Once weekly, on Monday morns, a woman comes to clean. Her legs are cast
in limpid stockings, I smell her cleanser perspiration. A coarse
elastic reins her stonewashed hair. She is not bejewelled. She wears a
pair of twisted wire-rims. Her husband sometimes tags along, buried
under her scrubbing implements.
She hardly ever acknowledges my cornered and abashed existence, like a
besuited mummy with gleaming imitation leather shoes. She does my
laundry and my ironing, too.
I did not want to die. I sought refuge in numbers, solace in
propinquity. I thought I'd join the Jesuits.
I strolled to the United Nations building and met a senior bureaucrat,
a member of the order. His angled modest office overlooked a busy
"work-in-progress" intersection, but he renounced this distraction. He
listened to my well-rehearsed oration and referred me to a monastery at
the other end of town.
Ambling along the waterfront, I scrutinised the flower beds, the
tourists, and the spout. Even at dusk, I found this city languid.
All shops were closed.
I had a dinner date with a Londoner, a naturalised Iranian oil trader.
Throughout the meal he kept rebuking me:
"You sound like someone whose life is long behind him.
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