Pretty women

Sporting a faint smile, she just walked into the Metro with her male companion, a couple of stations after I had boarded the train. She was tall, dark with sharp features carrying a black bag with a smiley on one of its strap and words ‘Do you like me? Yes/No’ written on her T-shirt.
They stood in the area that connects two coaches. From where I was seated, I could see her, if I would bend forward a little but her male companion was out of the sight.
Nothing extraordinary, given the fact that ‘couples’ tend to look for places where the crowd is less (though that happens rarely in Metro).
As the train moved, I looked at her again, catching her sight this time…
It was travel back in time… More than a decade and a half back, when I had just joined the college and our seniors were treating us with a ‘freshers’ party’. She was standing there, tall, dark with sharp features, her long hair held together with just a clip and a sweet smile on her lips. She was a senior, rather a super senior (a third year student) but at that moment it didn’t matter. The party was getting boring with the seniors fooling around and asking us freshers to do all that silly stuff that constitutes ragging.
As the ‘party’ dragged on, I decide to move out. But alone? I looked at her again. She turned and smiled. “Like to have coffee?” I asked. How I got myself to say that and that too to a senior who was already supposed to be having a boyfriend (it was considered sacrilege to ask the ‘already engaged’ girl for a coffee) I have never been able to figure out. I had expected a polite refusal. “Okay, shall we go out of this place?” she said with her sweet smile intact. The joy was short lived. “Can we have all the freshers over here?” called out a senior. “Well, next time,” she said.
The Metro screeched to halt. I was back into present. More pretty girls walked in --- and continued to do so after every couple of stations. But then all pretty faces don’t refresh memories.
For once I remembered John Keats when I ‘deboarded’ the Metro. No, not that I am a great fan of poetry or have any special liking for this great poet of ‘Romantic Movement’ of the 18 century. It is just that I found that one of his lines --- ‘A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever’--- from his poem…, (don’t even know its title) aptly described my day’s journeys --- in thoughts and in physical self.