Anika Labiba Ahmed
Now standing on the edge of eternity, life seemed to Neel like a bittersweet montage in greyscale. He remembered the Nor’wester winds that brought down the mangoes to the rich, moist ground, the first time he saw a corpse– it was his grandfather’s, his first kiss with a precocious girl in his neighborhood, mom’s khichuri on a Monsoon afternoon, the first cigarette on a winter day, the time his little heart almost gave up running away from home as fast as he could as if to escape the ravages of time.
He tries to rekindle these emotions but in vain. Life seems to him dreary, wearisome, and lack-lustre. The hunger pangs of his rebellious youth after a friendly football match were replaced by perpetual ennui and paralysis. He had tried to fill the void with music, food, people, books but the abyss that dwells within himself was still as empty as the time when his girlfriend, cheeks red with passion, screamed and yelled just to get a rise out of him.
Sweet Samsara! I should not have hurt you like that. I should have faked being alive for my family. I should not have spent so much time basking in the selfish pleasures and self-indulgences of depression.
Cold black treacle courses through his veins till he could almost feel it on the tip of his fingers. Almost, but not quite.
Now, standing on the ledge on his rooftop, Neel looks down at the city that he could never love. A labyrinthine display of concrete slabs that could never love him. Now, in the dead of the night, there is unperturbed silence. His focus narrows down to a curious, shabby tea stall that he had not noticed before. It is 2 am and yet the owner serves an earthy cup of sugary milk tea to a man in shorts and a dirty white undershirt. They struck up a conversation that Neel could not hear even in the dead silence of the night.
“What on earth could they be talking about?” Neel notices a half-chuckle. Or was it a scoff? What mystery! What dread of the heart could account for such conversation at such an ungodly hour? The customer lights up a cigarette using a lighter hanging by a thread from the roof of the stall. Both hands occupied, the man shifts his weight to the other leg, talking most animatedly in overwhelming silence.
Above them a cluster of dark clouds floats westward, exposing a hesitant crescent moon. The carefree customer looked up to see the moon and Neel quickly stepped back down just in time so as not to be seen.
Neel feels a flurry in his heart. The tingling sensation one feels in the gut when on a roller coaster. He finds himself downstairs and then out on the side of the street as if driven by some unknown force. Possessed, he approaches the tea stall and, by some divine intervention, says to the customer, “What are you talking about?”
A smile of politeness and deep understanding, a smile of acknowledgment, and camaraderie appears on the customer’s face.
“A cup of tea for my brother here”, said the customer in shorts.