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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.