on stranger shor, lifafa lookalikes, walking dates and city girl diaries

A few days ago, I asked a sweet, slightly odd, seemingly harmless 22-year-old boy to Humayun’s tomb for my first day in Delhi. This was not planned, Sanjana had taken ill and I was debating between affording myself my autonomy in frolicking or inviting company over. The latter was a risk, how many days of loitering has been ruined by a stranger’s foul mood and curiosities in absentia, I wondered. But he seemed to readily agree and seemed to me like agreeable company, we had spoken a week before this day, a few texts exchanged one long four-hour phone call where we combed through our film ratings and compared notes. While this can be chalked up to insufferable film bro behavior, I find that when I do it, it is inadvertently sweet and sincere as opposed to the irony poisoning of letterboxd users. Under my usual fashion, I would never do spontaneous dates, unless of course my hair is washed and I feel like I am capable of love and fondness. My hair was washed and behaving incredibly well and having recently gone through a long-term breakup, I figured I should entertain ideas I otherwise wouldn’t - like going on a date with a Lifafa lookalike with an interesting digital footprint on my first day in a new city. This felt all too new and plain, I’d never with so much ease invited someone and committed to a day with them, I didn’t know what he’d studied what his life looked like, or if he even liked history in the same stride, but having listened to my astro bot in jest, I was heeding to the extremely vague ode of ‘letting go’ and ‘being playful’ by foregoing my preconceived notions of gendered performance in courtship and overt planning that would inadvertently not pan out. what is the worst that could happen? he would grow weary of ceaseless walking and leave and I would be left with my camera and more time to focus on the museum’s artifacts? that was barely a worst-case scenario to me. I had an escape plan handy too, I had told a friend I would see her in the evening and I had told him I was on a time crunch, if all went south, I would bolt to Khan Market in the blink of an eye but this was barely a plan, as much as it was an afterthought of a possibility to consider.

He arrives on time and readily buys the tickets for the two of us, we stroll down the museum’s gallery and he asks me what I think of history, I am not sure how to answer that so I dive into a meandering train of thought about dominant histories. He apologizes for having his kolhapuri chappal on and I oblige, he expresses his urge to touch the exhibits, just the need to feel the crunch and texture of something so miniature, that is an urge i empathize with. we find the exit and begin our expansive long walk in and around the tombs, he offers to hold my bag and while i have no qualms holding my bag, the offer sweetens him in my eyes. nivi in her date substack writes about how she finds herself to be subversive when she toes the line of dating gendered politics and it heavily resonates. The transactionality of love under late-stage capitalism has gone south enough for my faith in chivalry to do the job. We keep walking and talking about our days, his time in the city, our disdain for white tourists, and his siblings, combing through banal childhood stories and finding little similarities and comparing notes on odd father figures. The ratio between small talk and sincere interest does it for me, I could never shun small talk, I couldn’t fathom beginning a date with loaded questions about politics and whatnot, I would much rather ask my date about his breakfast.

We keep walking around, and to my surprise, he doesn’t utter a complaint, instead, he’s helping me down steep tomb stairs and somewhere along this point hereon, we are holding hands, it so happens that he holds my hand while I maneuver steps too cataclysmic for my heel ridden shoes and then we just stay that way. He says I can take better pictures and I tell him the only reason my photography skills are compromised is because of his presence (I find it impolite to take pictures endlessly on a date). We circled Isa Khan’s tomb and went through the list of names scribbled on walls, lovers’ names, phone numbers, proclamations of love and heartbreak, phallic imagery, and crude drawings, he asks if we should sit and talk, so we find a spot unclaimed by the sun and start talking. we talk about film screenings in the city, and an abrupt interlude with his dead mother that I apologize for, day drinking shenanigans, the kind of men our fathers are, how close Aligarh is, and our thoughts on water fountains. Every sentence that comes out of his mouth sounds deliberate but it lacks the pompous intensity with which many men carry themselves, I find it incredibly hard to slot him in a box, he doesn’t fall in line with my string of film majors given their flashy cadence but upon more prodding, I discover he is a literature major. We discuss the short story he is working on and he says he struggles with the ending, there is cannibalism, caste, feudalism, and meat involved, and we arrive at a befitting end, a rough sketched-out imagery of sorts, he seems satisfied with it. We watch three old men on a bench from afar as we sit down in a sequestered corner again, overlooking the trees and another tomb, he stretches his hand out and we continue talking while holding hands. There are lulls of silence neither of us seems to mind, I am still at that moment thinking of his story, he compliments my hands and my choice of scent and then we go back to discussing Kafka as a pervert (not a lover!), his love for Rekha and his sister leaving to pursue her PhD, except he has no idea or inclination to know the details of it.

Having exhausted the premises and deciding what kind of particular European we hate, we stumble towards the exit, three hours into the date, he asks me if I’m a communist and I confirm, as does he, and we leave it at that. I like the brief nature of that exchange, having traversed the joyless checkbox lists of men who behave like Jaden Smith on create mode, I find it briefly refreshing to discover things about your date organically, without the need to relay essay questions at first glance, what lovers discourse fails to consider is the notorious discourse machines the internet produces and unleashes into the dating world full of protest date-rs.

we go out for a smoke and share a cigarette, he offers to drop me off at the metro, and upon discovering that I have yet to take the Delhi metro, he offers to take the metro with me until my destination, but we decide on lunch instead. His spice tolerance or lack thereof amuses me, his eyes begin tearing up at the Qorma and it all becomes an incredibly funny spectacle as he fights back his tears. I finally leave to see Suhasini, and in disgusting filmy fashion, we lock eyes one last time, It doesn’t faze me considering it had become a routine occurrence through our date.

The next day, I asked him to come to meet me at Lodhi Gardens, I wait for twenty minutes as he makes his way from gate 1 to gate 7. I offer to meet him halfway but he insists on finding his way to gate 1 so i let him. We run into many lovers in nestled spots and then eventually we find a bench right next to a crow picking through the trash. We do some bird watching before settling into a corner, there is an increased sense of familiarity and intimacy to the date that I don’t mind, i am resting my head on his shoulder and thinking about how little public space Bangalore affords its lovers. That thought is short-lived as a man warns us of a peeping tom, despite our only stake in romance being hand-holding, all my love for Delhi dissipates in that comical moment as i start thinking of Bangalore fondly again, my heart flutters between two cities so often i cannot fault a city as much as i fault myself.

We leave then to embark on a confusing metro trip, one moment we are in delhi haat and we have no idea what we are going to be doing, so we take the metro back, and then the next moment, we are on the metro to Connaught place, I love how travel in this city is almost seamless, he gives me his metro card and I feel like I have tapped into a whole new world. I enjoy tapping it more than I’d like to admit, at this point, my bag is his constant shoulder companion as we walk down South-Delhi riches, honestly the houses here put Indiranagar abodes to shame. His phone starts blowing up at some point, hearing ‘mister bihari please pick up your phone’ mid-kiss only amuses me further, it’s a sleuth of birthday calls, he sounds jovial and sweet on call, I take great joy in observing how people take phone calls, I often find myself aloof to family phone calls but he seems to be displaying an earnest interest in his cousin’s school teacher tales. At this point, I wonder if my interest is observational and anthropological candor or a blatant softened interest in him.

we settle in a bar and spend the night talking, as drunk literary men often reveal themselves to be troubled, he retains his sweetness and sincerity in his confessions, the night takes an even more amusing turn as we find ourselves in a shady spot of puraani dilli, being confronted by the bureaucracy of an aanchal guest house throws us into the tragicomic scene from jab we met, except nobody here is a manic pixie dream girl and thank god for that. at some point in the night, he tells me that he will miss me, and we indulge in the frivolous but fundamental exercise of wondering how life would be different had i not been leaving, i assure him that these thoughts are a mere byproduct of inebriation but then things are repeated in sobriety, suspended mid-conversation and we hang them up there casually as if it were the clothesline. In true fincher fashion, I love it when someone loves fight club in the same way I do which is of course more nuanced and subversive than most, so he says, you’ve met me at a very strange time in my life.

We don’t exchange a word when I drop him back to the metro, we are sharing earphones and nobody feels any pressing need to carry on a conversation. On my way back home alone, i wonder, the nature of such interactions and the assumed intimacy with which situations rarely present themselves, i think about chance encounters and in need of a devil’s advocate, i wonder about all the current discourse around ‘lovebombing’, i reject that premise almost immediately owing to its need to mechanize otherwise serendipitous at best emotionally questionable at worst meet cutes.

Sitting in the auto, I wonder about the events of an odd night, unexpected and welcome at the same time. Are such intimate dates the norm? Was the city more conducive to such romances? Was I perhaps extending my generalization to an aberration? Could you take to someone in a mere two days or was it the grand unified theory of love industry doing its trick by convincing us of such oddities? A cynic at heart, I dismissed all these questions, they simply did not take precedence as of now, over-intellectualizing an otherwise pleasant time only taints it and throws you at the juncture of doubt and needless worry. Living in it however as is, beyond interpretation, I have found, takes much more rigor and restraint. There is, of course, a lot more to the story but I doubt I can ever master the form of the personal essay and I refuse to divulge personal rendezvous in their entirety, it feels like a betrayal of a sort, to both the person and the memory of it. This date column is a transgression at best. After agonizing fruitlessly about the question of the date and whether I should indulge in this torturous affair some more, I found no downsides to this endeavor. Some questions are better left unanswered, the inadvertent blurring of lines, a sweet pretty boy with a goofy ringtone to smile at, and titillating conversations about the 1970s German New Wave is a gamble I would always take.

We are going to a movie screening together tomorrow but I am turning down the spontaneity filter for the foreseeable future, exceptions are only exceptions when seldom made.