An Unexpected Encounter

[This is for a writing exercise by my friend Ushasri Nannapaneni for www.ushaveera68.wordpress.com]

She was sitting by the corner seat—she looked totally out of place in the bustling Data Udupi Hotel—as if she had landed there my some mistake, and would, at any moment—disappear completely. The waiters, clad in ill-fitting pants and shirts of light blue, stood a respectable distance away.

The clatter and clamour of the outside world—the dust that was thrown up every time a bus passed by the dusty main road, the honking of the cars, the general ‘people’ noise—all seemed insignificant now.

I tried hard not to stare at her, but it seemed like the locus of the hotel had changed now, and it was inevitable that we would all look at her, even if we tried not to. She was wearing a gray business suit that fit her ample body perfectly. Her face was not what anyone would call pretty—but it had a certain look some might call stately.

She ordered a plate of idlis. When the server brought them to her, he laid them on her plate and somehow ensured it made no sound. No cling-clang. No thwack. When she ate them, one by one, her head didn’t move an inch towards the idlis—her hands brought the idlis to her mouth, as if the idlis had no business expecting her to meet them halfway.

She signaled for water in a fluid, almost poetic motion, and the servers emerged immediately with a bottle of cold mineral water. No “mineral or regular water?” “Cold or ordinary?” that I had been subjected to. She unscrewed the bottle cap and drank the water as one would in an ad. I nearly expected a “cut! Cut!” from some corner of Data Udupi at any moment.

Just then, my phone rang. It provided the break from the collective trance that the hotel seemed to have fallen under. It was an embarrassing ringtone that my son had set for me—“Ayyayyo ayyayyo,” it went. She glanced across at me too, and that’s when I saw a flutter of recognition in her face.