If

I saw you, that cold morning. And when I say cold, I mean bitterly, bitterly cold. You looked pretty agreeable to me, and I even liked the car that you were driving. And yet, when you pulled away from the crossing, I was describing you with some pretty fruity adjectives (to put it mildly), about you, your family, your ancestry and your anatomy. Maybe if it hadn't been so cold that day, I would have waited for you to pass, even though you are required to wait for pedestrians to walk on a zebra crossing. Maybe if it wasn't so slippery, I wouldn't have lost my temper so easily. Maybe you were running late for something. Maybe you're a nice person after all. Maybe if we had met in a pub, we might have even swapped life stories over a couple of drinks.

Maybe I will meet you later in life sometime. Highly unlikely that I'll recognize you though. Or you me.

Rendezvous

She was 54. 25 years into her marriage, and it was by no means unhappy. Her husband had recently retired from work at a nationalized bank. They had three children, two daughters and one son. Her son was studying hotel management at Australia, and she knew (from the prospectus of the university) that he would get picked up soon by top international hotel chains and that's all she would see of him. Her older daughter had recently gotten an assignment in Bangalore, and everybody was thankful because everybody seemed to think that if you got an assignment in these times, it must be because the company wants to keep you. She was adjusting to Bangalore nicely, and was a wealth of information about how healthy the tomatoes in Bangalore were and about how the lemons were orange-sized. Her younger daughter was preparing for an entrance exam to enter business schools, but she wasn't doing much. It was obvious. She spent way too much time out at night, and then even more time on the Internet putting up pictures of her holding on to (She thought) rather shifty looking young men. Rather sombre thoughts, for when one was reading the cartoon page of Tughlak, and thinking of how inconvenient it was that the telephone was in their house-owner's name, and nobody could look them up if they wanted to, and how irritating it was that none of the cartoons were actually funny, when everything suddenly blacked out.

That's how he came to know her. He couldn't care less about her sons or her telephone bill, though. She was a statistic to him. And as he crossed his fingers and hoped she would be a good one, he looked at her chest, split wide open and holding no secrets from him. And heard himself say "Verify closed CP. Start Re-warming. Mari, put in a langenbeck there, lets check for oozes"

"Starting Re-warming, sir. 1:34 PM. CP time 54 minutes". And the lines on the monitor appeared, first illegible squiggles and then a reassuring, regular pattern. He heaved a sigh of relief and stepped back so his assistants could close her up.