Nimesh Bastola
Whenever he listens to contemporary alternative indie songs—those Nepali tracks that teenagers often enjoy, like the music of Puran Rai, Tribal Rain, The Elements, Sajjan Raj Vaidya, Sushant KC, and others—he remembers her intensely.
That day, while sitting in a café, a song playing in the background struck him. It was Puran Rai’s ‘Sparsha Sangeet’. He felt he might outburst into tears anytime. He was there intended to write. For months, he had been consumed by melancholy, and he thought that publishing his new article might help him overcome it. He was writing there on the strangeness of being human or complexity of human mind. But when he heard that song, misery engulfed him.
After some time, as he tried to refocus on his writing, another song played—John Rai’s Hawa Jastai. As soon as he heard it, he realized his eyes were already filled with tears. Luckily, he had worn black sunglasses that day, which concealed his weakness behind the dark lenses.
He ordered another double-shot black coffee and tried to forget her and made his mind to complete his ongoing writing, about the strangeness of human mind or strangeness of a human or something like that. He lost his way but he was sure that where he had stepped in. He had lost his way on her, on her memory which was so blissful and discomforting all at once. He was intended to write about the strangeness that a human being bears in his living but he lost himself in the strange thoughts erupted by the memory of her.
When the coffee arrived, he tried to stir his emotions into it, hoping to get intoxicated more. The weather outside was gloomy and the sky was dark similar to his feelings. The melancholic background music, black and bitter coffee, the gloomy and dark weather, his vulnerable eyes behind the dark sunglasses and her predator like memory all intoxicated him at once. But he felt nice to be intoxicated in all these things, being mixed up with every melancholy. Most of all, he enjoyed to be intoxicated by the memory of her, even he suffered by that.
After some while the heavy rain poured over his surrounding making matters more desolate. The rain started wetting the side of the table where he sat, soaking his Hemingway book and his notebook. A barista came over and asked him to move so they could pull the table away from the rain. He moved inside, under the golden chandeliers, away from the darkness but his mind was still captured by the unmovable darkness.
He ordered another coffee. The rain outside was pouring heavily more and more. He drank his third coffee sitting in a same café over and over. Once finishing his coffee, he noticed that rain had stopped. He gathered his things and stepped outside and was surprised to see that the dusk had already hovered all over the space. He felt he needed to move. He paid hastily and got mixed with pedestrian into the wet street. The city streets were bathed in the yellow glow of the streetlights.
As he walked, he encountered three boys. One of them asked him in Hindi for directions to the highway. He told he too was moving down there. They walked together for a while and he noticed something like cigarettes inside a plastic bag which one of the boys was carrying in his hands. When the boy mentioned they were cigarettes, something stirred inside him. He was so interested to hold cigarette on his mouth, though he hadn’t touched a cigarette in four years. He had never been a regular smoker, nor had he ever been drawn to the taste of smoke. But as an aspiring writer, he believed that holding a cigarette while writing somehow inspired him. And that had worked for him in the difficulties when he had not been able to produce words. He always kept a cigarette in case of emergency. Of course, those moments were emergency for him when his thoughts got stuck and blocked somewhere inside his mind.
That day he dared to smoke with those strange boys, but his own cigarette. He put on his black sunglasses, even in the dark, and puffed the smoke in his clumsy way. He looked quite handsome as the white smoke curled around his face. It made him feel good. He lost himself in the smoke and forgot everything for a moment.
He took a bus for his home and had a seat. As the bus started to move, he glanced out the window and was stunned. For a moment he could not believe his eyes. He saw what had occupied his thoughts for hours that day. His eyes had glimpsed a girl who was just akin to her. He had seen that girl merely from her back. But even from her back he did not need much time to discern that she was a wrong girl. His eyes got him ghosted without any prior preparation. Unpleasantly, he found himself thinking of her again. He tried to shift his focus to anything else. Then, a familiar discomfort in his stomach returned—the same upset he always felt after smoking. He mumbled under his breath, “So I hate smoking. I wish I could hate many more things.”
