“The world is changing, you can see it, it is stripping down and becoming uncomfortable and fairer” (Olas, Rupi Kaur).
Chai! Chai! British tourists with cameras on their chests, the distant sound of old Bollywood songs, a rickshaw crossing the road. Chai! Chai! Someone was selling the best tea in India while two men walked hand in hand. They were childhood friends, so there was no problem. After the monsoon, Princess Street looked puddled with the moon reflected inside. On the sidewalks of this street in the city of Cochin, in the tropical state of Kerala, hip brunch places peeked out and in an art gallery someone in a turban was painting a huge ficus. And there, up ahead, a man waited under a palm tree. He wore a tank top and a dhoti wrapped around his waist. His gaze was melancholic, like that of someone contemplating a polluted river full of upturned fish. However, when he saw you he always smiled, because not doing so would mean revealing his weaknesses to the world.
My friend and I met Kumar in a nice and casual way: he greeted us, said he would pray that the bite on my chin gets better, and after chatting for a few minutes, invited us into his house. It was a warm house, painted blue and filled with banana leaves in huge vases. “The door here is always open,†he added, as he returned from the kitchen with three glass bottles of hypersweet Coke. He seemed most animated: “So Spain, huh?”
Soon after, sitting on the opposite sofa, we listened with the curiosity of a child to the story of Kumar, who had worked on ships that transported coconuts from southern India to Europe in the 1970s. At the time, his best friend it had been a young man named Ahmed. Kumar showed us a framed photo of two smiling young men with their shirts unbuttoned and surrounded by mountains of coconuts. They seemed happy. “We docked in Barcelona several times and we got lost in La Barceloneta” -he recounted with overflowing tenderness-. “Then Ahmed got married and I never heard from him again. We wrote letters to each other for a while, he said he would come to Cochin but… â€Kumar’s eyes seemed to reflect the stars they had both seen lying on a fishing net in the middle of the Mediterranean. A strange intuition began to float through the room, a certain awkward silence, and he changed the subject. Throughout the evening we talked about the divorce boom in India and a world that seemed to be spinning faster elsewhere.
By the time three hours had passed, Kumar had already deduced that my friend and I were not a married couple, as we told all the people who asked us for directions to ensure our integrity. “You really are a lucky boyâ€, he whispered in my ear before leaving, next to that always-open door. After we said goodbye, two other friends walked by hand in hand and Kumar went back to sit under the palm tree to wait. To Ahmed. To expect so many things.
