I am sitting by the window which opens into a view of the road, eating stir-fried lotus root and nursing a glass. There are people passing by, taking a stroll on the pavement, some of them with their company ID card around the neck. A few are walking past the shop with determination in their steps, and few are pacing back and forth, on a call probably to their mother or friend or boyfriend, determined in their speech and careless in their walk.
I am freshly back to India, having arrived just a day ago, after a twenty-four hour delay chanced by bad British weather. I look out of the window and momentarily lapses into relaxation and think, ‘Hmm. There are quite a lot of Indians here.’ But the walls and the noise at the restaurant wakes me up into caring about the world and I realize what I had just felt, a weird interaction between the home and the un-home, where a small frame into the sidewalks of Mumbai extended from a small restaurant in Hiranandani Gardens makes me feel that there are quite a lot of Indians in India.
More weird is the fact that I am thinking about all these people walking around and how that girl walking past the window, with her friends in tow, is going to reach her place, take the blue jean coat off and hang it on the backrest of the chair, remove her belt, drop the bag by the bedside, and then just sink into her bed with the phone, open Netflix, tap the square of her ‘Recently Watched’ effortlessly and maybe let out a fart that has been building up for long, and resume watching the series she had paused when her friends called and reminded her that they were, indeed, going out shopping that day.
I think of all these people and how their lives, if they were all documented by a camera, would reveal how blasé their days end in going to bed with their laptops and phones and apps open, a pale ghostly glow around their heads. Not so different from mine. And thus, not enviable.
However, as I type this sitting in this cafe, I am pulled back into thinking about being back in India because the group of four sitting at the table next to me are talking loud and my noise-cancelling headphones cannot cancel their conversation. I hope they will leave soon, so that I do not have to type out this aside and moan about how bad our sonic environment is.
But the damage is done. I can’t write anymore. Later.