The Stranger I met 4 years Ago
Water on the streets, creating an illusion of a mirror, perhaps, a mirror only. Sat by the cold glass wall of the cafe at the Central Market, waiting for the day to go by. Sitting beside me, I saw those watchful eyes, dreaming, with open eyes. The kind of eyes that never rests perplexed but not really. Writing in my thought journal, a process, I dread. There had been a murder recently in the city and 20 million people, still drawn towards the race that is life. The crime scene is set, barricades put, police rushing in and out with the autopsy reports. As far as we know, it’s murder. I looked up my journal and found the stranger looking deep gone in my writing and with a, rather, muddled gaze, he stood up and left. This behavior is not odd in this city and I never judged him for he read all those gory details at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning. As I took the last sip of my Caffé latte, I felt a cold stare coming directly diagonal to me; it’s a blessing, peripheral vision. The stranger sat down next to me, it was my time to be perplexed and he gave me that space. We ordered another round of caffeine for what was coming ahead needed a mind that could think.
After exchanging details in the 5 mins time span that is set for small talk, we started getting out of topics to discuss but he stayed as if he knew that there will be an end to this meeting. He began to question me on what he had read in my journal and I was more than happy to let him know about all the abominable details. Those were simpler times; there was no Netflix, nothing else to talk about other than Moral Philosophy and the birth of Morality. 30 minutes passed and the discussion had escalated to a point of impasse, where no one had anything more to contribute, nothing more to say, to hear, to think. “Fear”, he exclaimed, “makes us do terrible things.” It didn’t make any sense then like it makes now and yet as intrigued as I was in understanding what he meant, I also had to be somewhere as an obligation. “Well yeah, to cover their tracks, people do crazy things”, I affirmed. He looked up, then through the glass wall; outside and I knew that he had something to say, “Fear-”, he started “-not just to create an alibi, fear in general, the literal meaning of which we all understand but in different ways.”, clearly getting on to something, he added “for birds, fear may be losing their home; bad weather, for the Barista; a bad customer. For me, to not know enough fears me and for you, right now, not being able to reach, wherever you want to reach, on time.” I sensed a deep shudder in my spine, a shudder so loud and apparent that the entire cafe could make it out.
He went on speaking, “a long long time ago, during the days of Noah, there was a boy, his name was Elijah, his parents had long gone due poverty and had a granddad on a verge of dying. There had been a warning issued of the ultimate doom of the world and that boy, Elijah, was happy, for once in his life-it wasn’t going to be difficult to live. Little did he know that the end of times was far too long into the future and till then they had to survive for which he cheated, traded, looted and ultimately gained enough fortune to subsist life. It was a month before the doomsday that Elijah got a deadly case of smallpox and died 10 days before the end of times. When reached the gates of heaven, Elijah was asked to accept his crimes and justify his actions to which he bellowed no guilt and pleaded all his acts as the acts of necessity”. At this moment, I had already forgotten about the arrangement that I had to attend to and was wholly engrossed in this story of his, “after so many centuries of perilous labor, Elijah was given a chance to appeal to his crimes and admit them again, which he denied, yet again. The entire empire shook this time, trying to understand how a person who has done such crimes be so merciless and prude about what he had done. Elijah, however, now put on stands starts to explain the gods who were clearly disturbed about this fact. He goes on to explicate how his actions were directly related to the conditions that were put onto him by man and the gods. He had to do what was right for him, for his survival.” Not agreeing to the argument made, my expressions did make it clear, “-Elijah was of the belief that had his deeds been as bad as they seemed, he wouldn’t have been dead just before the end of the world, which took the lives of everyone, irrespective of their Moral bent and his was a peaceful death, without any burden or pain. And for that, he was happy as it was a blessing in disguise.” As he ended this fable, he took the last sip of his coffee, packed his bag and stood up. He looked down at me and for the first and the last time said “there’s a lot right and a lot wrong in this world and an immensely powerful story behind every such action, the decision to look at an act as an act only or delving deep into it is your call, you have the power to analyze and evaluate each situation, use it well.” and left.
In this 2 hours long conversation, I had learned a way to look at the state of affairs differently, the caged singularity of thoughts that lived in my small mind had opened its door and flew right there with the words that I am able to pour down on this piece of paper. I looked down my journal, fixated at the cutting of the said murder trial that said ‘irregular evidence’, now in hope to find clarity and in that hope alone, I went to the barista, one more time and ordered another Caffé latte for it was too late for me to fulfill my said commitments.
