It was early January of this year, I was walking in downtown Marseille, going from bookstore to bookstore trying to find the next memoir to read. I had just decided to go out and walk aimlessly to do something with my time on the weekend—I was struggling with feelings of loneliness at the time. It wasn’t something new, I have such recurring feelings every winter, although now that I am conscious of it, I think that I can manage it better. In a city that is sunny almost all year round, one gloomy day can lead to a complete shift in my mood. I would even argue that a gloomy day in an otherwise sunny place makes me more depressed than an all-year-round-gloomy place would. I don’t have evidence of that. And honestly, I’d rather not collect evidence.
After a successful book search, I didn’t want to return home yet. I was not ready to re-isolate myself again. Even though I wasn’t talking to the strangers on the street, I longed for this time among them. A mere few months ago, I would have laughed at this idea—why would I need to spend time with strangers when I know that I will never speak to them? Even though I needed that. In his book Happy City, Charles Montgomery writes, “hunger for time among strangers is so widespread that it seems to contradict the urge to retreat that helped create the dispersed city in the first place.” So, I know now that it wasn’t just a “me” problem.
I remembered spending hours and hours at a stretch playing peg solitaire when I was little, so, I decided to go to a board game bar. I had no intention of talking to anyone, I just wanted people to be existing around me. I didn’t want them to care about me either. I was simply expecting to be invisible around a sea of people; I wanted that. So there I was, at a board game bar, at 5 pm on a gloomy Sunday.
After about 45 minutes of enthralling activities which included buying a ginger beer for the cold weather and uninterrupted attempts at peg solitaire, I felt a few eyes on me. I glanced up to see a group of old ladies smiling at me. They didn’t look very different from each other—greying hair, wrinkles around their eyes and lips, it even felt like they were wearing the same outfit, just in different colours. I hadn’t seen them before but I assumed that they had probably just come in since they hadn’t taken their puffer jackets off yet (spoiler: none of them ever took their puffer jackets off throughout the evening).
“Do you want to join us?”, their leader asked me.
Of course, she wasn’t their leader, but that’s how my brain developed the instant hierarchy. She was the tallest among all the ladies and seemed to have an air of confidence around her. I later learnt that she was a drag king. Now, for the uninitiated, a drag king is a performer (usually a woman, but it can be anyone) who dresses up like the caricature of a man. And she did that for a living!
I did end up joining them—they were a local group of queer women that hung out from time to time so that they wouldn’t feel lonely. They all had their versions of loneliness, some had lost contact with those who raised them at a young age when they came out of the closet, and others had lost many friends during the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. They all had experienced profound losses. All they had now was each other.
What shocked me the most was the way they talked about their losses. Following a conversation about flowers, one of them looked at another and said,
“Remember how Valentine liked to tie her hair with flowers?”
“Oh, she should still do that! Many women in India still use flowers for styling their hair”, I chimed in, rather impatiently, “it looks beautiful”.
“I bet she would still do it if she were alive. She was dainty but boy was she a rebel!”
They both started laughing.
Time passed quickly with these ladies. We played many card games together, one was the French version of raja-rani-chor-sipahi, a little game we used to play during our free periods in school with handmade chits, back in suburban Delhi. Instead of raja (the king) and rani (the queen), this version had the president and the vice president. “We guillotined our king and queen”, I was told when I noticed this difference.
To end the evening, one of the ladies had brought a galette des rois—it is a cake with a powdered almond filling. It was during the time of the Christian holiday of Epiphany, which is a huge deal in Provence, not because of its religious connotations but mostly because of food, the galettes des rois in particular. Usually, there is a fava bean hidden somewhere in the cake, and whoever gets the fava, is assigned to be the king. A friend of mine had told me about this tradition two years ago, and I had eaten a king’s cake before. But since I had always eaten it alone, I would always end up getting the fava. The wins in the past years weren’t satisfying since I was the only candidate. This year, I had decided not to do it, since it was getting a little too sad doing it alone. But these ladies had other plans.
“What are the duties of the king?”, I enquired.
“The king has to bring champagne next time”.
“Well, too bad I won’t meet these women again”, I thought to myself.
By now, the sun had long set. “I think I’ll leave. I have to go all the way to the southern end of the city”, I said, fidgeting on my chair to get up. One of the women looked at me and said, “So, champagne next time?”
I had ended up with the fava. I was the king.
“Of course”, I said, smiling.
I don’t have their contacts but I might just go to that bar with a bottle of champagne on another gloomy Sunday.
"He was plainly under that strange influence which sometimes prompts men to confide to the new-found friend what they will not tell to the old"
Thomas Hardy, 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'
Love the feeling when strangers meet, shed their inhibitions, and for a moment at least, they forge a bond so warm and deep it rivals sibling relationships lasting a lifetime.
Keep writing!
What a beautifully narrated experience! This was such a heartwarming story. Moments like these are truly special and you are doing a great job cherishing them.