possessed by the ghost of an optimistic stage performer, he wouldn’t have doubted them.

Karno wasn’t complaining, but something told him that this performance would not continue once the guests left; that her usual quiet would return, which he had already begun to miss. But with it would also leave this eagerness to venture outside one’s skin and be a part of a joyous moment. Why do we never feel contented with what we have?

They opened the wine bottle which Rhea had brought along, and that’s when Karno first learnt that Devaki did not drink.

“You don’t?” Karno asked.

“Not anymore,” she said.

Most of his adult life was spent warming up to members of the opposite sex after downing a few, which made it easier for him to communicate. But in the case of Devaki, he realised, he would have to lay his guard down without any outside support. Of course, he could still get a few gin and tonics down his throat before being intimate with her, but it’s not the same thing if the other person is not riding the same boat.

Sandip, who was part of a jazz band, had brought his guitar along with him, which he started strumming after dinner. When he asked Devaki what kind of music she liked, she said she was not into music but one of her exes was. She had never mentioned an ex, not that Karno had asked. But Devaki slipped her name with so much ease into that conversation that it almost seemed like Faiza was sitting right there with the rest of them.

“Faiza used to play the guitar too on some days, and she had a playlist for every occasion.” There was no place for envy in their equation yet, so Karno distracted himself by thinking about his cricketing days when he was still a teenager. Whenever he needed a distraction, he always chose to take his mind off to a cricket pitch and placed himself in a hypothetical situation, like a character in a video game. Three overs left and seventy-nine runs to make; six deliveries to bowl and defend just one run; three balls to face and each must be hit for a six – almost unlikely to happen in the real world. But in his head, he always managed to navigate these mazes and come out victorious. When he couldn’t sleep, which was on most nights, he did the same thing.

Later that evening, she lay on top of him. They were both fully clothed, but Karno had never felt this kind of intimacy before in his life. Their eyes didn’t meet, their bodies were stationary – like a freshwater lake after it has rained. She mumbled something which he couldn’t follow, so he asked her to repeat herself.

“Am I the first chance encounter of your life which is this memorable?” she asked.

It was an unusual question. Perhaps she was. At least no other memory came to his mind. “Yes, I guess you are.”

Her head on his chest moved a little, as if to trace an indiscernible shape on his shirt and then went back to being as still as it was before. He wished in his heart that the shape was a smile.

“Am I yours too?” he asked expectantly. A question that could mean a million different things. “You can tell me if I’m not.”

She thought for an extra second and said, “You are, you know. But a few months ago I was at the metro station and there was a man on the platform who was looking inside a file and mumbling to himself. I went closer to him and stood there and only then realised that he was an actor of some sort who was rehearsing his lines. It was just so warm, that whole scene unfolding in front of me. He had a hat on, and a brown shirt and a ragged pair of denims with mud on them. He almost looked fictional.”

Karno smiled.

“Our eyes met, and I said hello. He did the same. We talked for a few minutes until the train arrived. He said he was auditioning for a part in Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq. He was on his way to the audition and incredibly nervous. I asked him if I could hold his hands for a minute; they were shaking, like they do when someone has been out in the cold for too long. And he let me. And we stood like that for a few minutes, his trembling hands in mine. My hands trying to comfort his like I was warming the body of a tiny rabbit. Soon the train was there; he said, ‘Wish me luck,’ and got on it, before turning around to say a final goodbye, but the doors had already closed by then. I could only see one of his hands waving at me, the one I had cured just moments ago. And the train left the station while I stood there watching it go. I should have been on it too. But I took the next one because I didn’t know how far I could travel with that stranger. Sometimes I wish I had taken that train with him.”

Excerpted with permission from Lonely People Meet, Sayantan Ghosh, Bloomsbury India.

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