It was many years ago while I was still working at the night college when I met her. I used to frequent a small restaurant off of Coles Road and she was renting a room close by. She called herself Yahvi at the time, and her hands always smelled like burned camphor. She stopped by my table to ask for directions one evening. We spoke in three different tongues and four different colors, her matted brown hair and skin burnt squid tan, my snowy silver and antique brass. We spiraled around how charming the city was at that time of the year, with the pink and yellow flowers and the purple jacaranda carpets that were laid down beneath our feet. Finally we landed up in a muddy red field where we lost each other as I followed the sound of a sarod playing by the moonlight, and I don’t remember what it was that she said pulled her like a magnet... a madness.

We’d meet like this often at that restaurant. I found that I ended up going there three or four times a week, after work, and early morning before it; and she would be there, carefully moving a black ink pen around a handmade notebook, one couldn’t tell if it was words or pictures. She said it was experiments, but she said lots of things.

She told me that she had travelled here first with her father when she was a child and that while on their way back from a short holiday in the hills he had died in a terrible road accident from which she suffered no injuries because of the smallness of her body and the softness of her bones. She found herself sprawled on the curve of hairpin bend number 19 and was quickly rescued from the night, who’s darkness spoke in riddles, by the kindness of a passing stranger. Let’s change the subject, she would say and we would talk about other things like how Tuesday night dreams were always hopeful and Wednesday’s were always wet.

She had started to visit me at the college and would sometimes sit in on classes pretending to be one of the students. I found myself clenching my teeth at these times because her arrival was inevitably followed by the ribald moans of post-pubescent men who responded to the presence of a foreign woman with the same abhorrent slurs that accompanied the ingestion of their mother’s chicken curry. She didn't seem to notice it, or she didn’t pay it any attention, and she would raise her hand from time to time to clarify the meaning of alpha particles and anti-matter. We would sit in the canteen outside, after class, it was under some rain trees and there was great filter coffee. Here she would spin into a frenzy, she said that the air in the college changed her, she said that it made thoughts whizz through her like a swarm of impassioned bees. She would ask me strange things; what I lived for and why I lived. I would answer in all earnestness that, I did not know what it was that I lived for, but it was a desolate topic yet somehow grand. One might tell you that they live because they have to, or they may scorn the question and tell you to pull your head out of whatever orifice it was lost in; but it’s like talking to yourself in the mirror, this sort of introspection is difficult. These were the things my matted hair maverick would make me think about under the rain tree. Sometimes we would move these evenings to the room she was staying in. It was walking distance from the college. A small room hugged all the way around by a small terrace. It was rented out by an old couple who lived downstairs. One might have said it was quaint, with many windows looking onto those pink and yellow flowers. She had done up the terrace like a wonderland with flowering plants and a small fish pond. A friend had gifted her a pair of swordtails and she was insistent that they had no electricity between them since they never succeeded in procreating. She said electricity with the help of her hands, trying to indicate a magical surge of something that these fish lacked. She said that she didn’t blame them, sometimes it’s there, this surge, and it can kill you and sometimes it just isn’t, and sometimes it comes and goes like the seasons.

Sometimes we made love. I remember one afternoon you could hear the rain falling outside and the light came through her thin cotton curtains like dampened sweetness. Her body was tough around mine. We had both wanted it to be something. But it doesn’t always work out like that. Her back was torn to pieces in scars, they ripped across her like the works of some wild animal. I would sometimes move my finger along the raised skin and she would start to talk about what it might have been like if we were eternal. She said the scars were from climbing trees and forgetting about the thorns.

Sometimes she would cry, softly, turning her face from me and gathering her body into a cocoon. It wasn’t unhappiness, she said, it wasn’t anything from anything she could remember very well or explain very well, it was a grand scheme of things kind of sadness, but it wasn’t unhappiness.

Ours was a fated thing, maybe it wasn’t the zenith of our lives, we were on our way to separate places but we travelled together for some time. After her father had died she had gone to live with her grandmother for many years, but throughout her childhood she was miserable, she said. She would start to weep in the middle of geometry classes and was regularly sent home, initially with letters of concern, and then with ones reproaching her bad conduct. After two years her grandmother had not been able to discern whether it was the child still longing for her dead father or something else that was causing her to be so far from any sign of happiness, and she undertook the responsibility of driving her to a mental institution every Friday evening to uncover the reasons for her condition. After three sessions the doctor was certain that it was a broken heart causing her to feel this way, she has fallen in love, the portly man with the pocket glasses had told her grandmother with a grave look on his face. But what was wrong with that, everyone falls in love, it is washed away after sometime, her grandmother had objected, but the doctor insisted that this was a far more serious case than any he had seen before. This wasn’t a love that bore madness, suicide or murder this was something outside of life itself. The doctor, who was terribly intrigued by the case because of its rarity especially in someone her age, insisted that Yahvi continued to be brought back every Friday for an indefinite period of time that ended up being nearly five years. The then team of very interested young interns would run tests on her to see what chemical reactions this kind of thing produced in her brain, they wanted to note the precise amount of dopamine that surged through her blood as compared to everyone else who was in a more moderate kind of love. Until the very end of her almost five-year-long clinical imprisonment, no one knew the object of Yahvi’s love. It was always assumed that it was someone at the school, and the teachers had often hinted at various culprits, as middle-aged elementary school teachers are known to do. It was on the Saturday following her weekly visit that Yahvi’s grandmother got the call from the facility. Yahvi had remembered the very moment the phone rang because her heart stopped and her blood turned cold. When her grandmother hung up the receiver she was pale and for the rest of their time together neither one of them said another word to the other. Yahvi returned to India that summer, with nothing but an old black and white photograph of her father and a bag of dried nuts. She set out to find the love of her life for what else is there to do. She had ached for so many years for the stranger of the night who had rescued her from hairpin bend number 19, and had taught her to love the smallness of her body and softness of her bones.

She had mentioned him at times. She said that I reminded her of him in the way that I watched her when she spoke out loud all the thoughts that whizzed through her head under the rain tree. She joked that the both of us must have been trying to think of ways to tune out the raving lunatic who burdened us with her hopes and fears. I asked her about the scars on her body, if they were from him, she tossed her head back and looked me hard in the eye, he’s an animal, she smiled, a crooked smile, half hurt, half hope.

As the yellow flowers began to disappear from even the ground that they had fallen to, we started seeing less of each other, and when we did see each other on the street or in the cafe, it was only a brief, hello, how are you? Something had changed in her, and I think in me too. How I had judged her scars, thought them savage, how she had wept quietly, knowing this.

When she left that December she left me the handmade ink-stained notebook, that she wrote all her whizzing thoughts in when no one was around to watch her give herself up to madness. From inside of it fell hundreds of pressed flowers from Bangalore’s April. I would open it to the first page, and examine her scribble of a windy road for hours. I wanted to remember her in a wholesome kind of way, in my mind I had turned her into my suitably untainted maverick who only erred within the perimeters of propriety. But we were really just two degenerates feeding off of each other’s warmth.

It was last week, when I realized that I had been consciously planning each of my footsteps for over a month, when I decided to read the journal in its entirety. And there it was, the thin line bordering debasement that I had taken a secret pleasure in carefully tiptoeing along for most of my adult life, it was gone, and all of myself was completely thrust into a world I knew little about.

She wrote about their first time together, she hadn’t yet known her body in that way. She wrote about remembering the slime on the inside of her underwear and how she had wondered what was wrong with her. Poor girl, I thought, how young she had been and how little she had known about the way the world works, about the way things are meant to be. Her thoughts moved from nostalgia to rage to something I can’t explain very well. She blamed him at first. Then she showered him with golden words of adoration, saying that he was unlike anything this world could conjure up again. Saying soon after that he was unlike anything she would want to be conjured up again, it was all a mistake, and then she would chastise herself for cursing him, writing a thousand times, he is the love of my life, he is the love of my life. No one would have known from her writings who she was talking about, or what she was talking about for she wrote about him as if he was human, as if their carnal desire for one another was human, as if it was normal. I knew, because I had seen the scars on her body and I had dropped her off at the bus stop in December when she set out to find him 10 years after she had left him, wondering whether he was still alive, somewhere in the darkness, waiting for the scent of her. I knew because she told me that she dreamt of him, hopeful dreams and wet dreams, feeling nothing in the world but the weight of his massive body on top of hers and the clawing of her skin.