Wednesday 22 July 2009

Rooftops

He met the first of his wives--a school teacher--while she was sitting, bored and beautiful, amidst a group of adolescent boys, all of them uniformed, all of them eating from bag lunches. It had been a field trip, he guessed. Her students were amassed around her, crosslegged, making her look like some stoical Indian chief, or a guru waiting to impart the secret of enlightenment. She was pretty, statuesque, blonde. It was her blank stare though, her melancholy look, which caught him off guard. Yes, it was her loneliness as she sat there in the middle of these quiet, unobservant boys, that got him, that clinched his heart.