The words were unbidden from Nayan’s mouth and escaped him quite before his eyes had even lifted from the page to see who’d joined him in the small collection of seating. The regional accent of his Tamil Indian first language touched his English pretty heavily, but he was getting falling steadily back into the dialect again easily enough. He finished the last line of the paragraph he was on, placed his thumb there, then looked up from the book which he let rest in his lap over his crossed ankles. His shoes were on the deck beneath his seat.
The stranger was a tussled blonde man wearing sunglasses that blacked out all the important aspects of his expression, but Nayan could take from quick assessment he was in his mid twenties and had a puppy face to charm the sun of its gold. That said he was slumped with a sort of stunned lethargy consistent with A: fifty year old men or B: someone who’s just woken and was clearly not ready to take on higher thought processes. Nayan glanced sidelong at him from beneath the still slightly damp mess of his hair, offered a sympathetic half-grin and an opening to conversational ‘hi how are you’s.