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“Do I wanna know? Do you want me crawling back to you?” I almost blurted these lines out every time I opened my mouth that day. Still trying to figure out the band and the song, I reached for my phone when I caught a whiff of a fragrance that seemed vaguely familiar. I looked around but to no avail, breathed in once more, still perturbed, then googled the lyrics stuck in my head. “Aha! Arctic Monkeys! Of course!”. This technology induced instant gratification made me finally finish Fika and venture out of the café I had been lounging in. It was the midsummer day in Stockholm and the old town, Gamla Stan appeared to be brimming with tourists like me. With the song on loop, I resigned my feet to the thumps of walking on the cobbled streets when that fragrance caught my senses again and made me halt in my tracks. It was that faint lingering aroma left behind when someone brushes past you. I waited. I searched. Unnerved, I resumed my walk. It had been a few hours since. I was at the Royal Palace museum marvelling at the statue of Goddess Judo with the child Hercules when I heard someone behind me say “Hello”. Even as I turned around to look at this stranger, I recognized the fragrance that seemed to have tormented me the entire day. “Hi, you seem to really like this statue!?,” said his lips while his deep blue eyes scrutinized my face. “Well, er.., it is magnificent to say the least!,” I tried haplessly to form a sentence while my brain scrambled to make some sense of the situation. “I am Alexander and you are..?,” “Just wandering!,” I replied. To this day I cannot fathom the reason for this seemed like an obvious response. “Hahaha, I shall get your name later. Would it be okay if I ask where you are from?,” he asked while I assimilated his appearance. This unassuming tall, salt and pepper beard man looked at me with a smile that made me nervously calm. “I am from India, and you?,” I enquired. “I am from Greece. I would love to talk to you about India if you would join me for coffee?,” he asked. Human brain never ceases to amaze me. Within the span of this conversation, I felt emotions cruising from infatuation, confusion, vulnerability to of course, validation. But in the end curiosity got the better of me. “Well, a cup wouldn’t hurt I guess,” did I just hear my voice tremble. Damn! “I have a place in mind, shall we then?,” he offered his hand and I could feel my arm saunter its way towards him. Dazed and giddy, I ambled out of the museum with him chatting about genres of travelling. He seemed to know how I had incessantly thought about my travel agendas earlier that morning. He seemed to know that I planned to visit Fotografiska museum in later in the evening. He seemed to just know that I had been reading up on James Nachtwey’s exhibition. He just seemed to know. It felt like a dream when he led the way to the same café I had been to that morning. We sat across each other at the same table. I could see the exact same view through the window behind him and I could smell the same fragrance. Yet everything was different. Was this a premonition or was I building it up in my head? I battled with this question as the evening approached its end and the sun stubbornly set. We bid adieu to each other and the inconsequential conversation that had graced the evening. Hugging him I breathed in one last whiff of that fragrance. Days later, idling in the summer sun at the comforts of my home, I heard an almost imperceptible knock. As I opened the door, my senses went into overdrive with the fragrance that had taunted me. I looked down to see a postcard from Nachtway’s exhibition on the doormat. Written on back was – “Do I wanna know? Do you want me crawling back to you?.”