Of wiling away a Saturday afternoon...

I ate lunch at a Thai joint - rice and pork. Spicy and pretty decent.

Long after finishing lunch, I continued to sit at my table by the street and watch the crowd. At a table across me was a middle aged African couple. The man sipped on a beer, thoughtful and lost, the ladies drink stood untouched as she doodled with her fork. For the entire duration of lunch, they didn’t speak a word - not when they were perusing the menu card, not when the drinks arrived and they took their first refreshing sip, not while they heaped food onto their forks.

At another table was a young German couple very obviously lovers, eating a late lunch. They chatted, smiled and laughed heartily, their hands on the table, their fingers intertwined on the ochre and white mat. They clinked glasses when the drinks arrived. All seemed fine with their world.

Out on the street, a lady walked past with her toddler in tow. The child was wearing an oversized blue parka and had a lollypop stuck in one corner of its mouth, which it adroitly rolled to the other corner, relishing every bit of the sweetness.

A tourist ambled past, pouring over a city map, probably looking for directions to the station like I used to a month and a half back. Of his own accord the tourist was heading in the right direction, the station was a ten minutes walk dead straight. I wanted to go out and assure him that he was indeed going the right way, but then I desisted, pouring over maps and then finally arriving at the desired place albeit after a couple of detours, has its own little sense of satisfaction.

I looked at the German couple again, their spoons dipped in bowls of soup. How does the western palette react to lemon grass?

I had entered the restaurant at about half past two, and now it was nearly half past four. I ordered another coke to help wile away time. The joint is run by a diminutive five foot nothing Thai girl, she always has this warm wide half embarrassed smile on her face. Sometimes when there are only a few patrons around, we sit and chat - I inquire how her establishment is doing? Her little rice-paper forehead uncharacteristically creased with worry lines, she explains to me at great length, the vagaries of the tourist off-season.

This restaurant is on Graf Adolf Strasse, the trams run through the center of street, very much like Calcutta. The trams trundle along, stopping momentarily for passengers to step off and a fresh new lot to step on, a melee of red tops, white shirts, faded blue jeans and black skirts. Every place has a story and divulges bits and pieces of it to people who happen to occasion it. And the people like amateurs duped and cajoled into doing a blink-and-miss walk on role, just add to the story.

I thought of all the places I have visited and the scraps which I have brought back. I remember our trip to Thekkadi National Park, during a winter vacation in college. I sat under a tree on the periphery of the park, to shield myself from the rain. The rain fell in strong intense bursts and I had sat their looking at it, my head heavy with cheap liquor. Then finally the rain stopped and I lit a cigarette, rummaged through my bag to switch on my disc man. The headphones buzzed with the mellifluous Frank Sinatra singing ‘Then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like … I love you’. The man sang and I watched the raindrops run down the leaves and aggregate the slushy puddles on the ground.

I know I stand in line, until you think you have the time
To spend an evening with me
And if we go someplace to dance, I know that there’s a chance
You won’t be leaving with me

And afterwards we drop into a quiet little place
And have a drink or two
And then I go and spoil it all, by saying something stupid
Like: "I love you"

The song ended and the next track ‘Moon River’ started almost immediately, but ‘Then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like … I love you’ continued to buzz in my head.

I can see it in your eyes, that you despise the same old lies
You heard the night before
And though it’s just a line to you, for me it’s true
It never seemed so right before

I practice every day to find some clever lines to say
To make the meaning come through
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late
And I’m alone with you

There was a deathly silence around the place, the only sound my ears could here was that of the burning cigarette, the slow sound of fire as it devoured paper and tobacco turning it to smoke. The mind though still was stuck on,

The time is right your perfume fills my head, the stars get red
And oh the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all,
by saying something stupid Like: "I love you"

I knew then that this moment, under a tree with rivulets of rain water making an awry mesh on the drenched earth, would be something I would remember for a long while hence. It felt surreal, as I caught myself making my own memories.

As all that came back to me, there was a sense of joy and satisfaction that the promise that the moment held - the promise that it would be a memory which would last a life time, had held true. Often when out on vacations, I have come across an exquisitely beautiful place and rushed to capture it with my camera and taken an extra snap just for safety. Back home when the developed pictures were delivered by the studio, I used to excitedly remove them from their blue envelope, flipping through the lot trying to locate ‘that’ exquisite photograph. But it left me with an odd sense of dejection, not because ‘that’ picture wasn’t there - but because it had not captured the exquisite moment of beauty which it was meant to embellish. The photograph which had held so much promise, now in my hand felt like a postcard from someone else’s journey, an image one views with an uninvolved and dispassionate glance.

Maybe...I did spoil it all, by saying something stupid like 'I love you'?
Nah but seriously - I did ...did'nt I?

Labels: Fiction