tales of Suchita

I sat there, staring outside at the misty road, the bustling populous, the colourful umbrellas as everyone tried to go about their day despite the downpour. The cozy cafe would have you believe it was a warm summer day but just a glance outside would tell you it was cold and wet and dreary.

I had been sitting here for about an hour. It was one of those cafes where you could sit and spend all your time without anyone asking you to leave or order to justify blocking a spot. It was my favourite cafe, despite all the history entrenched here.

I started coming to this cafe because I had wanted to be one of those persons who sits in coffee shops and writes her big novella. I didn’t want to be too famous – because then people would know about this cafe and flock to it, spoiling its mojo and my one oasis. No, I wanted to be enough famous so I could leave my ordinary day life behind and be the enigmatic ‘oh that’s the writer’ with the black specs and a serious expression on my face as I spun yarn after yarn after yarn…

Sometimes I think my dream was bigger than my ambition. When I can’t bear the shards of the shattered dream, I turn to blame my father. He was too attentive you see. When his wife (I don’t like to think of her as my mother) left him saying she was moving onto bigger, better things, he became my mother, father, friend, guide…he showered all the love he hadn’t been allowed to shower on his wife. He didn’t even let me live the ‘I come from a broken home’ angle. He was (is – he isn’t dead – but since what he did in my childhood has a bearing on my adulthood that I speak of it in past tense) such a good parent that I was rarely unhappy. How was I to be a writer if I wasn’t unhappy with the world?

But in the depths of night, when none of the blames worked and my conscious started to prick me, I had no one to blame but myself…and sometimes him…but mostly myself.

He was looking for his muse when we met in this very cafe. He had the whole aesthetics of being a writer down to a typewriter – he told me the typewriter afforded little distractions than a laptop though I cannot fathom how the click click click of the typewriter didn’t distract him. He was so perfect, so full of sadness and so full of ideologies that it surprised no one when I hopelessly fell in love with him.

To cut a long story short, he found his muse, I lost my head and heart over including him in my dream of being enough famous, and then promptly left me in search of his voice so he could write his novella. I don’t blame him for any of it, obviously because I finally found who to blame – my muse.

This is the cafe where the dream began. This is the cafe where I met him and this is where he left me. I finally had the tragedy my father had deprived me of and I was ready to write – until he stole that from me too. He wrote his novella. He became enough famous. Now he sits in his huge empty house, churning verse after verse of such potent sadness that the populous is lapping it up like it were ambrosia.

And here I am, sitting exactly where I had been two years ago, with the same notebook and pen (didn’t I tell you I had the aesthetics of being a writer down as well?) but with far less confidence and less people to blame.

My father cannot understand why I simply cannot ‘get on with it.’ This is perhaps the only rebuke I have ever received from him. But he doesn’t understand that I lost something that day when he told me he was leaving me. I lost everything when he wrote his novella about our love – the tragedy of it was so poignant that it had made me cry.

How was I to ‘get on with it’ when it was floating in the past?

I turned away from my contemplation of the world outside and looked at the cold dregs of coffee. I signaled for the waiter to get me another one. I stared at the half filled notebook where I had started and stopped numerous tales of pain, loss and adventure. He broke my dream and stole my muse. And his and the world’s punishment would be of never seeing me become enough famous. I would deprive them of my talent and creativity. See what they had to say to that!

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Written for the Write Tribe Festival of Words – June 2018 prompt: “The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it.” – The Lion King