The best place for a literary rendezvous?
by Dinu Pathirana
"To be in love is a natural state for every human being" said Anton
Chekhov. If so, are there special places to go to, when you are in love?
The beach? The Galle Face Green? Vihara Maha Devi park? The Public
library or the "Cool Spot" round the corner? The question did not go
down well with puritans.
'That's a very impertinent question. You're very rude. I wouldn't
recommend a place to anybody.' Said one.
But the liberals thought otherwise. A thirty-something stay at
home-mum who wished not to be named says 'Thinking back to my
undergraduate days when I was continuously falling in love, where to go
to, seemed immaterial. The canteen, the library, the benches by the side
of the road...Ghastly "saivara kades" became a shared joke. When last
this happened to me (reader she married him) I was in my final year at
University. Seated in the canteen sipping plain-tea in plastic cups, all
I remember him saying is "but you are so thin". He's never said it
again."
The Vihara Maha Devi Park is considered a favourite spot because it
has enough shady corners for seclusion. The soft breeze, the leaves
whispering, the sunlight drawing cartoons on the grass provide the
perfect atmosphere. The only draw back is so many others think the same.
So where would you go? 'I would recommend a place but unfortunately
I've never had an affair." says Sandeepa, while his colleague claims
'It's the sort of thing that one wouldn't, and shouldn't, reveal.'
Meanwhile, here are two of the best literary rendezvous as found in
Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" and Graham Green's "The End of the
Affair" Sometimes the place doesn't matter ... 'At 11 o'clock I was
sitting in the third booth on the right-hand side as you go in from the
dining room annexe ...The old bar waiter came by and glanced softly at
my weak Scotch and water.
I shook my head and he bobbed his white thatch, and right then a
dream walked in. It seemed to me for an instant that there was no sound
in the bar, that the sharpies stopped sharping and the drunk on the
stool stopped burbling away, and it was like just after the conductor
taps on his music stand and raises his arms and hold them poised ... I
stared.
She caught me staring. She lifted her glance half an inch and I
wasn't there any more. But wherever I was I was holding my breath.'
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
And sometimes it is the food ...
'Afterwards - we were back at Rules and they had just fetched our
steaks - she said, 'There was one scene you did write.'
'About the onions?'
'Yes.' And at that very moment a dish of onions was put on the table.
I said to her - it hadn't even crossed my mind that evening to desire
her - 'And does Henry mind onions?'
'Yes. He can't bear them. Do you like them?'
'Yes.' She helped me to them and then helped herself. Is it possible
to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I
could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course,
simply the onions - it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of
a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.
I put my hand under the cloth and laid it on her knee, and her hand
came down and held mine in place. I said, 'It's a good steak", and heard
like poetry her reply, "It's the best I've ever eaten"." From The End of
the Affair by Graham Greene.
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