The Kaleidoscope

It has been a month and a half since I flew out of Europe. My residence permit expires tomorrow. Perhaps I will never go back again. I thought when I returned that I had a bundle of stories to narrate. But I now realize that my bundle had been tied carelessly. I cannot find half of my stories; my anecdotes are neither with tails nor heads. Cities become stretches of streets and colours that run into each other and cannot be told apart. I wish in vain that I had paid more attention, had watched the fading murals on the church walls more closely; had lingered a bit longer in front of the street musician so that his music would be with me when I walk in a different city with different rhythms. I wish I had swirled the wine in my mouth for a minute more so its taste would have soaked into me and lingered. Yet there are bits and pieces that I have saved.

Once, in Ferrara, Dani and I walked into a small Italian restaurant around two in the afternoon. It was a Saturday. And like almost every other Saturday, we had got up late. In Ferrara Wednesday nights and Friday nights follow a pattern that is almost ritualistic. Students will be out all night, gathered in and around the pubs or on the town square, idling on the steps of the Basilica Cattedrale di San Giorgio, getting up now and then for a glass of beer. Me and my friends on the other hand always bought our drinks beforehand from the supermarket and carried it with us to the square. Beer after beer would pop up from Daniela’s cream handbag, which by some undetected magic, never ever disappointed us. Often a newly graduated young man or woman would be paraded around the square, with a crown of leaves on the head with his/her colleagues singing “Doutore, Doutore…” in loud drunk voices. Once we saw a rare tribute being paid to the nation on its founding day, as a group of youth stood around the flag staff, took of their pants and started singing patriotic songs to the rhythms played on their nationalistic bums. This day, though, followed a rather uneventful night. We had sapped the magic bag of the last of its powers and had gone back home, me earlier than the others, as usual, for after a drink or two I could understand neither Italian nor Portuguese well.

But let us get back to the story line. The via Garibaldi that runs from across the Basilica, is where we usually end up when we eat out. Slurp, the tiny pizza place at the beginning of the street that serves such delicious calzones, their paper light covering filled with juicy red tomatoes, ham and ricotta cheese..The Chinese place with amazingly low prices and equally amazing low quantities of food, Taj Mahal, the North Indian restaurant with great food , loud wall decorations and curiously shaped bottles of ‘Indian beer’ called Kamasutra, lining its glass shelves. But today we walked past all the usuals into the rather dull looking Italian restaurant right opposite Taj Mahal.

The inside was rather dark with only a few late eaters finishing off their meals. So we asked for the menu and sat on the plastic chairs set outside in the bright. Our waiter was a pleasant man, rather stocky, possibly in his early thirties, though with thinning hair. He took our orders leisurely, chatting away and throwing in suggestions. After we were served, he sat down near us for a smoke and started to chat with Dani. It is fun to watch and listen to a conversation that you do not understand, from the flanks. You notice the gestures, the posture, the subtleties of expression and the modulations of the voice that you otherwise miss. Now and again they would pause and Dani would translate the conversation for me. He would try to switch for a while to English. He spoke with a rather soft voice and smiled often- a smile that always reached his bright hazel eyes. He talked of his home in Romania, of his mother waiting there, of being lonely in the crowd and lost in his single room apartment in the unfamiliar city. He turned to me and talked of when he was a small child, of a movie that his father took him to, of how he remembered each of its frames. “It was an Indian movie,” he said “the title translates as ‘chain of memories.’” It was at the same moment that we both started singing, “Yaadon ki baraat… ” in a language that was neither his nor really mine, yet knowing the song to be ours in strangely similar ways.