Looking at her there, in the Village in the Sky, watching her laugh, it shocked me to think that I'd deliberately avoided her for so many months. I was no less surprised by how tactile the girls were with her, how easily they reached out to stroke her hair or to take her hands in their own. I'd perceived her to be aloof and almost cold. In less than a minute, those women were more familiar with her than I'd dared to be in more than a year of friendship. I remembered the quick, impulsive kiss she'd given me, in my hut. I remembered the smell of cinnamon and jasmine in her hair, and the press of her lips, like sweet grapes swollen with the summer sun.
Tea arrived, and I took my glass to stand near one of the huge window openings that looked out over the slum. Far below, the tattered cloak of the ghetto spread outward from the construction site to the very edge of the sea. The narrow lanes, obscured by ragged overhangs, were only partially visible and seemed more like tunnels than streets. Smoke rose in drifts from cooking fires, and stuttered on a sluggish seaward breeze to disperse over a scattering of canoes that fished the muddy shore.
Inland from the slum there were a large number of tall apartment buildings, the expensive homes of the middle-rich. From my perch, I looked down at the fabulous gardens of palms and creepers on the tops of some, and the miniature slums that servants of the rich had built for themselves on the tops of others. Mould and mildew scarred every building, even the newest. I'd come to think of it as beautiful, that decline and decay, creeping across the face of the grandest designs: that stain of the end, spreading across every bright beginning in Bombay.
"You're right, it is a good view," Karla said quietly as she joined me.
"I come up here at night, sometimes, when everyone's asleep," I said, just as quietly. "It's one of my favourite places to be alone."
We were silent, for a while, watching the crows hover and dip over the slum.
"So, where's your favourite place to be alone?"
"I don't like to be alone," she said flatly, and then turned in time to see my expression. "What's the matter?"
"I guess I'm surprised. I just, well, I thought of you as someone who's good at being alone. I don't mean that in a bad way. I just think of you as... sort of aloof, sort of above it all."
"Your aim is off," she smiled. "Below it all, would be more like it."
"Wow, twice in one day."
"What?"
"That's twice in one day that I've seen a big smile. You were smiling with the girls before, and I was thinking that it's the first time I've ever seen you really smile."
"Well, of course I smile."
"Don't get me wrong. I like it. Not-smiling can be very attractive. Gimme an honest frown over a false smile, any day. It looks right on you. You look, I don't know, sort of satisfied, not smiling, or maybe honest is the right word. It looks right on you, somehow. Or I thought it did, until I saw you smiling today."
"Of course I smile," she repeated, her brow creasing in a frown, while her tightly pressed lips wrestled with the smile.
We were silent again, staring at each other instead of the view.
Her eyes were reef-green, flecked with gold, and they shone with the luminous intensity that's usually a sign of suffering or intelligence, or both. A clean wind stirred her shoulder-length hair-very dark hair, the same black-brown as her eyebrows and long lashes. Her lips were a fine, unpainted pink, parted to reveal the tip of her tongue between even, white teeth. She leaned against the windowless frame with her arms folded. The tides of the breeze rippled through the loose silk of her blouse, revealing and concealing her figure.
"What were you and the girls laughing about?"
She raised one eyebrow in the familiar, sardonic half-smile.
"Are you making small talk with me?"
"Maybe I am," I laughed. "I think you're making me nervous.
Sorry."
"Don't worry about it. I take it as a compliment-to both of us.
If you really want to know, it was mostly about you."
"Me?"
"Yeah, they were talking about you hugging a bear."
"Oh, that. Well, it was pretty funny, I guess."
"One of the women was imitating the look you had on your face, just before you did it, and they cracked up over that. But the really funny thing to them was figuring out why you did it.
Everyone took turns at guessing why. Radha-she said she's your neighbour, right?"
"Yeah, she's Satish's mother."
"Well, Radha said you hugged the bear because you felt sorry for it. That got a big laugh."
"I'll bet," I mumbled dryly. "What did you say?"
"I said you probably did it because you're a guy who's interested in everything, and wants to know everything."
"It's funny you say that. A girlfriend of mine once told me, a long time ago, that she was attracted to me because I was interested in everything. She said she left me for the same reason."
What I didn't tell Karla was that the girlfriend had described me as interested in everything, and committed to nothing. It still rankled. It still hurt. It was still true.
