Dedicated Hallmark card shops were the new Big Thing in metropolitan India in the early nineties. It was 1992, I was in 9th grade and visiting my aunt in a posh area of New Delhi. I was out browsing cards in the new Hallmark card shop in the neighborhood although I had no money to buy an actual card. Reading the funny cards, I took a deep breath and smelled something...delicious. I had never smelt anything like that before. It was clearly a cologne- a man’s cologne or perfume, something foreign and expensive of the kind one could buy at the imported goods stores.
I looked sideways at the man who had come to stand next to me. His arm was White. My glance stole sideways and up..and up till it reached his face. My jaw must have dropped because it was the face of Richard Gere.
Seriously.Richard Gere. The actor.
I hadn’t seen the movie, but everyone knew the hero of Pretty Woman! I was standing in a Hallmark card store in Delhi next to Richard Gere. How strange. Perhaps he was buying a card for the Dalai Lama.
A loud giggle escaped me at the thought and he looked down at me. I felt awfully embarrassed at having been caught staring, how invasive and unsophisticated! I looked away but not before catching a kind, very beautiful, un-annoyed smile.
I smiled back rather automatically and then in an unselfish show of maturity, walked away to let him choose his cards in peace. No one would ever believe I didn't even try to get Richard Gere’s autograph or at least shake his hand, but I was smiling all the way home because I now knew how genuine Hollywood smelt like without even having gone to the movies, let alone America.
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