People pass. All walking towards North Road, most bound for Regent. Lanky basketball players, T-squared boys from the Technical Institute, fat female clerks with that dour look that graces the faces of all public service clerical staff, petite girls in plaid skirts, white shirts and Nikes, the one muttering madman, some University Students with the slow, self-assured drag that only aspiring lawyers and Rotaract/Rotary members can achieve, thick-thighed, high-gut women in large t-shirts and tights. Some of the bolder women stare at you.

"Hey, Ravi," a voice says and you turn around. You try not to notice that she has deliberately worn her hair loose, or the lip gloss that you can't decide whether you like or dislike intensely. The shirt is white, long-sleeved and loose; the jeans are tight. You have waited too many seconds to reply. She sits and turns away briefly to avoid you seeing her smile.

"We know each other too long for you to give me the silent treatment," she says.
In Love
I walk away from my thoughts
Upon a road of forgetfulness
I search for cure, many ways to find
A key to free my tortured mind

I walk away with foolish pride
Facts of life, I try to hide
And damn the seconds of careless time
That brought the though back to my mind

I swear in fear of losing control
Within my mind, my heart, my soul
Rejecting the facts of consciousness
I pray my mind would take a rest

I feel the rebelling power of strain
Discarding willpower controlling brain
My mind’s eye holds your picture so true
My heart sadly pleading, I love you.

- By Eddie Marques
"Sorry," you stumble, "I was just kinda lost in thought just now. How everybody…Auntie Sukhie, Naresh, you father them?"

"Everybody ok. So…Mr. Bholanauth. What have I done to…ah…for you honour me with your request to speak to your honourable and hardly-seen-these-days person?" She waves her hands, juts her chin, in a mock grandiloquence.

"I miss you," you say, and this stuns her.

"Please," she says quietly, a slight quake in her voice, "…remember? No more words like that."

"I miss you, Bharti…" You try to touch her hand but she pulls it away.

"Talk bout something else or I gone, ok, Ravi? When last you see Nirmala."

"Which one?" you ask, stubbornly.

"You know more than one now? I'm talking about the one I know. Wha used to go to Bygevalt. Which other Nirmala you know?"

"They get a girl does English with me. Creighton course."

"Well I won't know that Nirmala, dear. I could only ask about the one I know about, from Bygevalt."

"I ain see Nirmala for a long long while, girl I think Sunil seh last time he see she was pun GTV…the Bhajan show they does get on early in the morning, round four, five o'clock time."

"Sunil don't work?"

"Yes. He on probation at Scotiabank."

"Then what he doing up at four, five o'clock in the morn…"

"Preparing for work," you offer, cueing her.

"Uhn-uhn, not Sunil. An-y-bod-y but Sunil. Remember? Sunil used to come to school ten past nine every morning. Oh God, Sir Bristol woulda ketch heart-attack if Sunil din spend one more year at Campbellville…."

"Bharti," you stop her, "we didn't come here to talk about Sunil. Both of we know duh, awright?"

"Then talk then"

You wonder where to begin. Before you came, there were a million things that you wished to say to her, accusations you would have confronted her with. You wonder which one you should begin with.

"I remember this time up Mahaica," you begin "I went walking by myself on the road past Boyo shop and I here this sound, 'miaow miaow' -"

"A kitten."

"Yes, a kitten and I look inside some bush by the roadside and I find but three or four dead kitten, like tom-cat kill them and one still alive but barely moving and I pick he up and carry it to the bridge near Boyo shop and throw he in the trench"

"Ooh," she says, "that's cruel, Ravi"

"Anyway, I think it woulda just sink like that, but the current din kinda strong and you know that thing float like in slow motion like if it swimming until it float for couple minutes straight the legs moving. The other day at Sanskrit class, I ask guruji, the one from India, whether what I did was wrong, you know, adharmic, but he didn't hear me properly and went off on some rant about how Indian people will rise up and overthrow the oppressors or something like that. You think I shoulda kill it?"

"I think you shoulda given it a chance to live," she says "You just calling bad Karma for yourself."

You pause, because what you are about to bring up is going to hurt. But you go ahead anyway.

"I was reading this book - they made a movie out of it the other day, with Michael Caine - The Cider House Rules and I was reading about the whole procedures for "throwing away a belly" like Auntie Sukhie would say and I read that one of the required procedures was shaving…down there."

"Whaz you point, Ravi?"

"All the time we been together, I never see you shave there except that one time, you know after you went away suddenly fuh spend that weekend with your family at Parika"

"So, I probably changed my mind one time…"

"And I been thinking since, you know, my problem, you know, shooting blanks…"

She gets up and turns her face and starts crying. You try to hold her but she shrugs you off and people are beginning to watch. You leave her there, your heart in your throat and head towards the seawall.

And there are nights along Camp Street, yes there are nights along Camp Street, when the wind from the ocean blows a heart-breaking cold, so cold that it, the very air, sometimes seems as if it's been encased in a layer of thin ice, thin, fragile, crystalline ice, and you walk, afraid of your passage, afraid that one wrong step and the whole world might shatter, and there is nothing more to be said, there are no more words left to say, and you walk, and you hope and wish and pray for rain.