The locals called that place Dragon. It was said that, very long ago, it had the ubiquitous ‘Café’ attached to its name, like every place that served anything edible in those tree-lined, right-angled streets, no matter what its cuisine was. The town wasn’t in a colonial hangover as much as it was still stone drunk on La belle France.
So they surmised. The Dragon too had been a café once.
It had originally been a self-respecting, wanton-serving Chinese Place. But eventually, as the owner grew older and wearier and too lackadaisical to hire a cook and keep him, it had adapted to the wonders of the two-minute Maggi. It made no secret of it, though. The items on the menu were listed, quite plainly, as the different flavours of the instant noodles.
The name board swayed dangerously when the sea breeze was rough and was chipped in several places. That gave the eponymous green dragon which stood on the name board a very authentic, scaly, dragonish look. It looked quite pleased with itself, almost as if enjoying an inside joke, as it stood there spewing bright red fire with yellow sparks.
On the inside, it had plain, dark brown wooden walls, old-worldly mosaic flooring, with thick, horizontal wooden beams crisscrossing the ceiling, always looking like they were about to choose the next moment to come crashing down. Those had been the combined legacy of the town’s French masters and its native craftsmen. The travel guides liked to describe the place, ‘Terrible food in a terrific ambience’. It offered its patrons some live music every evening, and the local talent, some livelihood. No qualifier was added for the music except ‘live’. It was about the only unpredictable thing in Dragon.
That it was unpretentious made it all the more charming. Like the cool boy in town who seemed to make the weirdest things severely Cool by just being their doer.
It had no clocks.
–
It was to this cafe that she came to play.
She had been in love with a boy named LaxmaneRadjoulou, who was leaving forFrancevery soon. She didn’t know when exactly. Her parents had confiscated her mobile after ‘stumbling’ into words like ‘Deaaar’ and ‘Dorlingg’ in the texts he sent her. She then had de-activated her facebook account in what she liked to call a ‘depressive fit’, but in truth, was more because of the severed internet cable that was the handiwork of her father. She was, to describe in rather dramatic terms, under house arrest. She obsessively practised ‘Distance makes the heart grow fonder’ on her notebooks in curvy script, and doodled multi-coloured hearts. She loved, she was silly, and she loved being silly.
After her initial period of confinement, she rushed to public telephone booths and made frantic calls to his number. And every time, the response unwaveringly requested her to please check the number she had dialed. She fidgeted, twitched, grew madder and puzzled and confused and obsessed over how she could reach him before he actually went Out Of Coverage Area. She grew so desperate that one day, she mustered courage she didn’t know she had and cycled to the high-walled, bougainvillea-lined compound he lived in. She stood there for a while, feeling like an idiot, while the drunks leered at her. Seething, she willed Laxmane to come out of his house and save his girl’s honour in style. Nothing happened, and no one came out. It was then that it first occurred to her that he hadn’t been in touch..maybe because he didn’t want to?
She waited indefinitely, of course. She hoped he would, at the very least, turn up in her campus one day, red rose in tow, telling her how much he’d missed her these months, and that he was very sorry but he had to go toFrancebecause he was a French citizen. She told herself that it didn’t matter, they did not have a future anyway.
She wanted only Closure.
Life had other plans.
He never turned up, nor did he ever contact her again.
Thus ended what she thought was the love of her life – because of a communication gap or simply because he’d lost interest in her, she would never be able to say.
–
Since he’d deserted her without so much as a So Long Thanks For All The Fish, and also because she was already insane, she sought to break up with him within her head. Day after day she stuck darts on his mental image, and after a while, the bull did go blind. But as she drove closer to her target with a steady eye, her world slowly converged upon her and she forgot to converse. The waters around her had dried up and no boat from no island could reach her.
She couldn’t understand the inquisitiveness that surrounded her, masquerading as sympathetic glances. It reminded her of the times her mother used to indicate she’d spilt some chutney on her sleeve just by staring hard at the spot. And as she couldn’t spot any stain on her exterior despite their pointed gazing, she shrugged and went her anguished way.
She soon moved to the Hostel where nobody would notice her moping.
–
When she eventually did come out of it, a deadly calm settled upon her. The inner turmoil, the waves crashing over and over over her mental cliffs ceased one day, and were replaced by a Silence. She didn’t know what to make of it. She couldn’t cry because she’d just gotten out of something terrible, yet she felt this was worse than happiness. Her mind seemed incomplete without those nagging voices telling her how deplorable she was. She was desperate to fill that void. With something. Anything.
But she was quite tired of chasing after human subjects. Looking back, she really couldn’t fathom what she saw in the petulant loafer that was LaxmaneRadjoulou. She had found him mysterious when she first got to know him. Any by extension, she’d thought- smart, moody, nonconformist, and constantly sprouting deep junkyard philosophy. What he’d turned out to be, though, was Stupid. He had been silent and irritable most of the time because he was plain dull and had nothing much to say to her. It was her love, her emotions that mattered, after Everything Was Over.
–
She took to wandering in the streets aimlessly. The Dragon was someplace she knew by sight, but had never visited before. Local girls from well-respected, conservative families had no business entering outlandish cafés, and god forbid, alone. All that was for the Tourists. But the break up had made her reckless to the point of stupidity, and she steadily became adept at cooking up perfectly plausible excuses. Walking into the Dragon seemed like a good idea one evening. She did.
It was a lull hour, between lunch and dinner. She sat picking at her Masala Maggi noodles, listening to a preppy young guy sing about lost love, swaggering ceremoniously on the raised platform with his guitar. Everything about him screamed ‘Artificial’ with an exclamation mark to boot. She tried hard, very hard, to not let the clichéd lyrics and the insipid music get to her nerves. Half an hour later, she’d had enough. She normally would’ve walked away, but something about the fakeness in those songs needled her, and she walked over to the Cashier and told him plainly.
“I know.” He nodded nonchalantly.
And she could think of nothing but a very lame, “Yeah.”
He scrutinized her for a moment. “Do you play?”
“What? No, no..I mean, I know to, but I-”
“Why don’t you come and try out tomorrow, same time? The slot’s free. Anything goes”, he added.
She opened her mouth to insist that she couldn’t, but instead ended up shrugging her shoulders with an “Umm, okay?”
–
She reluctantly dusted out her guitar that night, her mind wandering to the music lessons in her childhood. Her teacher hadn’t liked her particularly, despite her obvious love for the instrument.
“Too free-wheeling”, he used to tell her parents.
They’d sympathized with him, cancelled the lessons (a waste of money!), and had packaged her six-string to a neglected corner of the house. She was too unpredictable, everywhere and in everything. They had her checked for dyslexia and a number of other ‘mental’ disorders. The results, very depressingly, had come back negative. Not knowing what to do, her mother had quit her job and took up Worrying About Her as a hobby instead.
You could defuse bombs with timed fuses, but what do you do with bombs which might not have proper fuses at all? You don’t even know if it’s a threat.
–
The next day around the same time, her almost-broken voice rose and fell in the café, and her fingers seemed to pick the strings in an unfamiliar way. One of the patrons was sobbing. Another came up to her later and told her in a quiet voice, “Your Voice. It’s killing me. Come here again tomorrow. Please.” The request was seconded by the Cashier, who turned out to be the owner of the Dragon. A few weeks later, she was a regular performer in the evenings and when a small group began to gather just to hear her Acoustic Tapping, even the perpetually bored owner had enough sense to offer her what he assumed was Good Money. She accepted, again with a shrug. Deep down, she was reclaiming herself with every new song she wrote. The void was disappearing. She would’ve played even for nothing.
She had the habit of walking over to the tables after she was one with her gig for the day, engaging in small talk with the regular clientele, which consisted mostly of foreigners. They brought their own bottles of liquor, and occasionally, delicacies purchased in some other café that actually cared about gastronomy. Some of them had fled their homelands, and some others were just tourists who’d just stayed on, drunk on the sweet indolence that wafted through the streets.
The Mig-21s came to her through a bearded gentleman who claimed to be holidaying, and who wouldn’t tell her anything about himself except that he had once been a fighter pilot. Since there was an airbase a few miles outside the town, airforce clientele were not a novelty at the café. This man had a queer accent she couldn’t place. He stretched his vowels long but rolled his R’s, and spoke excellent English. Once, she tried to press him for details, and he cut her off saying, “No, no, why don’t you listen to what’s worth listening! Let me tell you more about the Mig-21s, my absolute favourite!”, and went back to the sole topic they’d been discussing for the past 3 weeks.
He would categorically trash any argument she raised about their high crash rates. “Nonsense! Bad spares and bad pilots can turn the best of aircraft into Flying Coffins, or whatever they call it”, he’d say, and mutter to himself, “Not to mention those blasted birds”.
She loved Mig-21s the way it is possible to love trench coats without owning a single one of those. Migs forced people into trenches, and trench coats, though having nothing to do with trenches, have the word ‘trench’ in their name. She loved spotting crazy, meaningless patterns like these.
–
One sad, windy Saturday evening, five months after she’d come to know him, she watched the bearded gentleman getting thrown out of the café. The owner had to physically push him out; it turned out he had an outstanding debt of three months’ worth of evening Maggi. She felt guilty – could she have helped him? But then, his expensive shirts and delicate perfumes hadn’t said anything about his being impoverished. The ‘fighter pilot’ part too had been a lie, she thought, but still couldn’t reconcile her memory to what she knew now. He seemed so knowledgeable about aircraft, and so genuine. She felt cheated, nevertheless, and in that moment realized he had been her first friend, post-catastrophe..again, only to desert her without a word.
She forced herself to concentrate on playing.
That same evening, an hour later, she looked up from her vantage playing area to find a familiar, brooding young man enter the café. It took her only a moment to register LaxmaneRadjoulou and a girl who seemed to be all over him. She left the stage abruptly, and hid near the kitchens from where she could get a look without being recognized. But they hadn’t noticed her; they were too busy playing footsie. Too many questions cropped up in her mind, and not one of them had a happy answer. Reeling from shock and gagging with disgust, she told the owner she was feeling sick and left before she could process what she had just seen. She didn’t want a scene at her workplace.
–
“You’re a coward. You’re a fucking, fucking spineless coward”, she repeated to herself, in the half-light of her room.
But a new voice that had arisen over the last few months argued back. That people were entitled to be fucking cowards at times. That it was, as the popular phrase went, Okay. That she deserved some quiet, some break. She decided not to go the next day.
She couldn’t reach the owner over phone, but that wasn’t very unusual. She’d go by the café sometime in the morning and tell him in person. She deliberately shut her mind to everything else and listened to insanely loud music for the rest of the day.
–
Sunday morning brought with it some Calm. Maybe it was the coffee.
She glanced at the headlines of the dailies hanging on the bunker shops on the way.
‘Fighter plane crashes in town café: 5 killed’
Below it ran an extensive story about how Murad Hakob, a disgraced Armenian pilot had broken into the airbase the previous afternoon, stolen a Mig-21 aircraft and flown it around before losing control. The plane had crashed in the heart of the town, near the famous local café called Dragon. Three people had been dining there at that time, besides the owner, and none of them had survived. The pilot too had died in the crash, and was suspected to have been drunk at that time. The police were investigating the causes behind the accident.
Almost instantly, she knew it was the bearded gentleman who’d done it. Just the way she knew she’d find LaxmaneRadjoulou’s name in the list of Deceased. She learnt the name of his companion, spelt in the same, twisted French way as his, from the newspaper.
Her composure threatened to collapse any moment. She bought the newspaper and cycled on like nothing happened, trying hard to de-numb her senses.
By habit, she ended up at the place where the Dragon once stood. It felt surreal, and the implications, inconceivable. She simply didn’t know what to think, and if she should think at all. She stood near the smoking wreckage for a long time, staring into space, until a policeman came around chased her away.
–
In the early hours of the next morning, when she finally gave up trying to understand what had happened and why, not to mention the nagging How, the last impertinent thought turned itself over in her mind and made her smile: What had it been, Bad Spares or the Blasted Birds?
p.s: My entry for an inter-college short story contest. A story had to be written with these elements – Guitar, Mig-21, and Dragon. <hat-tip> to J for the invite and endless rant-listening, and to S for the biased, loving beta.
