It was a rainy evening in the city of New Delhi. The pre-monsoon rains had been a hopeful sign for a prosperous monsoon ahead. I had been looking out of my dorm room’s window for quite some time, waiting for the pouring to halt down to a drizzle. Monsoon always filled my head with seeds of ideas waiting to be grown into stories or poems, and for what seemed like almost eternity (three years), they had been left untouched. This evening felt like a perfect one to pen down those ideas to grow, but I needed a better spot than the minuscule, vintage, and filthy room filled with engineering books. Eventually, the rain paused, and I quickly dumped my pen and notebook in my backpack and headed out. The laptop and the umbrella, though in my sight, were left unbothered.
“Ruskin’s Coffee Shop,” near the college campus, was the place I chose for my resurrection. The cafe was popular for its peaceful ambiance, cheap prices, and the pleasantly unorthodox closing time of 2 am. During the day, it was mostly filled by corporate employees and was in a steady state of commotion. It was only after 9 pm when the cafe was taken over by readers, writers, couples, or anyone in search of peace and privacy away from home.
The cafe was a 20-minute walk from my dorm. Despite the uninterrupted drizzle over my head, I had begun perspiring by the time I reached. The cafe was more silent than usual. There was a young couple at the corner table for four, their table occupied by two cups filled with coffee that probably had been resting there for a while. Engrossed in each other, they were unbothered by the thunder outside or the dying fumes of a hot latte. Another customer was a neatly dressed young man sitting next to the power switch, his laptop plugged in, and his spectacled eyes glued to the screen that shone bright and white in the dimly lit room.
I chose to sit on the barstool with its table against the glass wall, a little further from the entrance but still facing the main road, isolated from other customers and the ordering counter. I placed my writing tools neatly on the table, opened a fresh page, and uncapped my pen, hoping it would start writing itself the way it used to, but it did not. Just like the page, my head was blank too. I capped the pen back after a few minutes and started looking outside in the dark, desperately trying to find something that would help me break the spree.
The clean glimmering road, erratic passing of cars, trees on the sidewalk bowing to the weight of rainwater, or changing pace of rain, nothing was successful in turning the rusty wheels in my head. My mind was headed on a journey of self-doubt and disappointment when I got interrupted. It was one of the staff members who made his way from the counter to my seat and asked with a smile, “Sir, would you like to order something?” I didn’t need anything for my kidney or stomach but my mind. “Yes, get me a cappuccino, please,” I said unwillingly. I turned towards the glass wall. The rain had caught pace, and it was pouring again. I would have to soak myself wet to reach the dorm, but these were the least of my worries at the moment.
It was almost 11; my coffee hadn’t arrived. The fresh page that I had opened with great enthusiasm was vacant, the road was almost empty with cars going much faster and at longer intervals. As my gaze fell across the street, I saw a figure appear from the silver threads of rain. The streetlights revealed the silhouette of a person holding a big black umbrella. The figure drew closer and closer to the cafe, and when it was close enough, inside the courtyard of the cafe, the umbrella was taken down. The cafe entrance lights revealed a female figure and someone I wasn’t a stranger to.
She put her umbrella outside and walked in and sat right next to me. I had seen her a few times in some lectures. People on campus had been very complex to me; there was always some other face than the one you were talking to. She felt more decipherable and hence stood out to me. Her sharp young features and enchanting smile were probably some contributing factors as well.
I had never been able to muster up enough courage to talk to her, but a blank head can’t be shy either, so I asked, “Hey, what brings you here at this hour?”
She replied with a smile, “You probably know the answer.”
“I can barely think of anything right now, but I am curious. Please tell me.”
Her eyes shifted from the road and now looked right at me. “I was waiting for you to come up and say something, but I felt the need to take charge since you weren’t going to.”
“It shows?”
“It does!”
“I should have been more careful,” I simpered.
“Tell me, what have you written so far?” she asked, pointing at the blank page.
“How do you know I wr….”
“I have done my research. Tell me more about your today’s works.”
I was a bit frustrated by my lack of control over the conversation. “This girl knows that I write from I don’t know where, and here I don’t even know her name,” I thought to myself.
“If you know enough, you should probably know that I haven’t written anything in three years.”
“So what? I have heard writers no one becomes a writer eventually, they are one all along.”
The waiter slid the coffee behind me on the table, but I didn’t look at him.
“I am not a writer, maybe then.”
“That is not true.”
“Then why don’t you suggest me something to write about?” I asked, a bit annoyed by now.
“You can write about a girl that you keep throwing your eyes at during lectures.”
I started nodding, and so did she. Our eyes sunk into the other’s, and our lips curled into smirks.
“Such stories don’t fascinate people anymore. The world has an abundance of such.”
“Write for you, not for the world,” her voice softened.
“I can take your word on it, perhaps, but I still don’t have anything. I don’t even know her name.”
Her stool now gyrated in my direction, and she set one of her feet on the ground, ready to pounce.
“As Shakespeare would say, ‘What’s in a name? Explore me, you’ve been waiting too long.'”
Her words were polite but assertive. I was ready to comply, but not before my final question…
“It shows?”
She chose better instruments to answer it this time. Both her feet were off the footrest, and she was now taller than she entered. Her eyes fixated on mine, grew darker and bigger; her breath was melting my face. My ears were deaf to every possible sound that existed in a human world, and my mind to the ideas that suggested any failure of senses; the hands found refuge in the depths of her black entangled vines, and hers on my deserted back. Even from microscopic lengths, her skin showed no marks of error; it was as if she was a newborn. My eyes failed to endure the sight of this unprecedented event and went to rest.
I nonchalantly let all my senses drop down dead, and then my lips felt that sacred touch, or maybe that’s what I thought because my body started to shake, and this force felt more magnificent than the one that had clasped me in its jaws. It was the waiter.
I opened my eyes to the haze of glass, hardwood, a closed notebook, and a middle-aged man in uniform jerking me with all his might. “Sir, it’s time for us to close. PLEASE WAKE UP!” I wasn’t deaf anymore. I didn’t remember closing the notebook and understood what had happened. I paid the troubled man as I glanced at my untouched coffee. The window presented a vista of a world that was glimmering for its triumph over the world above. I turned around to look at the cafe, of which I was now the sole customer, and the man beside me the sole operator.
I collected my tools and left. On my way, I heard sirens at a distance disrupting the silence of the night. Thunders and rains do bring destruction to many, but I was unbothered. My thirst had been quenched, even though it came at the cost of losing a friend.
The Words Of Dumb 