The Day I almost Lived

Short story

She walked into the bar. I had already noticed her absence. She gave a faint smile, typical of her, a slight raise of her cheek or rather a show of her teeth. Liya, the waitress got to her usual chores, arranging the tumblers, updating the register.

The distinction between day, night and the day after is blurred for me. The moment I wake up, I feel an intense sensual denial to accept the reality and my limbs spontaneously walk me to this bar in my block. It is usually morning when I walk into the bar but, many a times, I even beat the burly young guy who opens the bar. Patrons are only allowed in after he finishes the cleaning but after physically turning down several of my desperate attempts to barge in, he gives in with a raise of his hands and a shake of his head.

Every day, I sit at the same table by the window, isolated by a huge pillar and therefore always unoccupied. It has a limp, causing it to shrug off any plates or glasses the waitress puts on it. I sometimes envy the table and wonder if even my life can be set right by something as simple as a piece of cardboard. From the window I can see people walking on the street. They look like animals in the zoo performing their usual animations; office-goers dodging cars and the vagrants on the pavement, children trudging back home happily after school. The only constant in this fleeting vista is me, a dazed observer and a girl who sits on a part of the opposite pavement, staring blankly into the sky; her clothes tattered and hair knotted with the dirt and the grime of the street. I remember Liya having once told me that the only family the girl ever had was her mother; a bar dancer who had put an end to her life with an overdose of sleeping pills. It was since then that the girl had taken to the streets begging and drowning into the perpetual haze of the drugs she bought from the street thugs with whatever money she got.

Through the window, sometimes she would gaze at me, a half-smile of familiarity would break on her face, but it would disappear as suddenly as it would come, the grip of drugs reclaiming her mind and body.

After Liya had arrived she had got me my usual whisky without me having to order. Listening to the music I entered a drunken trance, when I regained my senses it was nearly noon and I saw that my glass was empty, I looked at Liya and tapped the top of my glass gently with my fingers; a sign to refill my glass with the poison that was consuming me instead of the other way around. Liya came over to my table, it was then that it happened.

I heard a screech of vehicle trying to brake in a hurry. I looked outside through the window and to my horror there was a large pickup truck turned on its side where the girl sat on the pavement. I made a mad dash to the door of the bar, tripping over several tables. I ran over to the pavement to see the girl pinioned between the truck and the wall. Her dazed senses had failed to see the truck coming at her. We managed to free her broken body, in the journey to the hospital as her head lay in my lap, I observed that her face was calm, her numbness now was not because of intoxication but arising from the body’s reaction to extreme pain causing it to block out all senses. On her admission paper I put her name as Karen and signed as her father. As they rolled her away into the trauma unit I suddenly realized that I was in a territory which I had long tried to stay out of. The hospital smell reminded me of Karen; I remembered her lying on the bed, the last remains of life flowing out of her as I watched helplessly. Karen, my daughter, was the only family I had after the death of my wife until fate had snatched her away from me in a road accident. After her death I had lost my will to live and had taken to drinking, losing myself in intoxication. If I could save the girl, I would be able to live again; the void that Karen left behind would somehow be filled by the comfort of saving another innocent soul from the inescapable hands of death. I walked back home in a daze, my head throbbing with the mix of alcohol and the horror of the gory sight of the accident.

Some time after I came back I fell asleep. It was late in the night when I was woken by the phone ringing. It was from the hospital. “Sorry,” they said. They had tried their best but were not able to save her. I collapsed, drowned myself in another bottle of whisky and fell asleep.

The next day when I woke up I thought to myself, what was it that had made me grieve for her. I knew the answer. It was my daughter who I saw in her, the father in me had died another death. Later in the day I walked out of the bar to her place on the pavement and stared at the sky, trying to find what she saw with those unblinking eyes of her. Maybe, she searched for her mother in the shapes that the clouds made; maybe she knew what was coming and chose to look beyond the world which she was not going to be a part of anyway.

Some days after the incident the bar was shut down, but in my dreams the old table often comes alive. This time, I am sitting on the pavement and the table is pointing towards the sky where I see the girl smiling back at me.