Here, Hear!

The café interiors had entered Mariam’s soul. Each evening, over the years, even as the waiters changed, her order remained the same – an Irish coffee and a grilled chicken sandwich. Decors and managers changed, but not Mariam’s evenings. Being single, allowed for a lot of time, to everybody’s envy. All that she earned was for no one else to be spent upon. All one knew of her was she was a tycoon, a storm, dynamic and democratic. She worked her way upwards with perseverance and a lot of sweat. For tears, she neither had time nor the luxury of indulgence. With the exception of tours and travels, her evenings were spent in that café, alone.

She preferred to think it otherwise; she was not alone that is. The crowd of unknown faces, and the familiar sip were her companions for life. Her comfortable apartment allowed for many corners in which she could, would she choose, to sit and do what she did all these evenings at the cafe -- write. Convinced that someone else took over her, as dusk lowered its shade, she returned to the chaos of crowds and the rubble of voices. Not one story repeated itself except for her order, not even the bill amount. Mariam remained there for a couple of hours, destructing characters, creating crimes, weaving love and building sentences. Mariam breathed in that familiar unknown a space of her own.

Not for publishing, not for sharing, evenings all over she wrote, and she wrote and she wrote. Over the years, she gave in to typing. Till last night. She revisited all that she had written.

The crowd and chair seemed more known than all she had ever written. She could not remember having owned those characters and given them voices. She had deviated and ordered a latte. Perhaps that, thought she. She sat up on her bed and tried to recall the walls of the cafe, her other home. Failing to associate the paintings with the scribbles, the doodles with the low-hung lights, she picked up her pillow and pushed her head into it. A part of her died. Someone stole her stories and read them. She became popular. Successful.

She came alive. Going out of her cabin which read Miss Mariam Gonsalves, Deputy GM; she washed her face. All her life this trauma of an evening she wished she could have, greeted her in her routine stolen afternoon nap.

If only she could write.