A kilometer down from my college was this 24x7 teashop, catering to Truckers mostly. It overlooked a bus-stand, a STD booth, a building with a music store on the ground floor and a cyber café on the first floor.

This guy called Kareem bhai, a Hydrabadi, ran the shop. His station a raised platform, on which stood this large copper thing, most close to a boiler, reduced manifold in size. It was always on the boil, and had two spouts one for water and the other for milk. Its Indian-ness was unmistakable.

It had a wooden bench stretched out in front of it. I used to often go there in the evenings. It was a lovely perch from which to watch the din and bustle of a busy crossing. Buses with loud blaring horns tumbled in like beaten up jalopies. People were everywhere, women with shopping bags, men with attaches, and students with a textbook. And there I was with my Coffee on the bench, under Kareem bhai’s nose.

There was an odd sense of involvement and abstraction, all at once. I was part of the whole system, the bellowing automobile exhaust, the cries of a vendor selling an evening daily, the oppressive heat, and the warmth of my coffee rising out of the Styrofoam cup. Yet in a sense, there was abstraction, like watching sport from the stands. I was insulated, the discussions around where in a language I didn’t know, and the headlines in the newspaper I couldn’t read.

I looked across the buses and the people, the noise and the smoke, towards the sky stretched beyond it. A telecommunication tower rose into the sky, and behind all of that was the sun. A citrine disc now an oblate spheroid, drops of yellow citrus weakly squeezed from it dissipated into the murkiness, each drop coalescing with the sky to announce the curtain fall of a stage show.