Beyond the savage brick lanes, it was still a muted night. Warm and divine like an aged pudding. The city stood tall in the distance like a bunch of charcoal pencils. I wanted to roll over and turn myself into a new species. There was only so much a human could do. And just then I heard the city express eat its way through the suburb – stopping lovers in their tracks, turning them into fools for their dreams.

My body ached for money, and a warm hand. It was a caustic world and people came along when they needed something. I tried to sing, but my throat shivered despite the heat, and all I could do was shuffle about the gravelly drunken paths beyond the neighbourhood streets. A canopy of wedding white flowers hovered above my forehead, before it brushed past like a school of angels and left the world in a deeper darkness. I smelt a spicy meal through a kitchen window, and an earthy music playing indoors. Till I felt impoverished outside the orange haze, my hands in my pockets as a tired dog whimpered in the damned distance.

I was to meet someone at the station, but the ten-thirty train was always late. I buzzed around the last stretch like a sullen cabbie, twirling a cigarette in my fingers till it scrunched up and made me sad. We had known each other for a couple of years, perhaps better than anybody we ever had. And yet my nerves had turned to milk. For the first time – I wondered who she really was. It was strange what a telephone could do to a world of lonesome beings. As we were yet to meet for real.

I wondered whether she was better than me. The fear made me light the dilapidated cigarette and stare at a bulging curtain on a first-floor balcony. The idea of meeting her threatened my precarious faith in our likeness. I worried that it would ruin the mutual comfort in our fallacies. The only other possibility, which I dared not consider, was that there was truth in our connection. It gave me a glimmer of peace, and an inkling that the train would not be as late as I had imagined.

The platform was too long for the little suburb. The diamond lamplights stood like bored candles in a deserted restaurant, while sleepy moths of people clung to the benches and walls, waiting for someone to blow their melancholy to bits. The signal was yellow, which always bewildered me. I tried to imagine a train crossing a signal with caution. A boy with gleaming eyes appeared before me, his youthful gaze full of hope. He said something I couldn’t understand, till a girl with an old suitcase came shimmying down an invisible staircase – and whisked him away. His eyes were trained on me till they reached the exit. Perhaps he needed a quick fix. I felt sympathetic towards anybody who thought I could spare them a penny. I sighed and looked at the desolate cargo train parked in the center track, rustic and heavy like a giant iron chain. It was hard to imagine the station without it, as though it were a monument that had no place to go. The signal changed to red and a large headlight loomed behind the mounds of bushes beyond the suburb. I stood up, and realized that it would be a while still, and sat down on a different bench.

It was a celestial period before the train came to a halt. As though it were an aircraft that demanded mathematical precision. It turned the platform into a brief event. The passengers who had been in motion for several hours looked lost in the sudden stationariness of arrival. They seemed to have known the place all their lives – nobody ever visited the neighbourhood, and yet they almost asked one another for directions. I knew how she looked. We had exchanged pictures over the years. And though I had always imagined our encounter to be made up of lasting hugs and relief, the reality of being there eluded me and turned me into a concrete block. I adjusted my collar and stood up again, my eyes fixed on a coach that I arbitrarily believed to be hers. When enough time had passed and the train grew empty, I sat down and hated myself. If only I was as spirited as my imagination, if only my longing showed up in my body when I needed it to.

‘I had to use the toilet,’ was the first thing she said.

She had appeared from behind me, just as I was beginning to turn and consider that perhaps her coach was on the other side. Her voice had always made her sound older, but it was flatter now and lacked the illusion of depth that it created over the telephone. She sounded as human as me. It made me reconsider all that I had fathomed about her.

‘It was somewhere on the other side,’ she continued. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘No,’ was all I could manage. I realized that I sounded abrupt and made up for it by offering to carry her bag. But she turned around and began striding towards the exit, as though she had quickly grown accustomed to the place.

‘Nine hours eh,’ I said, running over the information from our last conversation.

‘Yeah, it would have been faster if there was a bus…’

She sounded like she mildly regretted her decision about travelling to where I lived. We had originally planned to meet halfway at a restaurant, sometime in the afternoon. But Laira worked till late in the evening and the night was her highway of silence. There was no bus to the suburb in that hour, and the train was a long-distance mail that slugged across twice every week. I eventually convinced her to come. Besides, the idea of a formal atmosphere deflated the intimacy of our relationship. It felt more appropriate to bring her home.

‘Things don’t change here much.’

She smiled and turned to look at a gnome perched on a windowsill as we passed an old cottage with an overwhelming garden.

‘Do you hear that?’ she said.

‘Hear what?’

‘The sound of your self-pity.’

We had talked about it earlier, but I didn’t think she’d become herself so quickly.

‘I mean.’ I watched her ponytail feather the back of her neck as she glanced at me, her eyes taking in the dark neighbourhood and its wheat-coloured slanted roofs. She was taller than I had imagined, a few inches short of my slouchy hair. A bit weighty since the last time she sent me a photograph. She always complained that she didn’t get the time to exercise.

‘I wouldn’t be so harsh on myself though.’

‘I’ve always wanted to leave. But the idea of leaving is different to the idea of going.’

‘How long did you take to think that one up?’

‘It took a while. Leaving is pretty dramatic, and going is quite different. Pragmatic, actually.’

‘Because when you go you come back?’

‘Maybe not.’

We reached my flat and went up through the backdoor into the kitchen. She kicked her shoes and gulped three straight glasses of water. She leaned against the counter and looked at me, for a moment I thought she didn’t know what to say. I fidgeted with an old mug and forced myself to look at her in silence. She watched me with her wide, tired eyes, as I stood uselessly beneath the dim, ancient kitchen bulb. I admired her hardiness and the way she didn’t need to do anything when she looked someone in the eye.

‘I’m going to take a shower, okay?’

She was halfway down the corridor when I steered her briefly towards the bathroom. It was the first time I had touched her. The strength of her body surprised me and left me dazed for a few moments in the middle of the hall. I needed to calm myself down before she returned. I picked up the large wine bottle that I had nursed around since Christmas and sipped it inconspicuously in the kitchen. It made me laugh a little to think about how big the bottle was, and that drinking straight out of it was like trying to blow a ridiculous instrument. I took the bottle to the bedroom and sat beside the old bay-window. The pale orange lamps from the street formed triangles of soft grainy light inside my room, keeping themselves awake as the night wore on. I listened to my shower as she hummed to herself like a tuneless toad, happy for its existence in a mirthless bog.

About a year ago, I had asked her if we could meet, and though the idea had seemed natural to her, the consequence of it obscured her decision. I didn’t speak to her for three months after that. And then one day she called me to say that she was passing by my side of the country to visit a relative, and that she could make a diversion to come see me after. We had everything planned out until the night before when her relative surprised her by coming home, and she had no need to travel anywhere. It had saddened me more than I thought it would, but it got us talking again. The wine was loosening me up and I realized how surreal it was to have her with me at last.

She slipped the towel off her head and hung it on my chair. She had changed into a placid pink top and a pajama, and she didn’t bother drying her hair more than she already had.

‘I used your pretty pink shampoo and now I smell like a baby.’

‘It’s the new anti-aging thing.’

She gave me a weird look and settled on the bed. She rubbed her eyes with her fists and tilted her head against the bedrest. Her voice was momentarily husky.

‘I was thinking about why you haven’t been watching films off-late.’

‘The dream-catcher phase.’

‘It’s impossible to watch a good film without feeling like it’s real.’

‘There’s some soap in your ear.’

She rubbed the side of her face with her shoulder and picked up a pillow.

‘If you aren’t on a train, the least you can do is watch it go by.’

‘How long did that take you?’

‘Long enough for you to know I’m right.’

She lit a cigarette and stretched her legs. She seemed to be intrigued by the way I watched her.

‘I don’t get the time for such things. I stopped questioning life and wondering “why?”’

‘I thought you said you’d quit once you’ve saved up enough.’

She smiled and exhaled a sheet of smoke.

‘It isn’t possible. To quit.’

She nodded at an invisible person before her.

‘And even if I did, I’d have to do something.’

‘You’ve been wanting to write for the longest time.’

‘I write when I get breaks. In a notebook that I take to work. Nobody knows, it’s funny how ignorant people can be.’

‘It’s not enough, is it?’

She shook her head as if to ward off an impossible idea.

‘Are you going back to that publishing company downtown?’

The innocence in her voice made me shudder. I shrugged like that portion of my past belonged to someone else now.

‘It’s been six months; I just can’t do it though.’

‘So, you’re just masturbating all day?’

I scratched my foot. She lay unmoved and watched herself smoke like she was two halves of the same person. She didn’t strike me as unusually appealing, or pretentious by any stretch of imagination. The alcohol in my blood swam to my head and brought order to my otherwise biased vision. Without the wine, I would have assumed she was flirting with me in her usual matter-of-fact manner. But I could see that she was merely comfortable around me, and that the suburban house with its big windows and low ceiling offered her a sanctuary that she probably didn’t have in her metallic, industrial town. And yet I couldn’t help thinking that she was a little nervous. She spoke faster than usual and tried to think of topics that we had talked about earlier. I began to wonder if it was because of the way I carried myself. I rolled the bottle towards her and moved to the chair, sitting sideways on it and laying my feet on the bed. I had forgotten about her towel and realized that its presence settled my nerves a lot more than the alcohol.

‘Not as much as I used to.’

I smiled at her. She smiled at herself and crossed her feet.

‘My mother came to stay with me for a week. It was a fun kind of catastrophe.’

She laughed a little, travelling back in time.

‘She discovered that I walk back after work every night. I’ve been doing that because the suburban trains are generally full of men and more unsafe than the streets. Anyway, she started coming to the factory after my shift to pick me up in a cab. It was kind of annoying for the first couple of days, but the cab turned out to be a liberating thing and we ended up stopping in little cafés before we went home. On the last day, we went to watch an old movie in the theatre, and we were the only ones there besides a bunch of teenagers. It was an old western and everybody seemed to know the story, but I’d never really been to the movies.’

Laira crossed her leg over her knee and let her foot hang from it.

‘And she bought me a bigger refrigerator and found a way to fit it in my house in such a way that I wasn’t as crammed in as I thought I would be. I guess I just never had the time to think about it.’

Her cigarette was finally out. She’d been tapping it into an ashtray beside my bed, and leaned across to look for another one in her bag. A silent breeze danced through the window and fluttered everything in sight with brief abandon. I felt like I was a smell, a snail crawling along a crusty hinterland. Laira’s fragrance made me envy her ability to slip into grace wherever she found herself. She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and watched her lighter burn the tip till she finally flicked it off.

‘There are times when I don’t really care about how I’m living. It doesn’t really matter if I’m unhappy, even though I know it’s a grand waste of time.’

‘Like when you were drunk for seven days straight and still went about your life?’

‘Yeah, that, and like, periods of my life when I just cannot function. I feel like an animal, with little spiritual sense. And I guess it’s better than pretending.’

‘Pretending?’

   ‘Not really, but in those times, yeah. Even writing can feel like a pretense then, an escape route. I feel good about wasting time in the moment.’ She thought for a moment before she went on, ‘like a self-proclaimed rebel whose victory over the demanding world is their willful unproductivity.’

‘But you regret it later on.’

‘It’s because time is cruel. You can’t pause it like a game. You gotta just accept that you couldn’t do much more about it in that moment, and stop deluding yourself that you actually had the strength to discover options.’

‘We don’t have a choice then, but to accept it.’

‘We do, actually. We can live in regret. And live with the lies that we tell ourselves. Like how we believe that all that we are now is because of some past happening, when it probably isn’t. It’s just that, we weren’t evolved enough to find what we wanted back then.’

‘I think so yeah.’

‘Are you sleepy?’

‘A little actually. The wine’s tired me out.’

‘Why don’t you lie down?’

I sighed and stood up involuntarily, and lay down awkwardly beside her, balancing my head on my palm. She had smoked the second cigarette hurriedly and tossed the butt into the ashtray. Her eyes seemed to look through me, as though I were a mere reflection. The tips of her hair lingered at the edge of her lips and she exhaled without a scent of contemplation. A woman who wanted to be content with being alive.

I thought about all the times we had talked through the night. They had felt precious, like a chamber of secrets. I often imagined her existence as she spoke to me, if she was bundled up on her couch in her little apartment, or if she hung out in the square balcony that overlooked a long and tumultuous alley. It had amazed me to think that she could be as alone as me, although there were weeks of silence in between when I sensed that she was with another man. She would mention such affairs in passing, and I would find solace in my conclusion that they were inadequate and incomparable to what we had. It wasn’t till that moment, as we lay beside each other, that I realized how little I knew about her. Her world and the moments that transpired within it, the men who rocked themselves into her body, and the laughter she shared with them – lost in the oblivion of our distance. And as I watched her and ran across the barren hills of my own life, I felt an air of desolation, a quiet hysteric that loomed between our bodies, despite the words and nights we had lived through together.

‘Are you tired?’ I repeated her question.

‘I don’t wanna go back home.’

I smiled sadly at her. I had begun to like her. Her roundish face and her flat cheeks, and the way she moved with deliberation. I felt a surge of affection for her, as though I had known her all my life, but I had forgotten to pay attention.

‘Why’s that?’ I whispered.

She brought herself closer to me, till I could feel her breath on my forehead.

‘It feels like a lot of what we live is based on concepts, rather than the real thing.’

I couldn’t focus enough to understand her but I nodded even before she finished her sentence.

‘We make up these concepts to conceal our fears, and the inabilities we have made ourselves rigid with.’

‘Is that why you finally decided to come?’

She smiled, for the first time, looking straight at me.

‘There needn’t be an answer to the universe. We are just passing through.’

I felt a mournful silence capture my being. I was dehydrated but I knew better than to get up. I didn’t know what to do so I decided to follow her. She stroked my hair and ran her fingers along my face, before she withdrew gently, smiling as though I were unprepared, a child at best. She was a few years older to me, but I often felt like the elder one, the listener and the occasional oracle in her life. But that night was different.

‘Laira,’ I breathed.

‘Hmm?’

‘You can stay through the weekend if you like. I’ll drive you to the city on Sunday night in time for the last train up north.’

She was nearly asleep, but she wrapped her arm around my shoulders. I didn’t stir for hours, though my throat had turned into a roll of sandpaper, and I had to fight my tiredness to watch her sleep. Finally, when I felt like I would crumble with thirst, I slid out of her arms like a receding dream, and fetched a jug of cold water from the fridge. I gulped a few glasses and took the jug to the room, sipping some more by the window as I watched the lanterns of night extinguish themselves and give way to the foggy dawn. Just then, I heard the unmistakable wail of an engine, followed by a rusty groan and a rhythmic awakening of wheels. And despite the skeptic in me, I was sure that it was the cargo train that had come to life after an era of destitution. I had no idea where it was headed, but it was finally out of the way. Something heavy had lifted from my heart, the horizon was in sight again, and it would soon be a brand-new day.