A story without an end - III

That was it, I thought. I had waited for three hours. And saw the sky change from ochre to deep orange to dark red. The last embers of the autumn evening were dying down. The cars and the buses had their lights on. People crowded the bus stop across the road, clambering on to already crowded buses. In a mad rush, the tin buses were darting around, scrambling for passengers. The entrance to the Park Street metro station was in a frenetic whirl. Mostly, people were entering the tube station to head back home.

I was sitting on the steps of the Asiatic Society building, a prominent “meeting” place, smoking the last cigarette of the pack.

Right across the Chowringhee lay the vast emptiness -- more conspicuous in the growing twilight -- the maidans, and the waste yard of the metro constructions.

She had not come. Yes, she had not come to meet me. And now it was almost seven. There was a slight chill in the air. I was shivering.

**********************************

The taxi lunged forward, cutting through the dense rain. The windows were blurry and the wipers flailing madly. Very soon the glass got all misty inside because of our collective exhalations: mine, her’s and the driver’s. There was an awkward silence, made more somber by the humid air hanging still in the cab.

Was she surprised seeing me at the Park Street crossing? Rather, was she pleasantly surprised?

She said, why don’t we go to Flury’s? I have to pick up some stuff. It will take me a couple of minutes.

It was her suggestion. No, not suggestion. It was almost made to sound like an order. Like it was in the past. She was much older to me, and she always made this clear. Even when I pulled the blinds one sultry afternoon in a moment of confused and tormented passion…


She was looking to open the window a bit and throw the tissue she had wiped her face with. But she desisted, and put the soggy tissue in one corner of her purse. The taxi was already half way towards Sealdah, so it would be a long detour back to Park Street where Flury’s is. I told the driver that we would go back to Park Street. He grumbled. These drivers are getting impossible by the day, I said. She said the other day she got into a taxi and the driver stopped half-way to her home and just refused move.

Crazy, I said.

A few years ago, she had used the same word turning down my curt proposition.

Are you crazy? She had said, laughing her heart out, as if I had just said some silly joke.

**********************************

I was still standing at the Park Street crossing, absorbing what had hit me. She didn’t come. I don’t even know her name. I met her in Darjeeling. We talked Salinger and Beatles and smell of old books in that tea shack as raindrops kissed mountainsides.

She nodded when I told her we would meet in Calcutta. On Saturday. At the Park Street crossing. At four in the afternoon…

Now it was almost eight. The shiver in my bones had almost become unbearable. I couldn’t stop thinking about the last few days. How I had traipsed down the Mall in Darjeeling after she had left. How the train journey passed in pleasant contemplation. How I counted days till Saturday. That was today. And here I was, at the Park Street crossing, thumbing down taxis that went by not bothering to pay any heed to my half-hearted attempts at stopping them.

It was just then that a thought struck me like lightning on a clear day. And it made me stand still on the pavement, as if some sheer force had rooted to the concrete. The home-bound crowd of pedestrians shoved me around, screamed at me. A mad man made faces. I could feel the hair on my neck rise, I could jut about hear the din of the busy crossing, I could feel my cold palm clench till it pained…

What if she had been waiting for me at the other end of Park Street?