10 PM. Our day has just started. Things don’t look too cheerful; there is a dingy slum, right before our eyes. The street light has a habit of illuminating all the things you don’t want to see, like a child defecating on the kaccha pavement. The auto passes leaving us in the throes of black smoke. The fumes mingle with the fragrance of the instant coffee, hot and tasteless from the machine. R blows smoke into my face No big deal he has been doing it for two whole semesters now.
The whole world can crib about passive smoking but I still feel he is doing more harm to himself than to me. Stretching back and resigned I ask for a drag. Now the sky is above my eyes, the stars twinkle mischievously, sinking into my consciousness. There is no reason to feel complacent, but in a set up like this, can it really be helped? The ambience of the place threatens to lull you to sleep. But the only problem is that you don’t want to sleep. You want to stay awake and listen to M drone on about parallel universes and nirvana. Of course I participate. The conversation has a quality of drifting into no real direction. We all know what we are saying; only we have no idea why we are saying it.
The place is not quiet but it certainly isn’t noisy.
The murmur of dialogue and its content occasionally invade our ears and the feeling of aloneness goes away for a few seconds. But it comes back again, because we want it to. R sometimes looks into space and seems to have gone further in time or something. Then he suddenly looks at me and asks, “what?”
M on the other hand can either kill you with his wit, or if you are not willing to perish so early in life, will lapse into sarcasm directed alternately at you or at the world in general. Anyhow both moods are entertaining and for their crowd pulling value, R and me are inevitably drawn to him. In the last five minutes I have tried to shift my legs and get comfortable at least 20 times, I feel too tired to even be exasperated. The coffee gets cold because I leave it standing for too long. I am accustomed to drinking it that way. Why am I recounting this? Does there have to be a reason for everything? Who was it who said that if you already knew what you wanted to do, what’s the use of doing it? M said it was Picasso. Well it’s nice, whoever said it.
Paradoxically everything is a haze of clarity. A bit like twilight. At any given moment you can transcend and grasp ultimate truths, but you choose not to.
R doesn’t always respond to the two of us. I think sometimes we get on his nerves. Or he just isn’t listening. He is full of stories about Benaras, and the ghats. Makes me want to see the place but right now, there is a row of boxy flats right above us. The windows are all darkened.
Normal people go to bed by such time. They also do not talk about death and tantra and time travel. I have no particular love for the place, the surroundings make me feel uneasy and guilty of being well-off. M has not said anything brilliant for 20 seconds. I ask him if anything is wrong. R has assignments to finish, but he prefers to sit here and plan how to bunk his morning classes.
The two of them together come up with enough excuses for the whole batch. I on the other hand, am brooding, I haven’t called home in three days, they’ll be worried. My primary concern right now is to finish work for Friday’s submission. I have many things to achieve. I have unlimited optimism. Do you think that is foolish? Laziness I believe is an anesthetic, manufactured to temporarily deactivate our minds. Otherwise we would drive ourselves insane by just thinking. Exhaust ourselves by doing.
I am confident that things will fall into place. We are all, the three of us striving towards our individual destinies, though at this point of time, watching us sipping coffee no one would quite agree. However that is not what I meant. My aim was to make a profound comment. About youth, and time, and their ambiguity. Five rupees for my coffee, paid by R and the lethargic numbness of my legs disregarded, we begin to walk. We argue. I cannot remember what about. I kick a stone along. It shoots into the bushes and is lost. I had thought up my profound statement, but it sinks into the recesses of my mind before I could spell it out.
That’s ok, youth has time. The other day M came up with a word I had forgotten I ever knew. Serendipity. The dictionary describes it as ‘interesting and desirous things happening to you by chance.’ This word by the sheer power that it has, catapulted us into a series of discussions regarding chance and what it means to choose. At the end of it, we all agreed that choices are made by us before we make them.
Incidentally, M finds great pleasure in coming up with odd names for even odder people. It is an uncanny gift he has. Once a name is chosen and conveyed, one cannot even perceive that poor devil to have ever had any other. It seems necessary here for me to mention that the names however, far from being rude, are highly creative. It cannot be a sedentary mind that churns out such wonders.
The three of us make up a trine of intellectual misfits, tunes merging and distinct. One end of the street at 2 AM in the morning, recesses into the darkness of the basti. The other reveals our slow march back to our hostel. We get up and cover the distance with slow disdain. The night and our own thoughts crowd the empty spaces rapidly. Youth is our license to amble through time. It is our only excuse.
Amrapali Hazra is a design, art, literature and life enthusiast. Now pursuing a career in design, visual art, and occasional writing, she finally feels she is ready to take the plunge into her first novel. A self-proclaimed philosopher, she ponders history, anthropology, mythology, esoteric and metaphysical questions. She keeps her eyes, ears and mind as open as possible, and hopes for a day when only the connections between human cultures will matter and not the differences.