Often at around 12 pm, you go out to Food Street and sit outside a tea stall on a plastic chair to take a cup of tea and think. For the last two years, it has become a common practice that rings bells within your head every night like a call of hunger. Sometimes, when you go to the stall, you find other fellows from your hostel sitting there, smoking and drinking engrossed in their occasional bursts of laughter. You casually acquaint yourself with them and give them suggestions regarding their psychological problems and a load of other bizarre questions given that you study psychology in the same university with them. On one hand, they show you respect because you study often and keep your own company, and on the other hand, they tease you because of your strange ways of living. They question why you have no friends, mock you sometimes with the word “fried” when you try to explain something to them in psychological terms, although you hate Freud and his sexual theories religiously. Your verbal tussles with them never seem to end. Today, you go out around eleven because you cannot spend time on a book or a movie as the lights have gone out. In darkness, you do not fear ghosts, but you fear yourself. Because you have slept all day, there are constant voices talking in your head as if there’s a volleyball team that lives within you. It happens sometimes but today the talking is more severe than ever. Unlike the schizophrenic patients in movies, you just hear broken phrases and clauses within your head which make no sense. You feel detached at such occasions and avoid people as much as you can. On the road, as you walk out, a car bitterly honks at you as you pass carelessly in front of it. On the other side, you knock against a guy who is wearing the uniform of a Falooda shop and smells of milk and cigarettes. He gives you a bitter look and then starts calling out to a young man inside a car about what he would like to take. You think: Why do these people want to be served in their cars on the roadside and not sit within the shop? You walk forward with your hands stuffed in your pockets. A tiny girl with dishevelled hair spreads her oily hands before you. Out of habit you say, “God will help you.” For the next three minutes as you make your way through the crowded street, the sentence mocks you severely over and over again. Apart from the abusive phrases, somebody keeps repeating the words from within you like a psychology professor, “Psyche is an abyss. One should have a fictional ground to stand on otherwise one will be sucked into it.” You see a class fellow coming from the opposite side with a few books in his left hand while you wrestle with your thoughts. You start looking to the other side vacantly and do not look straight until you cross him. You suddenly remember that you are in Shahid’s debt but you have no money to spare. In front of the poultry farm, you smell chickens and their waste blended with mango scents from the juice shop nearby. The amalgam makes you smile and you think this is you. Someone within you starts finding sexual metaphors that a mango can stand for. Like a child who jumps at everything on the wrong time, you forcefully drag your mind out of it. You then recall the death of a youngster in your village that your mother told you about in the morning on call. You wonder how occasionally you obsess over such subjects but didn’t think about Sajad’s death at all today. In fact, you forgot right after the call. Then, you begin to contemplate: “How little lives do we have? I am 22 and I still don’t know what to do with my life. Why don’t I just die and shut off all the questions?” As you think about these questions, you reach the tea-stall, drag a chair and sit outside it. The fat mad man who remains shirtless throughout the year except for the winters is also taking his tea on one of the dirty benches. Hundreds of people take tea in these cups, you think. The thought of cups in which thousands of men have sipped tea without them having ever been washed, disgusts you. You lose the desire for tea. While you sit there and try to disentangle the entire mesh of absurd thoughts, four of your hostel fellows come and drag chairs to sit with you. Asif asks you how you are doing and you say, “I am the same.” He laughs and says, “You’ll go mad if you do not come out of your psychology books.” Although you are uncomfortable in their presence, you keep sitting there and stupidly smile at them in return. Mujeeb speculates in reply and adds, “People who read too many books somehow get lost from reality.” You sit there sheepishly, still listening to the array of different voices. Someone with you says silently says in reply, “Oh yeah, you know everything, you fool.” Asif retorts to Mujeeb’s speculation, “I do not think so. Everybody should read. Look at us. We do nothing other than playing Ludo and watching movies.” Jameel orders tea for all of you. You want to stop him but cannot. Jameel says, “I watched this French movie with Azmat today. Oh, it brought us to tears.” Both Jameel and Azmat laugh boisterously. They look at you and then, do not explain the tear-inducing movie further. Asif asks if they watched ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’. They answer with a ‘yes’ all together and laugh. You pretend that you haven’t watched it. They start talking about their attendance problems and you think: “They do not know what is going on within me right now. They never would. Language can be so poor.” Somebody else reacts within you: “No, you’re just frightened of your life. You’re penniless. You heard about the death of an old friend. You have fought with your elder sister. That is why.” You take your cup of tea which a young boy brings to you in a little rubber plate. He is smoking a cigarette, coughing. You recall how you used to sleep peacefully at his age in the village. You proceed to thinking about smoking, cancer and death once again. At the bottom of your cup, you discover a strand of hair after the last sip. Jameel looks towards you and asks you if you are in love with somebody. Asif laughs and answers for you: “No, bookworms usually tend to be impotent.” He winks at you and you digest what he just said. You start arguing in a broken way within yourself. You feel the volleyball team within your head throwing words at each other like stones. “I’m stupid that’s why I fail to understand people.” “You can never understand people. You can pretend to, though.” “You are sexually frustrated. Nothing else.” “If only you start taking more care of your health and write the research paper you’ve been planning to write, you’d be fine.” “If others go through the kind of pain I almost drowned in today, why do they not burst up and give up on the acting like it’s okay to be alive.” “Just because you’re frightened and can’t stand up for yourself, you can’t expect pessimism to become a religion.” “Oh, yeah all great people were pessimists.” “Screw them and their greatness. I want to be rid of this infernal noise”. Your fellows have taken their tea by then and decide to leave. Tears come out of your eyes as you suddenly feel lonely. You leave the tea stall a little after them. A voice whispers within you: “You’re a loser but you will not admit it”. You walk for a while along the Mall Road as vehicles of every sort drive past you. You care not to go too close to the road because you fear your death-instincts might push towards it. There, on a bench you see an old man sleeping. You prick your soul for not being grateful. You turn around the block into the darkness and choose the longer path to your hostel. Throughout your walk, you keep feeling as if you have inhaled the strand of hair in the tea-cup that has now stretched deep down till your stomach. You clear your throat and spit profusely but the weird sensation will not go away. As you reach your hostel, you somehow feel that the rift within you has been ironed smooth. You reach your room on the fourth floor and open the door. You lock the door behind yourself and go straight to your bed. You remember your roommate is still outside somewhere. You get up and unlock the door. You come back to your bed and close your eyes. Within a few minutes, you are dead asleep. You dream that you are sitting on the same tea-stall. An elderly woman brings you a cup of tea. After a while, you see a little frog jumping out of your tea-cup. You see that the fat mad man of Food Street comes out of his car and orders a few parathas. You do not feel that there is anything wrong or unbelievable at all. You listen to the voices of a crowd passing through the Mall Road even though its twelve o’clock in the night. They are chanting slogans in favour of their dear politician. You realize you are sitting naked on the plastic chair in front of the tea-stall. You wonder how you came there naked. You decide to sit there all night until all the shops close down, so you can walk back to your room in darkness. After a while, you fall asleep within your dream. The writer is a student of English Literature at Government College University, Lahore and can be reached at rosseautolstoy5@gmail.com Published in Daily Times, November 5th 2017.