Easier

Chapter 1

Livingstone is a small city where on crossroads one always finds faces that they know, yet, one comes across new faces every day, each with a story to tell, incomplete, for life goes on adding chapters every day. Syed and Gayatri didn't mean to fall in love. But love happens when you least expect it. It creeps up suddenly. When someone needs attention, care, conversation, laughter and maybe even intimacy. Love doesn't look at logic, or at backgrounds and least of all, religion.
Gayatri was from a very conservative South Indian family that went to a temple every Saturday. Syed bought goats for his family every Eid. That said it all. Their paths would never have crossed if it hadn't been for that fateful day. That day when he walked into the coffee shop. Gayatri wondered if destiny chose our loved ones for us. Did we have any role to play at all?
She looked at her watch. Syed was late. They met every Thursday at five pm to catch up. Their conversation lasted for hours. Sometimes at the cafe, sometimes in his car, sometimes in places that she could never tell her friends about. They would never understand. And yet Syed made her happy.
Suddenly her phone beeped. He had sent a message. "On my way. Have something important to tell you."
Gayatri stared at it and realised she had knots in her stomach. Thoughts flooded her mind. What did he want to tell her?
She felt lonely and vulnerable, something she hadn’t felt for a very long time. She looked at the flickering torch, which was among the many that lighted up the coffee shop flanking the shore of the Zambezi River. Pensive, she walked across the balcony that over looked the river, on the edge she rested her arm and reminisced the time when she first saw Syed.
After divorce Gayatri’s life had been quite monotonous. Wake up, hear her mother nag about her being 30 and single as she helped her cook, help her father in the shop, get home, take the blame for everything that goes wrong in the house, sleep. Not a day would pass without her mother complaining how Gayatri should have been at her in-laws’. She would remain silent for she was tired of defending herself as to why she couldn’t keep up with her abusive husband. However, some days she would escape and go to this well-hidden café, only known to a special few. It is here where she found peace, solicitude and later love.
It was exactly 6:45 pm, the dusk had set and the sky was painted in crimson and blue. Gayatri was almost done with her coffee, it was then when she noticed that one of the two guys, probably brothers, who had just walked, in was staring at her. She tried to recall his face but failed. Conscious of herself she quickly gulped down her coffee, grabbed her purse and hurried away. There was something about his stare that puzzled her.
Days passed by and eventually she forgot about that guy until one day while she was sorting the peanut butter boxes at the shop and her father said, “Gayatri meet Syed, we would be supplying his company from now on”. That was the first time to she heard his name.
Gayatri suddenly felt two hand reaching out for her and hugging her, exhorting her off her reminiscences.
“Did I make you wait too long love?”
“Yes you did Syed, so what is it? Do you even know how anxious your text made me?”
“I’ll tell you but first I have to show you something, let’s go”
“Where?”
“It’s a secret.” Syed said guffawing.