Loretta
"She is not what she appears to be, dude" He said this attempting that meaningful look again after some nine earlier attempts. It involved lowering his head down, looking up at me from around sixty degrees and arching his eyebrows, while the eyes narrowed down as if they were exposed to radiant violet light.
"Oh?" I was busy looking else where. May be I was thinking about how I needed to get my love life back on track. Most likely I was texting back someone who wanted to do business with the company I worked for.
He looked disappointed by my reaction. I felt compelled to add, “You think she is cheating on you?"
"No"
"She doesn't love you?"
Eyebrows arched. Eyes narrowed.
"That's not the point"
"Oh?" I had to text back to the texted reply.
"I think she is spying on me!"
“oh...what?"
"She is a spy, dude. I am sure of it now"
I needed to avoid the eyes and eyebrow bit to understand what was going on.
"Like Mata Hari types? The sexy female spy who can be lethal if she wanted to be...prick you with the tip of her poisoned heel into eternal damnation! Wow!"
"No"
"Then?"
"Like a terrorist bomber...Manisha Koirala in that Mani Ratnam flop show"
"Dil se...She wasn't a spy in that one...was she?"
"Haven't watched it...but I think that's how it went...any ways dude, this one's dangerous!"
"Why would she spy on you?"
"What do you mean?" He looked indescribably hurt.
"You are not a spy target. Putin is. Obama is. Hillary is. May be Castro still is. You work in a soft ware company. You have been there for seven years. Who could she be spying on you for? Pakistan? You have known her for seven odd years now"
Exhausted by this gush of advisory flow, I looked around for the waiter to order another pitcher of beer.
"In Bangalore, life is what happens to you between two beers” said the head looking up at me from sixty two degrees.
That was profound. I had to concede that to him. "Indeed. Indeed. Well said!" I acknowledged. It sounded like a Lennon song though...

"She is spying on me on behalf of the competition. I am precious to this company dude. Without me they are nothing. My team is the brain behind it all. If she understands what I am up to...then she knows where my company wants to be"
"She is a school teacher!"
"By day!"
"Precisely! Standards one to three… eight a.m. to five. ..when would she spy on you?"
I have to admit there was potential for self improvement here. This was one was cute, intelligent and cool. If he was going to desert her for some vague reason, I could move in. So what if she was Mata Hari, or Anna whatever.
"Then why does she hack my e mail id? Why does she want to befriend every friend of mine on Face Book? Why would she leave anonymous comments on my blog? She is tracking me. She even figured out the password to my lap top. I caught her twice!"
"And?"
"She looks below the bed every night to check if there are monsters. I thought it was cute. But now I know it’s a microphone she switches on every night."
"Porn! Porn!"
"Fat chance..."
“How did you figure out it was a microphone?”
“ It’s not really a microphone. I think she drops her cell phone there after dialing the number.”
“Ooh…but dude, you end up paying up here phone bills most times. You can find out who she is dialing.”
“I tried. But there is no indication”
“May be she switches the SIMs” I helped. It was hard to resist. He was going mad or I was starring in a cool Hollywood thriller. Either ways it worked.
He had thought of that already though it seemed.
“So have there been any tangible causalities of her spying on you. Lost market shares? Super agile competition?”
“Not much…I don’t think she has got any where so far”
There was silence for the next five minutes as we poured ourselves our mugs of beer and sipped on the fresh froth in silence.
The beer’s yellow luminescence added a touch of mystery to our table to the viewer on the cinematic screen. If we were in a movie, that is, and somebody had paid money to watch us.
We burped in unison after the silent contemplation.
“So what do you plan to do now?”
“I think you should start dating her dude. I will act mean for a while and break up with her. You move in with the friend in need routine and everyone’s happy!”
“You are pimping your girl friend to me?”
“I am extracting myself from a difficult situation and helping you out as collateral”
“I am alright. Thank you!”
“You need female company dude. You will be thirty soon and you need to find yourself someone”
“Yeah. But I don’t need a spy!”
“She is a school teacher”
“You said she is a spy!”
“And a teacher too…she satisfies two major male fantasy criteria in one shot”
“Get her to join a nursing school for an airline company and she will be complete”
“All yours, dude!”
“Why would she let you go? If she was spying on you, she will find a way of keeping you…wouldn’t she?”
“That’s where you move in. You keep her too busy to spy”
“Maybe her boss will move her out with a black mark for ‘failed mission’”
“Great!”
“So what happens to me?”
“Why would you be serious about a spy anyways?”
“I think I am calling for the cheque. This conversation is going nowhere.”
We wrote crap in the air very fast in cursive font, in the direction of the waiter. He interpreted it, as intended, as a request for the bill.
We split the bill through complicated mathematical techniques.
“So what’s the plan now?”
“I am going home” I said “Got to finish this book…you?”
“She is here now. We are going to watch a movie at Rex”
We stepped out of the humid darkness of the pub into the crisp cold evening air.
She was there alright. Beautiful as always, looking just a little lost. Almost timid. A touch lonely. Gracefully slim and just right in height.
She smiled at me as she grabbed at his arm for support.
“Can you pick up the phone please? She asked, pointing at the phone she had just dropped.
I handed it over, waved good bye, turned around and left.

News of the world
Any passer by would have thought of them as one more lovelorn couple snuggling cozily in a public corner.

They were not snuggling. They were not cozy. And he had not thought that the hole in the wall Delhi restaurant with a really bad rock band from Manipur ‘entertaining guests’, could be described as a public corner.

Also, they were not a lovelorn couple. It was worse. She was telling him why he couldn’t write any more.

He was not some one who could bring himself to asking questions of this phenotype. He could, at the best of times, lecture you, badly, on rock history. Some times, but rarely, he could be really good at making self deprecatory jokes about his past loves. Most times he could do a great psycho analysis of himself for free, if you are interested.

“You cannot write, because you are being dishonest”, she said

“What?” This was an uncharacteristic squawk he had acquired from another friend.

“Yes! You write when you have honest feelings to express. When you look at the world around you and you want to convey a sense of longing, loneliness or bemusement at the absurdity that surrounds you…You cannot force yourself to write something. That would be junk.”

Her look conveyed “QED”. "This is what happens", he told himself, "when you date women you bump into in the literature sections of book stores. And you chose the one reading the back cover of a Murakami."

In a tone which to him indicated unerring resolve that she was wrong, he asked, “You think so?”

“Of course!” She pulled one loose hair strand behind the left ear. At some point in his life, he would have been irritated by such actions. He would have wondered why they can’t pull up their hair right. Now that middle age beckoned, he found it pretty.

"I am slipping" he told himself. "Here I am listening to a woman I do not know, in a city I hate, trying to be every thing I am not."

“Your problem I think is that you are not sure who you want to be. I have read your blog…”

“You have?”

"Try to make a joke", said the voice in his ear, "Point to a funny story..."

“Did you read the one about the frog?”

She smiled. “That was nice”, she said. The Smile disappeared.

"That’s it?", he thought. "I am with the wrong woman, again…"

“It’s all over the place. The Story for Children was brilliant though…”

"God! That wasn’t even written by me…or was it?", he thought

He tried his oldest method of distraction. “Have you had the coffee here?”

“It’s really bad.”

“Even the filter coffee?”

“That’s a fraud. I can make better filter coffee than that…”

“You can?”

“Yeah. I learnt it from my grand mother. She makes fabulous coffee in the afternoons.”

The conversation had reached a dead end again. He had never had his grand mother’s coffee to compare and contrast.

“So do you write?”

“Now and then, yes. Would you want to listen to a poem I wrote?”

“Yeah!” He was sure it was going to be bad. It had to be.

She took out her I-pad. Or was it a Kindle? He gave her a minus one in his head for being technologically competent

“It’s called a dream of love.
Man walks to the end of light
Takes five steps
And
Returns Free”

She put back the Kindle or what ever it was, into her hand bag and looked up at him.

He should have said it was beautiful. He should have smiled radiantly like a radio active being. He should have reached out and tried groping her fingers, moved by the poetry. He should have fallen in love right there.

“So what does it mean?” he asked.