A Fruit between Meetings

She was elderly and emphatically infirm. She was a gargoyle from grey buildings, an impish pair of marbled eyes staring up through specs, assessing generations, tickled inwardly by naughty memories. There was once a taxi. She waved it down with a hooked umbrella, as if it were a law: 'Every waved umbrella results in at least one stopped taxi.' The taxi is decadent, but was assembled a good few decades after she was born. She smells of Ponds. Her elbows move with vaseline gloss over the maroon cushion. The meter has a pout and says 'Don't touch me'. That's more like an auto meter. I thought she would say, "what are taxis coming to" etc. but she didn't and we drove around Colaba Market and back where we started, with chocolate smudges on her collar. She wants to see a train. I take her to Bombay Central where behind rusted grills she can see the iron lines twisting this way and that. I take her to Vashi where the sun is going down, in a twilight of gold and ticketless shadow. Shakily she wades through corridors, mistaking dusk for dawn, asking for a cola, asking for a train. We buy one, and the foam is on her like brown sugar. I tell her of Haji Ali being taken down for a new one. She drops down in my mind like a neem fruit, yellow, overripe and sweet-smelling. The stranger has no story with us, no reality to maintain. In blurred office images, she went the way she came, which is never.