He took off his jacket, revealing his muscles. Radhika cocked her head slightly to one side. ‘You like girls, don’t you?’

‘Well, yeah, sure,’ he said, looking around in embarrassment. He caught sight of a tattoo on her exposed left shoulder. It looked like the tail of some animal.

‘Well, yeah, sure,’ she mimicked him and laughed. ‘Good. It would’ve been a tragedy to womankind otherwise.’

Madhav didn’t understand what she meant at first, and his ears burned when he finally caught wind of her suggestion. Her humour was extraordinarily open and unexpected. He couldn’t look anywhere else but in awe at her.

‘What if I say you’re left with thirty days? How are you going to prioritize everything in your life?’

Madhav was thoroughly disconcerted by the abrupt shift in conversation. She was even more unpredictable than he’d thought.

He looked at her suspiciously as she raised her eyebrows. ‘What do you mean? Why are we talking about this all of a sudden?’

‘What I mean is very simple, Madhav. No matter how long you live, what matters is what you do in those years.’ She laid her hand on his, her eyes pulsing with a strange energy.

‘I’m not saying we have to live every day as if it’s the last day of our lives. But we shouldn’t become complacent thinking that we have all the time in the world to accomplish our dreams, because we really don’t,’ she said, sipping her coffee.

‘Who has time for these questions? It’s difficult enough keeping my head above water, trying to survive,’ he said, gripping the table in frustration. How had this conversation gone from Tinder to life coaching?

‘Do you want to live your life or just survive?’ She held his hand tightly and caressed it. He sighed, trying to grapple with her complex questions.

‘You know, something strange happened this morning,’ he said, his thoughts wandering.

‘What happened?’ she asked, curiously.

‘I woke up and saw drops of blood on the floor. As I followed the trail of blood, I found a rat that had been stabbed with a pencil. It was the same pencil with which I wrote every night,’ he whispered.

Radhika listened to him carefully and thought about what he’d said for a minute. ‘He must have committed suicide.’ She tried to make light of it, making a mental note of the incident for future therapy, but Madhav remained shaken.

‘Let’s not talk about it any more,’ she said. ‘Finish your coffee.’

He hastily gulped down his coffee. She was like a mother, caring yet firm. Madhav wanted to know more about her life, her family, friends, everything.

‘When are we meeting next? I mean, when is our next session?’ he asked.

She gave him a half smile. ‘When this office is done.’

‘Not fair!’

‘Let’s go,’ she said and got up.

As she switched off the lights, Madhav asked, ‘Where are you headed now?’ He tried to feign nonchalance.

‘I live nearby, in the next lane. But I intend to shift into my office soon.’ She took out a helmet from her bag as they moved downstairs. She had a scooter, a yellow Vespa.