The café had a distinct appeal of its own , with a very strange name that it possessed . It was called something like hubros or leebros . The
word might have had taken the fancy of the cafe's owner who came up with it while he
was watching a glamorous commercial or him being a sport fanatic who
thought the name was too cool for
school.
Its interior was made
to look every bit glamorous. An array of cheap bouquets was laid on each table,
the kind of bouquets that you found on a Sunday haat or Thursday haat in your
very own local market. The three regions of wall that faced each other had
three distinct colour of its own, a mossy cheap paint that could give you a
high five in return if you intended to give the wall a one.
The walls were hung with bizarre pictures some discoloured
and dillusioned however, the picture that caught my fancy was the one that said
“free haircut and hair colour”, they wanted volunteers to master their skill
upon in other words scapegoats to prey upon.
The café was empty when rooman entered inside except for a
rad looking man sitting on one corner chatting on phone endlessly, the man was
quite synonymic to the café and its neighbourhood.
He listlessly chatted with his girlfriend calling her names
like “gold-digger” and his presumably “gold digger “ girlfriend giving him
threats to slit her wrist and the poor guy obnoxiously stating that she may
slit if she wants but that she shouldn’t engrave his name upon her.
It was one of those cafes that immediately made you feel so
comfortable yet at the same time disturbingly uncomfortable. Shooing away the
irrational doubts rooman sat in another corner of the cafe trying to make herself
comfortable and lit herself a cigarette.
In this moment thoughts began to flourish one after the other, it was indeed a different
place to be. It wasn’t every day that you chanced upon a neighbourhood such as
this. Legends had it pimps and peddlers flourished in the adjacent building .
she looked around and questioned the normalcy that existed here just like it
existed everywhere else.
So many thoughts calloused upon the raw mind, she could have
easily been the one to discard the existence of the place but if she had then
she wouldn’t have had come here at all and since she was already there she
contemplated on its surrounding and scrutinised every bit of it .
As she sat there scrutinising the details an existential
crisis sieged upon her. She scowled at herself for not letting herself sway in
the heats of the moment. She could have easily given herself and sunk in the
moment and lived that very moment for a
lifetime but external barriers and her own class distinction that she had
created in her head surfaced through. She couldn’t blame herself for it, could
she?
In her mind she thought about the three things that she
could do sitting in that café.
Firstly, she could
have cursed herself on ever visiting that place and swear to never return
again. Secondly, like a liberal intellectual of the era she could have made
peace with it and chilled for a while returning home only to tell her friends
how dope the café was and they should totally visit it next time together with their
fancy Dslr’s making a movie on the hookers and their pimps that flourished around and the gender issues that concerned
them. Thirdly, and most importantly rooman thought about how she could have
absolutely owned the moment and lived it for the sheer delight of those tacky
flowers, shady paintings and the warm talkative hostess who ordered tea and
cigarettes for her exclusively although they weren’t a part of the cafes menu
Humans have been living a life that is laid out for them and
its very rare that they tend to look beneath or above the surface of it all.
The good , bad and great is already decided for what may come.
to be contd...
