Cape Town: I am sitting on the beach watching my kids play; a few yards away from the gentleman meant to protect me in South Africa. Protect me from what, I am not sure, but there he is, surreptitiously standing in the corner, smoking and squinting into the sun.
I get some ice cream for the kids and call him over to hand him one as well. He thanks me, sits down and in the next 20 minutes, I learn about a life that is so remote from mine that I can scarcely imagine it.
He is in his fifties and has been in the Army all his life. He has been in Iraq, Bosnia and Sierra Leone. Places that I only know about through newspapers.
And now he solves what he calls 'little problems'. If Somalian pirates have taken someone hostage, he is called in to negotiate, if an oil tanker is abandoned in Mozambique, he helps to assemble a plan to retrieve it.
He got married this year for the first time and is now fighting the next battle in his life with his wife's breast cancer.
Delhi: My friend sends a car to fetch me from my sister's house and bring me over for some tea and some tte--tte.
Sitting in the car and stuck at a traffic light, the driver begins his tale. He is a simple boy from a village near Nainital. He wants to bring his old mother from the village to stay with him in Delhi, but she refuses to come as she claims that she is periodically possessed by a goddess and the goddess will not travel with her to the city. In the realm that he has grown up in, this does not sound as absurd to him as it does to us. He says that she often has fits and convulsions after which she makes predictions. The whole village comes to her, asking for glimpses into their future.
We reach my friend's home but he hasn't finished his story so he walks me to the lift, absentmindedly leaving the car doors ajar and the car in the middle of the driveway.
Mumbai: I am sitting in a tiny room, waiting for a friend who is having an MRI. Working on their computers, there are two people in this minuscule cabin besides me. In the next 20 minutes, I start to feel as if I am in the middle of a marriage-counselling session.
I am unable to recall how the conversation started, but I do know that it ended with me knowing a lot more about them than I intended. He says that she spies on him and checks his phone sporadically. She says that's because she needs to. He says that everyone has a few demons inside and as a radiologist, he sits in this very room and sees death staring at him all the time through tumours and blockages on his screen, reminding him that life is too short. She says that in the nine years that they have been married, she has heard this statement too many times. They both agree that despite their differences, they like trekking the Ladakh slopes together and that is enough to keep them going.
Meandering through life curiously, I have collected a pile of short stories. These have no beginnings and no ends because I collide with them midway, but what I have always wondered is, what makes someone pour their heart out to a stranger?
Is it the fact that I will be gone tomorrow and will not muddy the water like someone permanently affixed in their life or in a world submerged in stating their opinion, often within 140 characters; were they perhaps waiting for someone, anyone, just to listen...
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