The second step

The path to hell is paved with good intentions. Another truism that would soon come true. Loyana kept crying for what seemed like an eternity. The tears flooding her face and seeping through her clenched hands. When she finally looked up, the moonlight illuminated every curve of her beautiful cheekbones and lit up her eyes that had been washed clean.
This is the part where I'm supposed to say that I took her face into my hands and kissed away her tears. Sorry to say but that horrible hackneyed scene thats been done to death pretty explicitly by Mills and Boon and whose banalities even Jane Austen couldn't escape didn't happen. And probably because what should have happened didn't was the reason for the events that followed.

Like the moron that I am I offered her a tissue out of the packet that you'll find at all times in my messenger bag. She took it, tore it into shreds and chucked the remains onto the road. I had absolutely no idea what to do next.

"Lets get a cup of coffee," she said and turning the jeep around drove us back to the city. We went to a Barista outlet and it wasn't untill she'd injected a large dose of caffeine into her blood stream that she finally deigned to say something.
"I'm depressed." Pretty obvious. "I've finally realized that I fall in love with the most ridiculous morons that ever passed for males. Plus I have commitment issues." Um, I'm not a shrink lady. "I can't believe I'm telling you this." Well....., that makes two of us then.

She continued in the same vein for about an hour. My cynicism slowly gave way to a heightened sense of irritation and then finally to pity when she began to talk about her parents and their idiosyncrasies. Finally.A topic I could relate to.

She'd recently been subjected to a typical Indian bride viewing and she absolutely hated the whole idea. She trotted out all the familiar feminist arguments and then after another hour of parent bashing, ( they were in a hurry to get me married and now they say that I was the one in a hurry..........yeah right. Whatever. ), She finally realized that I looked like death warmed over and was all apologetic about it.

At this point even I was pretty freaked out. I mean who or rather what was this girl and what the hell was I doing in Barista past midnight? Me. Mr.responsible. I was always putting down plans by my classmates to bunk classes. I was supposed to be sanctimony personified, what was I doing here of all places? In any case I'd got a class at 7 a.m. and I needed at least five hours of sleep. I had no idea how I'd get home. That was when she turned her attention back top me and very casually said,"Come, I'll drop you home.........."

The destruction of a civilization and the distintegration of its memories begins with the moral degradation of its youth. Of all the ideas that Orhan Pamuk expounded in The New Life, this one seemed to have lodged itself in my brain. I looked around and found evidence that probably this was coming true at all levels.
Couples of all shapes and sizes populated the coffee shop that had slowly filled up with people as the night wore on. People who were there for the sake of being there, because its cool to have a boyfriend /girlfriend, because as a famous T-shirt slogan goes Virginity is simply a lack of opportunity. The girls were all dressed in similar looking outfits of tight skirts, heels and skimpy tops while the boys followed the Jeans, t-shirt, designer sneakers and gelled hair uniform that seems to have become a permanent fixture on the circuit.
I realized just how out of place I looked in my flat fronts and button down shirt. to be honest, I looked like a teetotaller in a bar asking for a bottle of Chardonnay. In short, I looked completely out of place. Loyana on the other hand looked like she owned the place. Maybe there is some truth in the belief that its not what you are but what you seem to be that counts.

Sometimes you tempt fate and at other times it beckons to you. I have no idea why but I stopped sweeping my eyes through the room and focused on another anomaly. A very well dressed man in a black frock coat and silk cravat who was sitting at a table populated by a few other equally well dressed individuals. They seemed out of place too but in a way that was quite different from the way I was. They looked like they belonged in a victorian parlour or at the very least in a private room in a luxury hotel. Definitely not in a coffee chain store.

He must have noticed something amiss because he slowly raised his head a fraction of an inch and looked around. It felt like a lion was surveying the landscape. His cold grey eyes appraised the room looking for the source of the disturbance. Something about the way his eyes swept over us both in frank appraisal before finally moving on made me very uncomfortable.

Abruptly loyana turned on her heel and began making her exit leaving me to simply shake my head at the indecipherable social code that seemed to have supplanted the good manners that I'd been taught as a kid. I picked up my bag and left all the while aware of something uncanny having taken place.