Contents

1. 2. Man in Café Milan

Man in Café

1

Today is Sunday and a plausible day in the calendar for me at the cafe. Recently I had a lot of angst about how I spend my time. Attempting to get back all of it from unfruitful works. Cash had never been my principle vexation. Except at a specific time of life, when I appallingly felt its absence and thought how I could have shared some of it for society's beneficial uses. But my thoughts only remained on paper. I did not bulk up any amount of mega wealth to satisfy all these dreams. At times when I was poor, I tried to console myself with the idea that health is wealth (as in those times of diseases in history) and did not feel miserable in this regard. But only as time passed, I realized that some works do not elevate my soul and are not worthy of pursuit during my stay here, which again is a brief period… Today another intriguing thing occurred toward the beginning of the day when I was leaving the bistro. That morning, first I went to an expensive one and in the wake of seeing the menu, requested an espresso since I was there just to be away from my routine of the week. And also, it guaranteed more moments to muse upon certain ball games where my presence is imperative.

At the point when I left the restaurant, a little girl of nine or ten moved toward me and she focused on the fruit vendor and requested a taste of it and I obliged. And I was buying this for her when her little sister came and needed one for her too. The seller was not hepped up to give these things to them, still, they were given, and he didn't take the full price, however, reduced some cash, and started recounting that these youngsters are not on the right path. Without doubt that is a devious perception and who are we to pass such a judgment on these poor kids who are already carrying on with an existence of indigence. They were living in lanes and a good ways off, one could see their mother. This is where we are to refrain from verbalism yet do something that will not diminish the staidness of the scene. Then again your awful wishers -anyway though you are a peaceful joe, you have a few such on the planet-will make you interminably muffled on all such spells. Yes, you know the entire saga.

Then I went to this historic cafe, a fine edifice jutting into the sidewalks, with prominent pillars of azure blue and pink, and amber coloured glass panes and leaf motifs on primal walls ,a few hundred yards away from city enceinte. Two hundred years might have passed since its birth, and once it was the château of the gentry and later converted to a garrison and then a cafe. Old honchos gave way to new ones. The cafe was thronged by silk-stockings and the au courant and mixed populace lending it cosmopolitan aureole… It was still morning and the sun was young and the guests went to and fro, some getting down from limousines and others leaving the quarter. Here in this swank bistro on that December morning, I met the old gentleman, quiet and doddery in demeanour.

He might have been in his late sixties, with hair partly white and partly cinereous. He sat in the bistro for an hour or more languishing and now and then, fiddling the little cigarette lighter he kept in his palm. He carried a Dobermann of rare Isabella fawn hue with him. He grinned at the watchman and attempted to enter decisively because it was where pooches were permitted entry. At that point, the gatekeeper objected and so did the administrator and there was a tussle between the portcullis and the counter. The supervisor argued that a significant number of visitors were kids underneath the age ten and the Dobermann might scare them. And the supervisor's words prevailed. This was the moment he chose to sit opposite me. I gave him a respectful smile as he seemed to be quite older than me. Though he smiled back, it was a reluctant one, and it seemed he was preoccupied in some serious thoughts. He wore light blue shirts with a wool chesterfield. The cargo pants were beige and démodé. Part of his teeth was visible in the frontal segment of the face. He had no portable stick though once in a while he looked in need of that. Later, alone looking at the empty seat he was in, I checked closer the scale of the jumbled emotions I went through while he was staying there. Then he left and the seat was vacant. I thought it was better when he remained there. Something huge went missing when he left that seat. That assumption of absence tarried with me on a few shots for the rest of the day. Amidst get-togethers varied and vain. I reminisced I gained something very distinct but later brushed it off as a bunch of nonsense.

When I went there the second time, the café was almost full. It was noon. As I had developed some presynaptic symptoms, I had been on two days leave and today felt fairly fine. It was, in fact, a peak time in the bistro, and I was searching for a seat and found a chair unoccupied in the central portion of the hall. When I looked opposite, I found that it was him. The old man with Doberman. He now smiled warmly. Over breakfast, we talked as if we were friends for some time. He reeled off the story of an inconceivable man that he had been in the past as his snappy alliances testified. Scorned in workplaces with a rum ire that ripped many a chord of good relations. During the conversation, he smirked possibly to himself or the wide vacuum between the dawn-tinted dividers and seemed to summon up succour to let loose the next few driblets. He squandered his stock in wagering games and was thrown out of the house. His son had already left when at college and has not been traceable since then. He had two more espoused girls but after the wedlock, none of them was fair enough to bestow him some mercy. He lived in a lean-to next to the main drive with the pet quadruped.Paltry sums he got out of odd tasks, a security duty or carpenter’s job which he knew. At times he drew with colour chalks on pavements, a pleasant landscape or a popular figure and collected his money in a towel. Earlier I had

seen some street artists in my town and had wondered what their past would have been, but now, I got an inkling of that issue. These things are among the secret folios of life that are hidden from us for some time or at times forever. My presence, he said, was a decent boost to him, though he would prefer to be alone. I wanted to help him with a passable amount because that week was also a fortuitous one in my calendar as I was clearing away some of my debts by selling a part of my house. The deed was executed months ago, but the first part of the deal came to my account only a fortnight ago. I asked him about his wife and he said she felt unsafe with him in his financial mayhem and is with the daughters. And he told me with a genuine feeling of sadness that though they were willing to help him, their spouses are totally against it. Let the old spendthrift suffer. Only then the goose will learn. One of them even mentioned a very bad jargon in the vocabulary in his presence. The funny part was that he was that fellow's tutor in the tenth class. So Caliban can come from all parts of the earth at all times.��

2

It was past the ides of February that I visited the café again. He was there. He said that his mother was of Romanian blood and his father was Indian. He studied in Paris. His mother was a Freemason and had her parent lodge in London. He did odd jobs after he had lost his regular job as the administrator of a prestigious institution, and after the school bus tragedy, he lost major jobs permanently, as some sources reported that he was the chief culprit in that incident that took away many innocent lives. After the incident, he had bouts of depression but on another personal side, lost his connection for good ones forever and was henceforth doing quaint jobs. In the past three years, the Dobermann was his sole companion and he told me that dog is a special animal, a very grateful brute and he is happy that his love for a living being is reciprocated immediately. We human beings, he said, do not express love from the heart, because we are more worried about the image we create before others than actually expressing it. He had for that reason liked certain types of women in his life who are pellucid and expressive in their emotional lives. A false emotional life, he argued takes away the true joy of life forever and joy is an integral part of our being… That day, we were occupying the window chairs and the panes were wet in the morning drizzle and the air carried the smell of fresh bitumen on the dragways. Outside at a distance were manifest mighty stretches of silver poplars of heart-shaped and coarsely toothed leaves atremble in the wind. I asked him about his original home and he replied that his father kicked off when he was a small boy and he was brought up by his mother and aunts. They had a house near the Dacian citadels, and he left the country when his mother died. He was educated by his stepfather and he studied art in Paris and when his stepfather pegged out in the Second World War, he skived all connections with the immediate chain of relatives and travelled from city to city, country to country. The next ten years, he said, were the happiest in his whole life, and when he said that, a drop of tear touched the rim of his eyelashes. He claimed that his forefathers were Transylvanian Saxons and played a decisive role in the city’s development, but usually, I don’t take these genealogy tales very seriously because in my place every other household has written genealogy books, which contained only wrong historical data just to please those coming generations making them smug and dorky. He asked what I am into and I said, I am an aide to a mathematician who is doing some