The Second First Date
Twenty years and two marriages later, we tried again.
He still ordered his coffee wrong. Black with three sugars, which is not black coffee, it is dessert holding a grudge. Twenty years, two marriages, one funeral, and four hundred kilometres had passed between us, and the first thing I learned about Dev at forty-three was that some things refuse to be updated.
We met at nineteen the way you meet people at nineteen, completely and all at once. He was the boy who waited outside my tuition class with one earphone and offered me the other, and for three years we were the couple everyone else measured themselves against, which should have been our first warning.
We ended over a bus ticket... Or over ambition. Or over a fight so small that neither of us can reconstruct it now, though we have both tried, separately, for two decades. I went to Delhi. He stayed in Lucknow.
We did the decent thing and destroyed each other by simply not calling.
Then we did what people do. He married a woman his family loved. I married a man my resume loved. His marriage ended loudly, with lawyers and a flat sold at a loss. Mine ended quietly, with two exhausted people signing papers on a Tuesday and thanking each other, actually thanking each other, in the parking lot afterwards.
For years I only wrote about Dev sideways. Every poem I filed under love was really filed under memory, and I knew it, and I kept doing it anyway, because writing around a person is so much safer than writing to one.
Last winter I posted one of those poems on a community wall for poets. It was about a boy teaching a girl to whistle through a blade of grass, and I changed his name, his city, and the colour of his bicycle, because I am a coward with excellent instincts.
Three days later, a comment appeared under it.
"The bicycle was green. And you still can't whistle."
My whole body went to nineteen.
We texted for three weeks like teenagers with arthritis in their thumbs. He typed in full sentences, always had. I caught myself putting my phone face down at dinner with friends, then excusing myself to the bathroom to read what he had sent, then coming back and lying about the queue. My friend Ritu watched me do this four times in one evening before she said, "Whoever he is, tell him you are too old for this." I was. I did not tell him anything of the sort.
He suggested coffee. Kanpur, halfway between our two cities, a cafe he swore had survived since our college days. I changed my outfit four times and went back to the first one. I stood in front of the mirror debating whether to colour the grey streak I have been growing at my left temple since my divorce, and decided against it. If we were doing this, he was going to meet the woman, not the memorial.
He was already there when I arrived, standing up too fast, knocking his knee on the table. Older, obviously. Softer at the jaw, greyer than me, reading glasses folded into his shirt pocket like a small confession. We shook hands. We actually shook hands, like two branch managers meeting about a loan.
The first hour was a hostage exchange of resumes. His daughter, twelve, lives with her mother, very good at chess, apparently terrifying. My work, my flat, my no children, delivered breezily in the practiced way I have learned to deliver it. Our divorces came up and were discussed like weather reports from countries neither of us lived in anymore. I watched his hands around his cup and felt nothing... and the nothing frightened me more than anything had in years.
I remember thinking: this was a mistake. We are two strangers wearing the skins of people who loved each other.
I began rehearsing my exit line, "we should do this again sometime," which every adult knows is a sentence that means never.
Then his card declined.
The machine beeped its flat little insult, the waiter did that thing waiters do where they study the middle distance, and Dev's ears went red. They went red exactly the way they had gone red in 2002 at the college fest, when the man at the chaat stall counted his coins twice, out loud, in front of my friends.
"I have money," he told the waiter, with tremendous dignity. "This is a new bank. The card is new. I am not. I mean, this is a new card."
I started laughing. Not politely. The ugly laugh, the one from before, the one my ex-husband once described in couples counselling as "a lot." Dev looked up at me, and his face did something complicated, and then he was laughing too, and the resumes caught fire, and nineteen looked out of his eyes at me for a full three seconds before forty-five pulled the curtain back.
After that we talked like people. He told me about his father's death, how in a hospital corridor that smelled of phenyl and someone else's celebration marigolds he had typed my number from memory into his phone, stared at it... and put it away.
I told him I had done nearly the same thing during my mother's surgery, except I had actually pressed call, let it ring once, and hung up.
"I know," he said quietly. "Unknown number, 2019, one missed call at two in the morning. I still have the screenshot."
We sat there with all our almost calls stacked between us like unwashed cups.
Somewhere in the fourth hour he said the thing I keep returning to.
At nineteen we fell in love by accident. If we do this now, we do it on purpose, and on purpose is a heavier thing. On purpose means you saw everything and stayed anyway.
I did not have an answer, so I drank his terrible sugary coffee, mine long finished, and he let me.
We did not kiss. Nobody held anybody's hand. When the waiter began stacking chairs around us, we ordered two more coffees to go, his wrong, mine right, and stood outside in the yellow light of the shuttered shopfronts holding our paper cups like credentials. He walked me to the taxi stand. He said, "Same place next month?" and I said, "You are buying," and he said, "New card by then," and that was it. That was the entire second first date.
I would love to tell you it has been simple since. It has not. He lives four hundred kilometres away. His daughter does not know I exist, and should not, yet. My friends have opinions, and my therapist has better ones. We are not nineteen. We have bad knees, lawyers' numbers saved from previous lives, and the specific carefulness of people who know exactly what a broken thing costs to repair.
But last month, for the first time in twenty years, I wrote a poem about him in the present tense. I filed it under new beginnings, and my hands shook a little, and I let them.
Yesterday morning he sent me a photograph from his kitchen table. Two cups, side by side, steam rising into the cold light. One black with three sugars. One milky and unsweetened, the way I have taken it since before he knew me the first time.
The caption said, "Practicing."
I looked at it for a long time... Then I put my phone face down on my own table, next to my own single cup, and let it be true.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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