At the center: there's Rumi, a young boy who grows up in a normal family- yet flinchingly is devoured by the absence of his parents' relationship. Over the years of a silent and lonely family life, he is left inherited with a stack of letters that b...
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The city echoed, of course with the blasts of horns, the traffic so vast, so busy, so not tired, and so brightly warm yet it couldn't fathom the throngs of citizens that walked through the heat, standing at traffic zones behind the footpaths strung, waiting for the light to signal red and the vehicles to stop before the zebra-crossing calmly. People crossed the roads, in large, groups while expensive ambassadors stood in line behind street traffic lights, the traffic-police patrolling, guiding, blowing their lungs out through whistles made of plastic, their hands dancing, indicating, showing- all at once.
From the motor-rickshaw, a young grown child jumped with a school-bag hung lazily on his shoulder, his white school uniform worn precisely the way he wore them while leaving home earlier that morning. Only now, he walked down the Churchgate station, where he saw a massive billboard with the face of a man with red devil-horns, written on the side was something in English. He smiled, and while walking a little too quietly, slowly, piercing thin crowds of older men and women, he read them loudly in his mind: Put your best foot forward. Don't let your budget put you down.
Above those very words, was a question: Bringing home a color TV today?
"No," Rumi thought, reciprocating.
Of course, he made sure that every word he read was pronounced correctly, enunciating every word again and again. He had scored 95/100 in his English exams last year. And as usual, his parents were never as impressed. It was all in good (or ill) faith when they'd scold him for not doing the best. "Why, ninety-five?" They'd say. "Why not a hundred?"
While walking sweatily, he passed from beneath the bridge built to cross the roads; he saw several posters- blue, white with red in written, yellow with numbers printed on them, some posters were vertically rolled around metal pillars. Some of them were in Hindi, some Marathi. He walked down a lane then, turning right- where all the small restaurants that sold keema and bheja (goat's brain) and were crowded by Muslims mainly, but Baba had told him that several Sindhis would also go to eat there.
Baba knew well. Baba always knew better. He owned one of those cafes that faced the closed walls of a red building, Rumi never knew what that building was. After school in late, late noon, Rumi preferred to get down outside the railway station, where there would be a rabble of workers against the traffic. From there, he'd walk for about fifteen minutes in the stifling sun of the wavy, vaporizing city streets to his father's cafe, Cafe Rustom. It was the namesake of its owner- a Parsi selling sweet Irani chai in the suburbs of one of the country's most popular, populous, and hungry destinations.
While Rumi was still very young, not too old, so around fourteen years old, he was sometimes dragged to the kitchen behind- solely by words of his paunched father to see, to follow up on how the whole butter was freshly churned out of very thick cream- or malai. Then he was shown how to spread that fresh butter on very warm Buns and cut them in strips to be served on plates. Of course, they were popularly known as Bun Maskas. But Rumi would quite literally get bored, and would most of the time be distracted, even though his eyes watched every action precisely, his mind would wander around the restaurant, sitting on a bookshelf itself, and reading the vintage copies of Virginia Woolf. But he was a patient boy or was strictly taught as such. What he only got out of those private lessons were fingers full of fresh, creamy, and delightful slobs of butter that melted through this delicately soft skin- licking them.
