Behind a red light.

The car was a yellowing white sumo – with blackened windows. The left window of the back seat was rolled half down – and inside was complete darkness except a confusing extension of the dazed orange spill from the streetlight a little way ahead. A hand – an immaculate white kurta sleeve and a brown set of fingers – moved up and down, up and down, lifting a cigarette to a hidden mouth. The tip glowed momentarily red like a laser spotter as the smoke was drawn in and the swirls of darkened shifting haziness that followed from behind the glossy paint of the car body drifted across the street and merged, scattering, into the shimmering floodlight outside.
The glaring sounds of an early night were dulled and insignificant – a small picture – an image, clichéd and predictable, had lent a sharp direction to the moment, as confused and meaningless as the reel it was a part of. And a hidden face, the most mysterious and exhausted fantasy in misplaced detached thought, had lent different brushstrokes of possibilities to that direction. A sharp aquiline nose or a straight marble-cut face, eyes still shrouded beneath a hood of simple impenetrable darkness, descriptions from the printed pages, read and reread over and over again, but never really and completely imagined – something from a story, an adventure, waited behind that window, behind the glowing stub of that exhausted cigarette that dimmed and fell and rose again to be lit up and smoke.
And then some fluorescent bar ahead beyond the jammed piles of directionless metal parts waved, or some red ominous light turned to envious green, and the image was lost in another cliché of time taking off again from where it had stopped, with the sounds glaring full volume again in sudden frenzied early night activity. The face, a last and shattering anticlimax, leant forward and looked out the window – a round small nose and stupid but happy ordinary eyes and a mouth that pursed up to say “finally” in a most normal and final tone.
Perhaps the face was never meant to be seen, but to stay that ‘hidden’ face of a half-priced paperback bestseller in toppling piles by the stacks of magazines – each just a little different from the next like jarring semitones. Or maybe the moment wasn’t in the face – but in the life behind it. And those behind all the other people in all the other cars, walking down the road, waiting under the streetlamps, all those who shared – however unknowingly and ignorantly – that single still picture that lost to the traffic signal. A detached, directed but at the same time meaningless infinity of little pockets of personal thoughts.