For a while, we talked. Then for another time, we just sat next to each other and read the books we were carrying. After that, we shared a large ice-cream.
Much later, we decided to walk the neighbourhood we were in. A place that had been once familiar to us — individually and together — now, almost unrecognisable. For her, these rain tree lined streets were about navigating heartbreak, a difficult marriage and finding herself as a person and the art that such discovery engenders. For me, these narrow lanes, leading into leafy cul-de-sacs, were an avenue for my hedonism and cavalierness.
We talked and recollected and laughed and shed some tears until we reluctantly left the area. Each wanting to dive deeper back into memory, the comfort of it, despite the sadness and indifference. Fighting the thing that Teju Cole once wrote about, “The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.”