Raoji Bazaar Book Club, IIT Kanpur

~1~
He gazed at the Café Coffee Day menu for the umpteenth time. It
had grown rather dull over the years and the images of sleek, slender
coffee-filled glasses on it had lost their sexiness. In an attempt to set
his eyes anywhere except the menu, the usually invisible posters
hanging on the walls suddenly became conspicuous to him. After
wandering haphazardly for some time, his eyes settled at the tagline -
A lot can happen over coffee...well certainly; that is, if she ever shows
up, he thought. Quite unusually, Piyush was not nervous at all today.
He had convinced himself that the dating website had set him up with
a girl who would only chat and never meet with him. ‘Good for me!’
he thought. He never preferred talking to people who talked more
than he did. So girls were off the list. Twenty-six years had not been
enough for him to learn how to talk to a girl without blinking fifty
times in a minute and stammering ten times in a sentence. ‘I really
need to stop being a recluse,’ he had told himself a year ago. The only
things he had done to realize this resolution were resetting his status
from offline to online on Facebook chat and getting himself registered
on a dating website.

Irritated, he looked outside through the glass wall beside his table.
Raoji Bazaar had never been fuller on a Saturday morning. The aura of
the place on this leaden winter morning was deeply in contrast with
the usual inactivity that the mornings witnessed. Although most of the
shops’ locks had not yet felt keys turning clockwise inside them today,
there still seemed to be a greater throng of people than usual. Even
the murky dogs seemed to have congregated to perform some sort of
a march-past.

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 Raoji Bazaar Book Club, IIT Kanpur

An uncomfortably lively figurine sprouted out of a pool marking the

center of the huge circle of shops that surrounded the Café. It was
technically supposed to be squirting water upwards and be called a
fountain; only, it could not. In fact, the most memorable thing about
this wastage of space was the occasional packets of chips or cigarettes
floating in the still, archaic water of the pool. Plus, the unbearable
aroma ensured that people were kept away from it.

Piyush had always thought of Raoji Bazaar as a mysterious place that

came straight out of Agatha Christie’s books. His father used to own
an antique shop just round the corner. That was several years ago. In
the last four years, Piyush had shuffled many a career options. Now
he ran the antique shop with his father in the opposite end of the city.
He remembered how as a kid he used to plead to his father to take
him to Raoji Bazaar with him; but his father had never taken him to
the place and it had remained a mystery to him until he was old
enough to sneak out.

Raoji Bazaar was not exactly the typical Bazaar but a rather
nondescript hybrid of an old-fashioned casual market place and a
mall. It was probably the relented dissent of the city against the
invasion of malls which made the Bazaar seem like a werewolf stuck
painfully midway in its transformation. This explained the huge
diversity of people haunting the place day and night. If you were
doing a survey for a sociology class, you would have some good
graphs to make from this place. People from all classes and age
groups came here for different genres of shops and eating joints.
From the modest Bhel Puri waala to McDonalds, from the Raja tailor
(who was quite a treat among the elderly) to the Raymond Shop, from
the Indian Coffee House to Café Coffee Day – Raoji Bazaar had them

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all. No one was really sure why the place was called the Raoji Bazaar.
The most credible anecdote advocated that the name took on in the
1970s when P.V. Narasimha Rao had visited the place and savored
Bhel Puri at a stall that used to be here.

Every now and then, Piyush threw a glance at the door. The crowd
was constantly increasing in the Bazaar. Incredibly, the stinking pool
was attracting a lot of people this morning. After an hour of pointless
peering and silent soliloquies, Piyush nonchalantly accepted that he
had been stood up. The loud commotion outside the Shiva temple
diametrically opposite to the Café cut sharp through his train of
thoughts. He stood up and went beside the glass door to have a clear
look. He always liked to keep himself distanced from such
occurrences. Other people in the Café seemed to be unaffected by the
commotion. After looking through the glass wall for a few minutes, he
realized that he knew the young man standing on the dilapidated
periphery of the stinking pool. He could recall this guy from his high
school days several years ago.

Varun had been a senior at school and had served as the head boy, a
post that Piyush had always detested for some reason. He believed
that such posts were always given to the rowdier lot. His belief turned
stronger now when he saw Varun forcefully push back the crowd of
people that flocked around him.

~
Giving presentations on Saturdays was not particularly in congruence
with the postulates in Aarohi’s book of life. When her career was in
perspective though, she made it a point never to think twice. Having

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been in the profession for three years, she knew well where to lay the
boundaries and how not to cross them.

This presentation meant a lot to her. She had been working on it since
a month. Last few weeks had been particularly hard for her, but she
did not mind. She had always put her work before her life. She had
not dated a guy in months which was hardly compensated by the
flimsy flirting in the office corridors. All her friends had tried for a
while to fix her up with a guy. They went as far as registering her on
this dating website, on which, by the way, they had also been
managing their boss’ fake profile.

Aarohi had chatted with the perfect match the site had found for her
last week. She needed some way to vent her tension and have some
fun, and playing with guys without even meeting them was the best
way to do this. Otherwise, she had no particular interest in her perfect
match. ‘This is not the time for such stuff,’ she had decided when her
expectations from herself shot up after her first promotion. Today’s
presentation was an important step for her future in the company and
she wouldn’t let anything jeopardize the day; and yet somehow her
pet named fate always managed to conspire against her.

Today, she had taken the short route to her office through the Bazaar,
hoping to save precious minutes on the clock when the disheveled
figure came in front of her ride as she crossed the Shiva temple. She
cursed him as she glanced at his face for the first time. On a better
occasion, she might have thought of asking him out. But not now,
when he seemed like an odious omen to her.

‘You can’t go through’, the omen shouted at her.

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‘Excuse me?’ she voiced angrily.

‘You don’t understand. You can’t go this way. Turn-around-now’

‘Are you out of your mind? Hey wait - what’s that? Oh my God! This
can’t be happening…’ she partly shouted, partly said and partly
thought, as her face turned ashen at the site that her eyes beheld.