I speak with the conviction of a strange mind, a mind that at it's will, either refuses to believe in anything or believes in everything.
I speak from recesses of darkness that are getting enervated by a few strands of light, I can't see too far, but sure can make out some silhouettes. I am suspended in disbelief and grounded in cynicism, trying to fly multicolored kites of hope.
I am the guy forever in transit, at beginnings, at the ends and somewhere in-between; sometimes waiting for the reds to turn green, and sometimes staring motionless at the greens.
I am the crazy stranger with a far off look in his eye, I am the harmless tie-wearing man, already looking tired on his way to work. I am the enigma that doesn't really intrigue, I am the charmer no one really notices. I am an average bloke, with a very non-average agenda.
I am Naren Poker.
Poker, really? I encounter this often, so to set the record straight, I ain't from a long line of illustrious but bankrupt players of poker, neither am I the kind who can live up to that name with their straight in the eye bluffs. I am just a chance victim of a joke, a cruel one, for a man who given an opportunity wouldn't really want to be noticed, for anything, carries a name that gets him a comeback each time. In a way, this also encapsulates what my life has been about, a series of circumstances unaligned to my wants.
Naren Poker, the private detective, reads the sign on the tired, beaten and forcefully held straight, the door of the humid and sweaty small room, I call the office, in a rather run-down corner on the fourth floor of a senile, old and wrinkled building in a busy, noisy and angry part of town.
It is here that for inspiration, on rather dull morning hours of work I usually flip through the racy pages of the once glossy adult magazines I pick up from a pre-used magazine store around the corner below. The bored faces of luscious females pouting or twisting their faces into strange expressions of sexiness for my benefit, never seem to bore me. They just stare straight into my eyes, or sometimes even through them into the large empty space behind, not that I got any business judging their trade. But then neither do they desist from mocking my emptiness.
Outside the window, the world and its inhabitants were keeping up their maddening pace, calling each other names, shoving and nudging, struggling and despairing, hurtling along, trampling on hopes - most of them their own. Not that I could care any less. I looked at my watch, the morning hours really never passed, every day the same story. In the age of the internet, the self-promotion boom on everything social, a private detective was a vanishing breed. Especially the ones with no specific specialty or skill. I fell in this category, the kind of guy who will bring you all the information neatly copy-pasted and compiled into a report.
It was a soft knock, which sounded like a loud thud, I looked sharply towards the door on my right. The usual loneliness of mornings had made me so unaccustomed to a visitor that it startled me. It was a dream, standing in my doorway, outlined by the old dusty brown of the door, a brilliantly shining form of a woman. She looked at me through the small sliver of her bored half-shut eyelids. I looked back or rather gawked, not that gawking has ever really bothered me, the strange lasciviousness of my eyes, so often commented upon, failed to penetrate the impenetrable beauty of the twenty-something. She cracked a smile and the sun seemed to rise right into my old dusty office. As is my wont, in such moments I feign unaffectedness, a casual disregard for the obvious. I have always been proud of this ability irrespective of how foolish or see through my attempt may be.
I signaled her to the chair opposite, suddenly the layer of dust on my table seemed to stare back at me. I called it names and implored it to disappear. It refused to oblige.
