In the caverns of November, in an old tea stall, their stood a cup on a shelf covered with cob webs. The impression that it created was that of a body left untouched for centuries. Did it have friends or family? Did it have unstinting support from someone? Did it feel cold throughout the year, or was it when the sky turned a little grey depicting the commencement of the month that followed October that it longed for a warm touch, almost like a healing process. The question faded in thin air, just like the last whispers of a soldier who died in No Man’s Land.
Had the Cup belonged to some royalty, the tea stall would be named a museum, but for a commoner, even an epitaph is nothing, but mere words carved on stone, almost struggling to exist, like a flickering flame. The Tea Cup had its dwelling in a small, quaint room in some corner of a concrete city stood wrapped by the fabric of someone’s last touch and a song of winter. Who was to blame for ephemerality, for even stars shut their eyes, and resemble the dead, yet they continue to be what people witness as they look up to the sky. November, too was under the grasp of the analogy that would speak of sea waves that ebb away.
Despite everything, there was a comfort in what remained static, amidst the ever-changing life enveloped by the wide spectrum of urbanisation. Two steps forward, and two steps backward, and we all return to one point, in the most vulnerable of our moments. There is something that never changes. The stain of tea leaves, on the bottom of the Cup had a story to tell. The dregs were a reminder of what lived once, and what still continues to live, whether it breathes or it doesn’t.
As winter approached, the panorama started feeling like a Phil Collins song at 1 in the morning, on an empty road that embraces the gleam of the street lights. At that very moment, you realise that you’re teased, and Godot appears to you like a femme fatale. Somewhere, down the road a drunk homeless man sings aloud a country song, remembering his lover, who probably left him because he lacked a decent job and was kicked out because he wanted to be a musician, while few steps away a girl in her 20s writes a poem about setting her heart free and the desire to venture to the woods, while being confined to the four walls of her room.
For everything that existed, that exists and is to exist, we know that the world doesn’t function like what Hammurabi believed in: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We abandon some memories, while some touches bid us farewell. There’s no vengeance or bloodshed. Few things in life remain untouched. There’s a repeated death of hope, yet we look forward to something, be it a hangman’s knot or a bottle of whiskey because we hope that it’ll aid us towards sustaining life. The same was with the Tea cup, that made love to cobwebs and dust. It was living with a hope. It was a memento of something far away from the realm of dynamics. It knew that its dreams were the tales of an annihilated city, a story of a long-forgotten history, but it turned its heart into stone and continues to survive. It understands life and has made peace with the different seasons that come and go by, ’cause nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.
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