A story that never went anywhere

I sit here, alone, in a coffee shop. All about me, pairs of doting lovers engage in the business of flirting and wooing - the business of love-making as it exists in India. Because that is all it ever amounts to - stolen moments in coffee shops, furtive touches in parks, purloined kisses in the dark recesses of some alley or shadowed doorway.

I watch these lovers, cocooned in my own loneliness. I watch one girl, beautiful in a fleshy, opulent sort of way, bat her long, glitter-lined lashes at her male companion. She wears a gaudy, floral-print shirt, and her long hair carries the tell-tale signs of having been subjected to some rough, chemical straightening technique. An office worker, probably corporate. Her lover leans closer, murmuring, I imagine, something flirtatious, stretching the fabric of his cheap suit. His crew cut glints red under the coffee shop lights, the result of a heinous, tasteless dying technique. It looks like an office romance - an attraction birthed among the cubicles, flirtation near the printer, and finally - thrown together in the narrow, steel-and-glass confines of an elevator - the discovery of their shared love for brash hair-styling.

You get the idea.

I imagine the matrimonial classified - female, 24, well-placed in boring, monontous office job invites alliance from similar background. Must have bad haircut and a taste for vulgar dyes. Cheap, tasteless dress sense preferred.

Another couple near me sip their coffee placidly, darting occasional, lust-filled looks at each other, over the white porcelain rims of their coffee cups. They sit in silence, filmy music blaring through the silence that hangs between, like a corpse. No conversation or banter. I watch them, and their furtive romancing, and wonder where the attraction lies. They are dessicated husks of people - dry skin stretched haphazardly over thin, rickety bones. In simultaneous, mirrored motions, they unpin their BPO office badges. Voice accent trainers? Do they pretend foreign identities during night shifts? Basvaraj or Bill? Naina or Nancy? By what names do they call each other?

I can imagine their matrimonial night, when they clasp each other in a rigid, clinical fashion, skin barely touching, and he thrusts (just the smallest, littlest bit) of himself into her. He murmurs her name - "Nancy," he cries, forgetting her real name, her birth name. Afterwards, as they lie apart, on the white sheets, smelling of disinfectant and plastic, her eyelids drift down, and just before she falls asleep, she wishes "Bill" a good night...

"Bill" and "Nancy" look up, catch me watching them. Ashamed, embarassed I look away.

A new song blasts overhead, a shrill-voiced songstress screeches -

"This is a hip-hopper...
Come Hip-hopper, come and love me."

I gag, over the sheer horror of the lyrics, which sound even more atrocious in Hindi. I look up, and catch a man ogling the song-stress on screen, shaking her derrière to the fast beat of the song, so fast that her short skirt, barely covering her ass, rides just the teensiest bit up. I watch him, nursing his expresso, salivate and crane his neck, hoping to see just a little bit more - even though the image is a flat, recorded image.

I laugh, and he whips about, surprised and panicking, offended at having been caught.

Another voyeur, like myself - except I prefer live objects to observe.

I look away, searching for a fresh object to observe. I catch a woman beside my table, in the act of twitching the pages of her newspaper open. The front spread obscures her face, as she holds it up to read.

And then it slams into me.