The little drop of water on the green leaves of the jasmine plant is gradually coming down. Clinging close to its stem, it descends towards the pot’s mud and disappears. The little drops of rain are slowly coming down from the window glass and getting merged with the other raindrops around. The guy in the emerald-coloured t-shirt is talking to someone over the call, and a couple are clicking pictures standing near the fence of the rooftop café. The café staff are shouting the coupon numbers, and a strange silence prevails over my empty table. The guy coming close to me said, “Bhaiya, aapka order (brother, your order).” He handed me over a plate of bhelpuri with a cutting filter coffee.
This rooftop café is one of my favourite. On days happy and on days not-so-happy, this café has always been an easy escape. The lush green around and the spacious rooftop is like an open sky of enormous expansion. It calls you to be free; it calls you to think between what is there and what has been lost. It is almost like recalling how you gradually saw this café taking shape, each day making itself into what it is now. However, beyond these apparent euphonic entitlements, the café often calls me to be a stone thief. The small pebbles put at the rooftop gardens and below the concrete poles are my favourite. Every time I go to the café alone, I steal one of the pebbles and keep it in a box. They are my bridge, a bridge from a dream to a possible reality. They are my stone of solitude! Sitting ‘alone’ in the café, I opened my bag and put a few of those pebbles on my laptop.
When the engulfing solitude passed over my highly contagious bhelpuri plate and a strange look from the side-by table passed over my empty face, I realised what those stones stood for. They are the moments captured and stored. They are the journey of a solitary Ph.D. life. They are testimonies to all those unsaid words, unexpressed anger, or maybe unexpressed love. A moment of solitude is a moment of self-introspection. In this rapidly growing global culture and the engulfing popping up of social media, we hardly try to be alone. But there always remains a small space for everyone, a happy escape route, where we all try to hide ourselves. Hide ourselves only to encounter it in solitude, encounter it alone. As I opened up my bag and started looking at the pebbles together, they were my story, lying there in pieces. They started talking to themselves. They started speaking of all those days, nights, and situations that I went through and are still surpassing.
The pebbles talk about the campus, talk about the acceptance of every solitary soul in this large green vastness and all-stretching lake, kissing the horizon. They talk about all those solitary walks through the lakeside, the early morning cycling, the late night walks, the nights spent in SAC in self-talk. The pebbles are me talking to myself, a younger self of mine who got lost in the lanes of this campus to give passage to a different self, possibly a self who finds peace in solitude.
Keeping my plate in the basin space when I was leaving the café, I opened my bag and put back all those pebbles from where I took them. The downward lift from the third floor caught me with an all-encompassing void, yet an enormous reality: to be encountered, to be accepted, and to be accomplished in silence. I left a part of myself there with the pebbles, which looked back at me with an open emptiness and a host of questions, ever unanswered. I left a part of myself there to be continued…till the eternal silence.
P.S. Bhelpuri was decent, not anywhere near mosla-muri! You can try the chocolate brownies though!
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