Tea & The Sky

Dear Mani,

Though there is no point in writing letters anymore, I just didn’t know what to do with the irrepressible temptation to do so tonight. It’s been quite a dull day, all throughout the clouds have stayed overhead, the rain teasing, without any wind. The sort of day that passes without making you realize that it has. The sort of day you love and hate for the same reason. And strangely, because I don’t know why, the desire to talk to you on such days becomes practically irresistible, even if it’s only one way, only like this.

Sometimes, on such days, when I lie on the bed in the afternoon, watching the white of the ceiling above, the blankness gives way to images and memories. Images in the form of memory. Memory in the form of images. And almost always, on such days, they are of you, and one other thing.

I see the both of us, like an approaching stranger would, sitting at the chai wala near the government school, the same which gave the tea in long, over-sized cups, more suitable for beer, which always made you feel that you were only being given half of what you paid for. Do you remember?

Maybe you don’t. It’s been a long time anyway. But regardless, the image of us at that joint remains fresh in my mind, and comes again and again on such slow, uneventful afternoons.

Why, I don’t know. I’m not sure why I even remember it so vividly. Does it bring me comfort? Pain? Ache? I have no answer. Maybe it is the feeling of timelessness we felt in our meetings there that fascinates me, the joint but unspoken feel of being suspended in time, as if the moment before and the moment after didn’t exist, as if the world was restricted to the few square metres of the shop, as if the world beyond was only a fantasy of our minds, as if anything we did before and after didn’t matter, as if this was what we were born to do, to sip tea beneath an empty sky and talk about anything outside the realm of consequence. How limitless and ecstatic would it be if our lives got frozen there, beside the chai wala, with the cups of tea in our hands, all the innumerable possibilities of our lives reduced to a beautiful, complete zero!

Consequence, consequence. How powerful and dangerous can that be! Yes, maybe it was the absence of this in our meetings and conversations that still make me remember it.

Do you remember? Maybe you don’t. It’s been a long time anyway. The shop doesn’t stand there anymore. The school authorities had it removed on the grounds that many students used it to bunk classes and have a smoke. But it is there in my mind, exactly as it was then - unscathed. As it will always be, as it will always come, on such days, which, in their stillness and completeness are quaintly similar to it,

Good Bye,
Manu.