~Jayendra Pathak~
I can’t say what made me fall in love with this cafe. Everything is so intense, the colors, the taste, even the Rain not the filthy rain as that of my town. They say whatever you are looking for, you will find here. They say when you come to café d amor, you will understand love in a few minutes. The rest is got to be lived. The smell is the first thing that hits you promising everything in exchange for your soul. The food sounds, and almost certainly was quite disgusting, chosen to be exotic rather than delicious; some of the old menus had still survived.
The heat, shirt is straight away a rag; you can hardly remember your name and what you came to escape from. But at night, there is a breeze, river is beautiful, you can be forgiven for thinking that there is no violence, no gunshots were being fired, only the pleasure matters.
The pipe of the opium, the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you.
And then something happens as I knew it would. And nothing could be the same again.
Then enters a man, tall or short, long or round skulled, dark, fair or Rufus is nevertheless scarcely to be mistaken so far as his mental qualities are concerned. He reveals himself normally as man frequently gloomy and irritable, prone to a sudden illumination of enthusiasm, a man of prolonged silences, suddenly garrulous, dreamy, but passing from repose to violent but usually short lived action. Conservative and superstitious, fatalist, fearless, he is all these things. Yet he is as various individually as the men of the other races are concerned, in some cases highly emotional, in others strangely passive.
Few years ago, the man had suddenly vanished from the city. No one didn’t exactly know about his where about. He just vanished from the city without leaving a trail of dust. Then disaster struck the city. Gunshots were heard frequently in every corner of the city. The man became folklore, an urban legend like many that were hidden in the tombs and the graves buried in the soil.
Some People blamed the sudden outburst of the tyranny to the disappearance of this man. There were lots of gossips in every café of the city. But no one was quite able to jump out on any conclusions. Once in a while, a newspaper article appears on the daily newspaper under the fake name, promising every people of the city that good days are ahead, and he is fighting for the sake of the people.
What is the mystical secret of this man? It is the memory, the soul recollection of a former morale and intellectual pre-eminence which he has not lost, for its gifts remain within him, but the Arcanum of which he can’t discover. He is like a man with a chest of treasure who has lost the key.
The gunshots became the order of the day. Once proud, beautiful and the mystical city is getting uglier day by day. These began in the depths of abyss, the lowest and the least grade, for there can be no intellectual existence without gradation, and in the respect of the gradation there cannot be but a beginning, a middle and end or extremity.
Thus animations in the abyss are the partakers of the life and goodness in the lowest possible degree and of death and evil in the highest degree. Therefore they are necessary evil, because of the preponderance of evil over the good.
The woman sitting in the rightmost corner of the café, however richly she is dressed, her simplicity and personal charm is the point; she sits with a book in her hand, listening to all the gossips in the café, with her one eye towards the bar tender and smiles cheerfully towards the man. Dressed in a salwar, she takes pleasure in eschewing the unpredictable: “Can I have another glass of wine?” She grins, and has a fascinating, mobile face which bursts into life when she launches into an anecdote.
With a glass of wine in her hand, she moves towards the table where the man is sitting.
“Can I sit here?”
“At first he rambled on answering the question. Near his table was a drunkard and often one could hear the rumble with the bartender roaring across, most likely during this regular evening discourse. She gathered that he was biding his time, waiting for the entire rumble to be gone before he took up the last and the most sensitive question. As the sound of the last grin was fading into the distance, he finally said:’ That’s what silence is. It can be conveyed to any listeners, Just these pauses….These wordless moments….When the silence descends and you are in the present….when you became aware of the birds…chirping’ and the pauses grew longer and longer till only the twitter of the birds could be heard in the background and people sat in the total silence.”
She said,” I am unaware of all these things”. He looked as if someone had been fooling him for the last few minutes. Before his face became gloomy, he said,” let’s have another bottle of beer”. And he started to mix the beer with the bottle of coke.” Don’t do that!” she said of a sudden, putting her hands before his eyes.
“What?” She made a gesture with her hand. “That! It’s…its all purple. Don’t! That color really hurts.” ‘But how in the world do you know about the colors?’ He exclaimed, for here was a revelation indeed. ‘Colors as Colors?’ she asked.
‘No. Those colors which you saw just now.’
‘You know as well as I do,’ she laughed, ‘else you wouldn’t have asked that question. They aren’t in the world at all. They are in you when you went so gloomy.’
‘Who told you anything about it?’ He demanded. ‘About the colors? No one. I used to ask what colors were when I was little –In table colors and curtains and the carpets, you see- because some colors hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older that was how I saw people’.
‘All by yourself?’ He repeated. ‘All by myself. There wasn’t anyone else. I only found out afterwards that other people didn’t see the colors.’ She leaned against the table. The glass of wine had drawn nearer. He could see it with the trail of his eye frolicking like squirrel.
‘Now I am sure that you aren’t fooling me’ He went on after a long silence. ‘Goodness! No!’ She supposedly cried, jolted out of his train of thoughts. ‘A person who fools at anyone –unless the person is fooling him too-is a heathen!’
‘I didn’t mean that, of course’. ‘You’d never fool at people, but I thought-I used to think- that perhaps you might fool about them. So now I beg your pardon…….What are you going to fool at?’
He had made no sound, but she knew. She looked at him, her head against the table, long and steadfastly, this woman you could see the naked soul.
‘How interesting,’ she half whispered. ‘How very interesting.’
‘Why, what have I done?’
‘You don’t understand …….and yet you understand about the colors. Don’t you understand?’
She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified and he faced her bewilderedly as she rose. He alone was hopelessly astray there in the dim light. ‘No,’ He said, and shook his head as though the dead eyes could note. ‘Whatever it is I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later-if I come again.’
‘You will come again,’ she answered. ‘You will surely come again’. She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadows.
It was a fact. A woman who knew and understood about the colors could still be useful-more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a pavior through the settling ashes at the secret thrill of it. The rain was falling through the balcony, but she could feel- it was too dark to see-that her work was done. She again leaned against the table, while an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her short moment of pleasure was broken by a sound, sound of a rumble again roaring across. She looked around and could see the glass of wine on the table. The man had already gone.
She leaned forward and listened. There could be no mistake. She closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly. ‘Go on’, she murmured, half aloud. ‘That isn’t the end’,
The bartender was already making another glass of drink.
(Source : Suskera.com)
