A few Saturdays ago, I sat at a table at my local mall and talked to a total stranger for 45 minutes.

"Hi, I'm Alexandra," said the stranger, before introducing me to Bonnie, her service dog, a Labrador-Golden Retriever cross.

Bonnie sidled over for a pet — she was off-duty, so it was allowed — and she nuzzled my pocket, which still contained a handful of treats from my early morning walk with Finlay.

I began by asking Alexandra — the "Blind Artist" on the session board — whether she was able to see anything at all from behind her tinted glasses. She laughed.

"Usually I can see a little," she said, "but I was out until late last night, and I'm feeling a little delicate. To my credit, it was a guide dog fundraiser."

She said she can't see faces, but she was able to hazard a guess that I was wearing a dark shirt, which I was.

The occasion was Talk to a Stranger Day, organised by an NPO called ASK, which stands for A StrangerKind.

The idea is that you chat one-to-one with a volunteer participant, from across a spectrum of backgrounds, occupations, and life experiences, in the interest of promoting understanding, curiosity, acceptance, and yes, kindness to strangers.

ASK was founded in Cape Town four years ago by Madi van Schalkwyk, a graphic designer and Enneagram coach by training. Madi told me she had grown up in a small conservative community, isolated from the people living outside her narrow circle.

When she began engaging with others during her student days, her eyes and mind were opened by the simple act of talking to strangers.

ASK is her way of helping to break down barriers and make the circle bigger, in a public setting that facilitates and encourages open, direct conversation.

I arrived early and scanned the board, which had been set up opposite a coffeeshop in Cresta Mall.

There were 15 "strangers" to choose from. They all sounded interesting. "Tattooed"; "Brought up by a single mum"; "Gay, Non-Binary, Transgender"; "Burn survivor"; "Stepping out of shyness"; "Changing your career after 60".

I made my choice and was shown to table number 9. As Bonnie languished on the cool white tiles, I asked Alexandra about her art. Was she able to see colours?

For a couple of years, not at all, she said. Her journey to blindness had been slow, her vision in childhood receding first in one eye, then the next; then overnight, in adulthood, came the darkness.

Now she was able to distinguish certain shades, red, for example, and the blue of the sky, "which helps with orientation". Still, as an artist, she prefers to depict the world in black and white, working mostly in ink and charcoal, with bright splashes of acrylic.

Alexandra has a Master's in Fine Arts from Wits — she was a winner of the prestigious Wits Young Artist Award, and her exhibition was called "Re-orientating the Mind’s Body" — and she is currently studying part-time for an Honours in Psychology.

Apologising in advance for posing a question she had probably heard hundreds of times before, I asked Alexandra whether her other senses had been heightened to compensate for her loss of sight.

Yes, she laughed, she had been asked that one before; no, to her disappointment, "I'm still waiting to discover my blind-girl superpowers".

She was particularly attuned to smell and sound, though, and for a moment, my attention shifted to the hubbub of voices around us, the hum of machinery, the white noise of the suburban mall.

I asked Alexandra what the biggest misperception about blind and visually-impaired people was, and she said it was the assumption that they are other than or lesser than.

“If I’m with someone,” she said, “they’ll usually speak to the person I’m with, rather than to me. They also tend to assume that I must be a really good, kind, and loving person. Well, yes, maybe, but I also have as many complex emotions as anyone else. People are scared about saying the wrong thing to me, but I dare people to offend me. I’d be quite open to testing that.”

She remembers, before she met Bonnie, walking around Melville with her white cane, and her cousin at her side.

At one point, her cousin said, “I just want to punch everyone, the way they’re looking at you!” With Bonnie, it’s different.

“Either people come up and talk to me,” said Alexandra, “or they scream and run away.”

What frustrates Alexandra the most is being denied entry to a venue because of Bonnie.

“Sometimes I do lose it,” she says. “I want to say, I can sue you, do you really want to do this? It’s almost like you’re invisible to people, but at the same time you’re very visible, but not in the way you want to be.”

I asked and I asked and I asked, about power outages (“They annoy me as much as anyone else, I still want to use my iPad and watch Netflix”); about social situations (“It’s difficult, because I can’t read body language, and I can’t even be sure that the person I’m talking to is still there”); about whether Bonnie is allowed, like other Labrador-Goldens, to sleep on the bed at night (“She does sneak on, I’m not as strict with her as I should be”).

And then the 45 minutes were up, too quickly, and my only regret was that I hadn’t been able to sit down and speak to other strangers, to listen to their stories, to learn what it is like to be in their world, and to understand that all you have to do, to cross the boundary and enter the circle, is ask.

A StrangerKind runs regular Talk to a Stranger events across the country. For more information, visit https://astrangerkind.com.