It is early afternoon. Not raining yet, but the air is moist and rapidly cooling.

I’m sitting at the neighbourhood café by myself. I came here to write, but I’m avoiding it, nibbling on a sandwich while hunched over my phone.

There are three men at the next table – old friends catching up, it looks like. There’s music playing in my earphones, but I hear snippets – talk of family, traffic in Pune, and something about emigration to the United States.

It begins to rain – “dho-dho”, as we say in Marathi – and I realise it’s going to be a writing afternoon whether I like it or not, so I open up the laptop.

The music, along with the rain, filters out most of the three men’s conversation but I keep looking over – the one facing me feels familiar. Seemingly in his mid-40s, small, alert eyes, and a bald patch on the top of his head, a single lock of hair primly arranged over it. He looks like someone Photoshopped a child’s face onto a man’s head.

One of them pipes up, “Yaar, it would be much easier to be an undocumented immigrant in the US if you were Mexican.” A fascinating statement, despite making little sense. I’m intrigued.

I realise how I know the man I’ve been looking at. I went to school with him – he’s in fact a year younger than me. I think about saying hello, but I can’t remember his name, or anything else about him.

“I think,” my erstwhile schoolmate says solemnly, “in our next birth, we should all be born Mexicans.”

The other two men nod. Why not Americans? I don’t know.

I decide it’s a mercy I don’t remember anything about him, and go back to my writing.