There was a man running in his early twenties contemplating people around his surroundings. There was a man in his early thirties running a café, selling tea and coffee behind the first man. There was a man running in his fifties standing like a crouching tree. There was a beggar begging for money with the shopkeeper. There was a young couple enjoying their date. There was a girl passing with her flowing red hair. And there were rest of people, people and people, endless people. Inside every person there were several uncountable and unfathomable stories.
The man in his early twenties, had his own pain and struggle. He was struggling to reach his dream and to get out from that struggle itself, and this was the common and the hardest kind of struggle to experience. He was also heartbroken in love. He was forgetting himself how wonderfully he was trying to make others understand how wonderful they were. He was discomforted by the memories. His face seemed like he was going to cry at any time like the clouds of summer. His eyes swelled due to the continuous flowing of tears. He wanted to write but that was not his only dream. Actually, he was lost. He knew one thing—that he wanted to be happy. He had promised himself that he would stop writing the day he felt contempt for his life. He wanted to live wild. He wanted to live as high as a man could ever live because he had also known that the inevitable death would snatch everything very soon.
The man who was running a café was married and had a daughter and a son. His daughter was in grade four and son was in play-group: both were struggling and enjoying their childhood. The man had worked four years in Dubai and also as a manager in different restaurants coming back to his land. But after being unsatisfied with those jobs, he started his own business. And even in that, he was unsatisfied. He was also unsatisfied with his life. For a year now, he has wanted to expand and change the position of his business. It was as if his work had been to wait for the customers rather than to sell them, because the business was not running as well as he had desired. His next or foremost dream was to build his own house and to live happily with his wife and his sweet little children. Sometimes he day dreamed playing with his young ones and making cookies in the kitchen of his own home with his wife during noon when there were no costumers at all in the café.
The man in his fifties was standing like a bended tree in front of the café. He wasn’t there for tea or coffee. Maybe he hadn’t been to any café yet because his struggling life never left him free for café, neither with the time nor with the money. Maybe he also had two children or three or maybe more. Maybe the money never left him out of trouble, which resembled his unusual clothes. For the last two decades he has been holding to a dream that his son would someday take him out of poverty and provide him with all the standards of standard life. But still he was working hard himself for the fulfillment of his dream and his dream was slowly taking him with the hands of illness and old age.
A beggar was asking for some money with the shopkeeper and the shopkeeper was making fun of his begging by doing a funny dance which implied “No money”. The beggar was amazed and was lost in himself like he was trying to grasp the thought about the next step he needed to take which would be best in such an unexpected condition. The beggar appearance seemed like he was in his sixties and also looked so weak like he had barely eaten anything. Maybe he was married forty years ago and had children so that he was no longer in contact with them. Or he was thrown out of the home by his uncontrollable alcoholism and never ending unemployment. Maybe he had been married with two more women and they also left him due to his useless existence for them. He was stretching his trembling hands in his ripening age for food and also for the alcohol which he drank every evening as a part for his survival, as a revolt against the complexity of life.
The young couple was busy with their gossip and their cold drinks and laughs and their touches. Both were also busy in their personal passion—in smoking, and sometimes they were blowing all their inhaled smoke back to each other’s face. And they were laughing and sometimes laughed like they were on marijuana and when any punk and hip-hop music started playing, they behaved strangely. When Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolie started playing in the café they started behaving like they were intoxicated by the grass or maybe that was their way of enjoying music. Maybe smoking, getting tattoos, listening to punk music, wearing nice clothes, piercing their body parts were the parts of their life. Their dream reached no far away from the present, from the enjoyment and they cared nothing more than to enjoy it. And their life might have been passing with enjoyment and people coming and going in and out of their life. Their struggle was to hold onto the enjoyable moments forever or they may simply not care about the concept of struggle. And they may hold those moments with everybody in the same way till their youth. Maybe “I don’t care.” was their signature, a mantra they had already encrypted in their muscle.
The girl who was walking with flowing red hair encountered the eyes of the man who was in his early twenties, merely for a second and she lowered her head in a very strange and amusing way. Maybe that was what we called ‘shyness’. She was also listening to music; earphones plugged into her ears. Maybe she was listening to a Bollywood song or maybe Lana Del Rey’s or the contemporary indie Nepali music of like Swar or Trishna Gurung, John Rai or Tribal Rain. Maybe many boys were interested in her and even in that she felt lonely sometimes because she couldn’t choose anyone. But she seemed happy and was walking like she was untouched by any complexities or like she was a practical person like most of the girls.
There were struggles, sadness and happiness that made them able to walk. They were in pain because they had sensed happiness and they were happy because they had sensed pain. And all those things were encouragement for more struggles, for more happiness and for more sadness, being amalgamative to one another.
And all those people were within a few meters, in such a distance where they could listen to each other’s voice even if they talked softly in a way we talk inside a single room. But they ran away from each other within a few seconds. They had met each other, intersecting each other’s stories making one story for a few seconds and lost again in the existence carrying their own stories within themselves.
