utsav
Part 1.
The cappuccino is cold, and there’s mold on the ceiling where the plants dangle from blown glass vials. India has many flavors tucked into the extremes. Like the textured carpets, the woman with the gold nosepiece weaves her stories into loose sonnets, leaving threads dangling from the edges.
The girl has not had a chai during this excursion—the man across from her orders a dish of biryani with naan. Six cows stroll through the garden, and their dung piles tease the flies. Soon, the sun will be too high, and the scent of chicken grease makes her stomach coil and contract. The girl moves to a smaller table indoors, choosing a corner to sit and read.
It’s a day for navel-gazing, her friend whispers into the phone. How long have you been vegan?
Between bites of her beetroot sandwich, the girl watches the red spiders climb the terracotta walls. A trip plays checkers beside her. The two women wear sarees with silver paint pressed between their brows. One is from Brazil; the other is from New Delhi. The man keeps his head down, intent on the precision of their game.
Remember breakfast at the coffee table with the small ceramic dishes for our berries and oats?
Don’t spend your wishes to turn back time.
At the heart of every problem, there is the genesis of truth. The ache releases stagnant energy. Acid in the blood cells: transformation hurts.
Is there Kirtan? Why is it so loud? Her friend says into the receiver.
The only law worth living is contained in the spiral. Shells. Fossils. Filaments of the imagination.
The girl waits in the long line to order a blueberry smoothie. She wanted something circular in her body. The craving to be whole is all-consuming.
It’s a playlist, she says to her friend between sips on the paper straw. She has to drink fast, or the straw will become a pulpy mush in her mouth.
Oh, was all her friend said. She was flossing her teeth, and the syllable came out wrinkled and flat.
Hindu, French, Italian, and English. The cafe is sprinkled with geography. The girls from the UK look American with their crop tops and denim shorts. Their accents betray them, and they sit in a circle, sharing bites of vegan raspberry cake. The stone pathway is torn up, and mounds of dirt scatter dust across their bare legs.
The cakes must taste like dust, the girl thinks to herself, watching them lick the dairy-free icing from their spoons.
How do you decide when it’s time to leave? There is never enough space to do what must be done. The heat distorts her intention.
Press no Monaco: South Island cats sleep with their eyes closed.
She writes to pass the afternoon. You must lose yourself entirely in a task to find what you did not know to look for. The discovery process is like digging a hole in clay. Painful and prolonged. Everything is made easier when you go with the flow.
The girl had wanted to concretize her plans! Organize and itemize, and establish a method for her arrival! The day was doomed at dawn. The power went out for a quarter-hour, and minute by minute, she felt the chaos seep into her day.
Control was a contrite fiend that kept asking for what you could never give.
Is it greedy to want to taste every inch of life? The Ayurvedic Doctress told the girl to eat a spoonful of ghee in the morning to settle her stomach. Her guts rolled and boiled.
To learn is to develop one’s sensitivity. To learn is to understand how to respond to problems with wit, humor, and creativity. To learn is to engage the greater nexus of things with an attitude of spontaneity.
The girl orders a second cappuccino and moves to a seat by the window, where a gentle breeze unfurls her brow.
Part 2.
The man across from the girl did not move his dishes when she sat down.
Rude, she thought to herself, terribly inconsiderate.
It was nearly noon, and the cafe was so full the line wrapped around the palm tree on the terrace. Monkeys shook the branches and held out their palms for some bread. The tourists were told not to feed them. Or perhaps it was to feed them. The rules were inconsistent as the power. The girl was used to bathing in the dark and would sit on the cold tiled floors to wash her feet before bed. They were always filthy, blackened with soot and sand.
She would have moved her belongings to make room for another person if she held the main seat of the table. This man had a pink shirt and a black ball cap and was reading a book in Turkish. He had dark eyes and a slim build.
The girl sat down and nudged his fork a little to the side. He’d ordered the chocolate banana pancakes—a sweet dish. The girl preferred savory.
It wasn’t an hour later that the bustle died down, and three tables opened up. The girl sat across from the man who’d finished his coffee, pancakes, and reading. A mantra for Ganesha played on the overhead speakers. The girl stuck her feet in a shaft of sunlight and wriggled her toes. It's interesting how one subtle environmental shift can create such calamity! She was too hot and tucked her toes under her bottom.
How do you know what path to choose? She wanted to lean across the table and ask the man how he decided to be here, in this little cafe, in October. There are too many things to consider and not enough things to forget. The girl had four bags to transport from the apartment to the plane and was suffocating herself with the silly idea of getting rid of a few more things.
How do you decide what to let go?
It is not hard if you connect to your heart.
If her heart were a song, it would be a tambourine slapped against a bare thigh. The leg belongs to a woman with red curly hair with tattoos on her chest. The tambourine is yellow with a deerskin cover.
The girl rises to order her friend a cherry scone for takeaway. She folded the crinkly wrapper three times over and placed it in her purse. The man across the table watches her. It is the only time he looks in her direction. Perhaps he thinks the noise is disruptive.
Good-heartedness does not reach many prisons.
The girl's coffee is cold when she takes the final few sips. It reminds her of the Turkish tea she used to drink with him. She’d speak with her hands, and he’d watch her and listen, sipping slowly. When it was his turn to speak, she’d turn her whole body in his direction, hands on her lap. She picked at her nails when she was nervous. He noticed and would take his small palms in his and squeeze.
He didn’t do it on their final day. She wrung out her pink slip dress when she had no nails left to pick-pick-pick, and her tea was cold. She drank it alone after he left.
A prisoner to her fantasy, she made herself sick by overthinking.
The man leaves so the table has more space. The girl extended her legs to his side of the bench to spread her toes in the sunshine spilling across the cushions.
The man left his garbage, and she picked it up and piled it on his plate at the edge of the table for the waiting staff to collect.
Some things are easier to discard than others.
Photo source.
