INCOGNITA

She landed up at his door one Sunday morning
Just as he was trying to begin the second chapter (after pages of false starts)
At first her knock had seemed like poetry to him
Midway between an irregular heartbeat, a throbbing wound and a morse code


Full red lips and eyes of blue
At first glance, she was another beautiful woman
But then, she wasn't;
For here was a mirror image of Vineeta
Those oversized eyes and slightly tilted lips
Stuck on the same landscape of a Californian sunset
He would have felt akin to falling into a dream
Had he not known who she really was


In the subdued sunlight in the room, he observed her more carefully
Her immense, copyrighted forehead accentuated even more by the hair swept back
An overdone mouth
She had deliberately created dark circles under her eyes
Even today, she sometimes made him smile


Then she spoke
Like all his women with their thick, distant, un-virginal, radio jockey voices
That swooped effortlessly through a man's legs
“We have the same toes
The same handwriting
The same earlobes.....
Tell me Shona, am I her?”


He couldn't bear to tell her the truth
“That you don't have to do the dark circles
Because you two have the same upturned nose
You too have the same housecounting eyes
And the same way in which you blink them when something interests or perplexes you
The only eyes I've ever seen which one might truly describe as, violet
I look in those tremendous purple eyes
But I see nothing there


And yet I used to know a girl who used to live there
And she is the most beautiful girl I've ever seen.
That I see pieces of her all the time
Every time, a girl with Cappuccino skin and low rise jeans walks by, fast and straight
I see images of her flashing me by
So, you too could be her
For all I know”


But to her he says, more reassuringly (and eventually in glib South Calcutta Bengali)-
“There's more than a passing resemblance
Khanik ta bichanaar paashe
Khanik ta tomar daan chokher kaache
Khanik ta aamaader dujoner majhe
Khanik ta thake shei meghla akashey....”


Translated, it (more or less) stands:
One part of it, near our bed
Another on the corner of your right eye
A bit of it between the two of us
Some falling down the grey skies.....


So, arching her eyebrows and blinking her eyes, she asked him again
Her words with the effect of a familiar song floating by
“Am I her?”
And he looked straight at her and said, with the clarity of her blue eyes
“No
You're not her”


(But all things considered da'ling
You did come
Pretty damn close)