Youth Cola Fountain

Something I wrote on my first blog ever:

There’s a corner on Vivekananda Park, right on Southern Avenue. It sort of pushes its butt on the park itself, on the railings. You cross the road, at least to the other side towards Golpark and there is a really inane Police Box whose entire purpose is quite unknown to people who walk by. I happen to think that the box is there so that most of the people there can find occasional entertainment when, say, a motorbike falls of or a car bumps into the bumper of another, or say some street kids start a scuffle. Its entertainment. After all most Bengalis love nothing more than a bawal to watch.

The pavement on the other side of Southern Avenue leads to one of the many entrances to the placid park that the corporation of our city had build to beautify the lake, Rabindra Sarobar. Which remains dark and creepy when the evening darkness sets it.

The corner of the Vivekananda Park , which I’m talking about is the seat of a Chayer Dokan. The man of the shop sells cigarettes to us solely because we’ve drunk way too many liters of his tea.

That VP, as the area is so called, is one of the worst lit and dangerous areas in the civilized pool of south Calcutta is a minor detail that hardly crosses my mind before the clock strikes nine.

There are regular police raids on narcotic contraband and I’ve seen way too many rushing bunches of prostitutes running from the police to count. Most of my male friends, have at some point or the other, been accosted by these ladies of the night and as well as people who aren’t quite ladies, if you know what I mean. I’ve been touched at really weird places that I’ve stopped being an idiot and a kid and always insist on any one of my male friends to escort me down to Golpark at least, these days, now that I’m older.

On any given day, the “morer Cha Dokan” has at least two people whom I know sitting there.

“yawn.”

“You know? I actually have nothing to say anymore”

“So? I don’t either. Kaku/Dada, Ar ekta cigarette daona… ei, anyone for another tea? Ok, Kaku, another tea to go, too”.

That’s the range of conversation that mostly takes place, when we haven’t run into someone who’s somewhat controversial, or ranting about how bad some band is, or more so, how to make that aforesaid upstart band famous.

The setting wasn’t always the same. There was originally another tea shop about a minute’s walk from this one that originally started this… thing. Once, a couple of friends from Ashutosh College had no place to go and smoke or to adda for that matter and they chose to go to this little shack of a tea shop right on the green fields of Vivekanada Park. It had a lot to commend it. For one, it connected them to the lady who was nature; you found people playing cricket there in the morning, football as the sun started going down and “ludo” when the sun went down. It was a miracle of the God’s. A place where you could sleep off horrendously desperate bouts of drinking and order your tea that was delivered and also keep a tab book that was used all by yourself? It was unthinkable. Also it was a highly political move against globalization and franchise trends that Calcutta seemed to succumb to. It mostly had nothing to do with the fact that people at the Lake Road CCD had thrown us out because we had become way too popular for sitting in a large group, guitar en tow, and not ordering anything at all. So the little tea shop on the greens was named CCD2- Champa Di’r Chayer Dokan. It was even labeled on Google Earth.

Come rain or shine, that place had us coming back. It’s seen a number of birthday parties when some of us never celebrated at home, it also acted as advertisement board and planning ground for a number of our very own home-grown ventures, Ex Nihilo, by the way, being one of such.

The number of evenings of lying on the grass and staring at the stars and feeling the strange feelings of contentment as live cows passed us by are things that has possibly melted into the velvet darkness with the two years or so that went by. The romances that started on that math , some still remain and some have withered away along with the seasons that do, to make space for another. The thoughts that were debated, thought of, were so “enclosed” that now, when I think about it, feels like thoughts thought by some one whose got the whole of tomorrow to worry, not like now, when I am in the front lines facing the line of fire and submerged in it. Exams didn’t seem that important enough. There always seemed like there was going to be a Part2 or a Part3.

Then things started unraveling a bit.

I lost a friend. Actually that was quite consciously lost, but lost all the same. That shook up the man-place equation quite a bit, and things didn’t remain the same. Some people started turning up and that in turn didn’t suite some people. So they broke up the gathering into two halves. A bunch hung out at the same place and some went off to the Morer Cha Dokan.

I spent quite a bit of time shuttling in between the two trying to be the diplomatic type and trying to not lose out of any of the people involved.

But then other things happened. Like the proprietress of CCD2 betrayed us by raising the price of tea and fags by quite a bit and the decision was made for me. It was the granite slab-makeshift benches for me.

It was all that mattered for me then. For any of us really. That was the Second year of college, I believe.

I had people who were either fortunate that they studied engineering and were guaranteed to shift seamlessly into the “real life”. They wouldn’t really have to fight too hard. And I also had people who were pretty sure what they wanted to do, or brilliant enough( I mean hardworking enough ) ultimately do something with their lives. But what of me and say someone who’s most likely to think that they should work hard and do really well in exams, dream of studying murderously when opening an article on history in the national geographic magazine, but when it came down to actually studying or writing the paper for that matter, barely scrapping a pass. What would happen to the daydreamers? Who dreamed of traveling to Europe to back pack or to study classical art and then having a really cosmopolitan life who works from home, freelance, or some one who dreams of riding off into the orange sunset of the Indian horizon with a bag of camera equipment and only returning to a city in like six months in a year?

The exams came and went. I didn’t really fare too well. But there was always the Part Three. But the fear had started to set in. People had already started to make their decision to do what they wanted to. Internships and what not. People who I least expected to, were earning pocket money.

But there it still was, that place under the sun/moon/clouds/stars that provided tea, and space to stare into. Lives never really go on when one sat at that place. What happens to the things that you read at home or the little bits of art that inspire you when you’re unaware? Where do they go? I don’t know. But I know that I stopped reading too many books at book shops, I started afraid of being alone. I never ever thought of the future. And I recently discovered that I really don’t have much of a personality any more. Please don’t think I mean to say that most people that were around don’t have personalities, but when you’re there, you stop thinking out side that little corner of southern avenue and that’s about a good four or five hours of twenty four. So imagine what’s left for you then. The recovery time’s killing. So the entire day revolves around that tea shop, from the morning when you mindlessly did what one was supposed to do waiting for the evening, and the evening gave way to night when one recovered.

“aj band practice ache, can’t go to the morer dokan, come to maharani.”

And the scene shifts. Now the tea drinkers have branched out. One more place to go. This was the time of weekly Princeton visits. The aforesaid band have found a small measure of fame in Calcutta by playing at Princeton clubs. The egos have increased, and they think they are something hot. Some what. And life still moves around tea shops but to a lesser degree. This is the final year of college, and people are actually doing what they need to be doing studying. Even me. I pretended to, when I wasn’t running around like a headless chicken trying to find study material. I thought I was being diligent. But in reality I could see the edges of the frontline and I was nearly shitting in my pants. People were still thinking that they were so great because they knew who Godot was. I thought that I was being individualistic by not knowing much and being extremely proud of the little that I did.

Then the finals came and went, some became graduates before some of us. And then we weren’t the same anymore. No one was. There were random hookups, some holidays, and some breaking ups. There were people I could talk to for hours, and I couldn’t anymore. And there were people who just went on doing what I think they were planning to be doing all their lives.

But I don’t drink tea any more. I don’t smoke as much either. I am a graduate now. But I fared (predictably) so poorly that I know with my secret foresight, that I’m in the trenches and I’m being bombarded with heat seeking missiles everywhere, and I know that my chances are slim. I don’t have peaceful moments any longer. Not much anyway. The permanence that I thought were my friends, I’m not too sure of. Not because I don’t want them, but because they’re preparing to fly away. And I’m trying to buy cheap tickets too, so poor am I. Some one pointed out to me that I wasn’t planning to keep in touch with most people I used to hang out with in the first and second year of college. I say they don’t plan to. Because from now on, people will probably less and less to talk about at the tea shop. And people will realize smoking isn’t that good, so they won’t have that many excuses to come to the shop anymore.

But they might all, the same. Some like me are so grounded that they might be the phantoms of the tea shops. But the talk will dry up, as the joy will. And then what would happen to the people who’re stuck in the unending cycle that’s the tea shops? Maybe its time to find a spot under a tree of a math which spins a mean time machine, and has a fountain of youth for cola fountain. 

I think I come here to moan a little, cry a little and then go back and forget this a little.
Maybe its the steroids that I have been taking since april that's the problem. They are supposed to make you depressed. P asked me if I was sad, when I she called me. I just garbled something at her.
I have been garbling a lot lately at people. I've lost the skill for articulate speech. I think I need this time that the brain takes to transfer thought to speech and then the written word to be properly understood.
All these inspirational things that people who are famous on youtube tell me about just taking the risk and just start being famous for something you did, by just doing it. They absorb me when they are talking but soon I have to come back to my one room, and the deep feeling that I can't breathe properly, and I don't have a table to draw on, and I SHOULD move, and the  thought of moving into a new place fills me with a deep sense of foreboding. But I should. I should buy a new computer but that cannot happen because I need to move, and I keep putting it off.