Coffee Guy and His Meant-to-Be

Multitudes are ablaze inside as I navigate the day.  The song and dance of the frenzied emotions which take on the veil of calm & ease is extraordinarily stifling. The body shrivels, launches into a fit of despair and yet what the world sees is a happy individual at work with collected poise.

Carrying this commotion-filled body in deceitful exterior in a relatively less chaotic weekend traffic, the holiday sees us in a café. No sooner do we reach, than my sister is already into the laptop, while I open my book casually soaking in the atmosphere. I note a couple settling down; one diagonally in front of me while a girl sitting behind me, next-but-one table. 

The day is still young for the coffee shop to begin its fast chores. The blank gossip emanating from the couple's table is too blunt to affect any interest, so I too dive into my book as my sister was already in her work which is when things started happening. Enter this guy, who completes the couple behind me and as one might have guessed, the subject of my story.

Both the tables were there for the same reason, pre-marriage dating, and it happened three weekends consecutively whichever café I visited. No other business, not even regular dating but this specific kind indulged in by a particular kind of majority in India. One with an aspirational modernity embedded deeply in the traditional ways of life.

And this particular couple scared away the turmoil within me, in a not so welcome way. 

It didn't take the new entrant there long to be the centre of the attention there. Not for any other reason but because he was loud, and I mean as loud as one can be without shouting! That imaginary threshold separating loudness and shouting was seriously being contested by the voice emanating from that bearded, bespectacled and incongruous soul. 

There are people who can concentrate on reading with disaffection even if, as they say, a bomb goes off next to them. I happen to be one of those proud readers, except this time I simply couldn't be one. The guy announced his arrival to the entire place, the reason for coming late with an apology which sounded more like a 'believe-it-or-not' fact. My sister looked up. And that was a big deal because she was in the middle of an online meeting and had strictly warned me to not indulge her in any going-on's. 

So, our hero here is on a date to confirm what was an already confirmed marriage. A date before an arranged marriage is one of the worst tokenisms out there on display. Unless the bride and groom lunge at each other's throat or one of them simple drops their pants in a crude display, I don't think any date confirming an arranged match ever results in the people moving on to someone else. It is the mother of all formalities, this whole business of meeting people before the eventuality of marriage. 

Anyway, the girl is happy. She started matching his pitch by making it perfectly clear to the house how 'progressive' her mother was to allow them to meet outside their house away from the prying eyes of the elders, despite reservations of her father. The guy agrees and explains to her and by extension us there, that very redundant point. After reassuring each other of their progressiveness in meeting outside, it was time for the guy to launch into a monologue.

The assault, something that should have subsided as every other loud-Indian conversation does, continued for nearly two hours. Now, I, with all my might tried very hard to go back to reading, as my sister put on her headphones and went back to her work. But he won't let me or I believe anyone else present there. The guys behind the counter, countered by raising the volume of the gently wafting music to a full-on audio recording session, in the hope of discouraging the guy. It didn't help. 

Everyone sitting there, willingly (only the girl) or unwillingly would know and write his biography, one day.

It began with him telling his soon-to-be that he was a teacher and the evolution of his value system guiding him in his present role. Ideally, no one except the girl were supposed to be the recipients of that information but he seemed to think otherwise. I felt, he was on a date with the three girls present there and desperately needed to narrate his life and works to all three simultaneously, just in case. 

To make matters worse or amusing, depending on whether one is my sister or me, the girl continued to match his tempo with a barrage of clichés of her own. How Indian parents are getting more liberal, how progressive she was to work, how wonderfully free-spirited each of them is to meet in a coffee shop without any elders supervising the proceedings. To this the guy is most heartily adding his - how he comes from a humble, rural background to make it on his own in a city, how his father had only imagined his son would be a farmer like him and how his son defied his mediocrity by being a teacher with knowledge of English language, how he is an occasional drinker, a fact whose acceptance should be a tribute to his honesty, how he demands nothing of the girl but her affections (and ears and loudness), how he is an epitome of the gentlemanliness being the one always resisting going overboard with his drinks like everyone of his peers seem to do.

Further, he goes on with, 'it is my philosophy in life always to (10 minutes of garbage), never to (same), live like (some more), tell others (even more), teach students (I weep for humanity)'. He wishes to have those many kids as are mutually agreeable, how next-gen is he going to be, by 'permitting' his wife to work, wear jeans and t-shirts, have male friends, and 'let' her have her own opinions at times. The way all of the above is assured to the girl is by announcing to us, that he has already declared the above to his father and he will marry only a girl who is 'progressive' enough to harbour the same kind of thinking. We, strangers, who will never know them ever must know this.

Again, he goes on, she is the first such girl he has met despite him not having time enough or age enough to be considering a marriage, but he was also a good son to care for his parents' wishes and come there and ambush all of us. The girl repeats the same in slightly modified language for her part but in equally loud equivocation. She can't seem to believe her luck!

For all the assault that went on there, I went back to reflect on the tirade of thoughts which was troubling me before I entered the place, as against the calm Sunday morning that was that day, until this man happened. I was left shaken as one would feel after withdrawing oneself from a battlefield. All my internal rumblings had abated. Died down in the uselessness and regressively progressive Indian middle-class match making/confirming processes.

Every word he and she uttered was like a dirt ball being flung, landing every single time on each of our ear with great precision. The reassertions of their mind-numbingly stupid stories with the alacrity of a confident leader making speeches at an election rally, not just to each other but to the whole coffee shop, is a lesson for generations to come. 

A lesson in confidence, a lesson in grovelling in filthy patronising, a lesson in the horror that is the socially-sanctioned, conformist progressiveness (an oxymoron) and a lesson in torture which I owe it to my mind to inflict on my readers in the hope that their internal conflicts might just be assuaged momentarily, like mine, by reading about the Coffee Guy and his Meant-to-Be.