an existential crisis

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...