The first few weeks I knew Shehnaz, when we were still getting to be friends, was an uncomplicated time. We made appointments and did not keep them; we made appointments to discuss when we might meet; we liked each other but were occupied, like children, with other things to do. Sometimes I am nostalgic for that make-believe busyness, full of innocence, of having ‘other things to do’, the prelapsarian background of lectures, bookshops, friends, our lives spent generously and routinely like rain-showers, stopping and starting again.
We decided to meet at the St Giles’ Cafe near the Oxfam Bookshop. ‘Do you know where it is?’ she asked me with a smile; these sociable questions she would invest with a mischievousness, so that they became funny and meaningful, and I would always pretend to be embarrassed answering them. I did know the St Giles’ Cafe; it was the only place in Oxford that served a strong and dark coffee, with a scorched South Indian flavour; a white froth, almost a scum, formed on the top even before they had put the milk in it. Unlike the coffee in the Middle and Senior Common Rooms, it was hot, and one could, with a certain satisfaction, admire the steam rising from the cup before one drank from it. The cafe was a small, ugly and crowded place, full of students, and tramps minding their own business, hatted and bearded, with an unworldly look about them, like musicians. On either side of each table, there was a bench, and one had to squeeze past people to sit down, or have people squeeze past you as they got out. Thus, as one made small adjustments in position, one was always feeling grateful or obliged, strangely powerful or powerless; one shrank and hunched, and then graciously expanded again, in regular accordionlike time. Each table also had an introvert who sat in the corner throughout and looked at no one. When people were called to take their food from the counter, they were not addressed by their names, but by their orders—‘Ham and eggs!’ ‘Plate of chips!’ ‘Bacon sandwich!’—and, calmly and without confusion, those who had been labelled so uniquely rose and walked towards the counter. Whenever the door opened, a draught entered from outside, but the baked air inside, smelling of frying bacon, cushioned us from the cold and from other influences. The paradoxical confluence of timelessness and movement in the cafe made it an ideal place for a first meeting between two foreign students.
Yet that meeting, comically, was not to be. It was the beginning of summer, and some girls walked barefoot that day on Cornmarket Street. There was a hustle and bustle, a festive hurry, and even Ryman’s, the stationery shop, had inspired-looking customers queueing up to pay for envelopes and sheets of paper and Sellotape. Sharma and I were roaming around at our ease in loose shirts, two Indians who might never have met in India, feeling at home, giving studious attention, as if it truly mattered, to shop-windows and an ancient organ-grinder, edging our way towards Westgate, both of us feeling boyish, and I especially younger because I was wearing sandals. It began to thunder then, and rain very hard, as it does at home; girls screamed in English, and people who were waiting for the bus panicked, but soon the crowds deployed themselves into neat and dripping little squadrons, cheerful and brave, and the entrance of the Clarendon Centre and the great department stores were converted into shelters with an unfussy swiftness. I had never seen it rain like this in England before; water collected in the lanes and flowed past us as it does in Calcutta; and the English were excited at first and then reasonable and collected, telling each other jokes and enjoying themselves; it was all a little like but yet very unlike the wise dailiness with which an Indian outwaits a shower. Sharma looked at the sky and felt poetic and told me how he was reminded of his village. Thus I did not meet Shehnaz that afternoon but waited outside a shop that sold shoes and saw wet and laughing people running and disappearing, and committed to memory the rare, leisurely couple who walked by, contented and soaked. Later, Shehnaz told me how she had cycled to the St Giles’ Cafe after it had stopped raining, but had found it empty except for its owners, the stentorian callers of ‘Ham and cheese’ and ‘Bacon sandwich’, who were silent now, and busy mopping up the wet floors.