A week or so ago, I joined N and R for dinner at News Cafe. Quite excitedly, they told me about this new place called "Dialogue in the Dark." It has a restaurant, which is engulfed in pitch darkness and you are served by blind waiters.
Interesting idea. My story however doesn't end just yet. That very night I come back home and open Midnight's Children to the page I had bookmarked it. I turn a few pages and I come across this:
Twin problem of the city's sophisticated, cosmopolitan youth: how to consume alcohol in a dry state; and how to romance girls in the best Western tradition, by taking them out to paint the town red, while at the same time preserving total secrecy, to avoid the very Oriental shame of a scandal? The Midnite-Confidential was Mr. Shroff's solution to the agonizing difficulties of the city's gilded youth. In that underground licentiousness, he had created a world of Stygian darkness, black as hell; in the secrecy of midnight darkness, the city's lovers met, drank imported liquor, and romanced; cocooned in the isolating, artificial night, they canoodled with impunity.
We were led down a lush black carpet -- midnight-black, black as lies, crow-black, anger-black, the black of 'hai-yo, black man!'; in short, a dark rug -- by a female attendant of ravishing sexual charms, who wore her sari erotically low on her hips, with a jasmine in her naval; but as we descended into the darkness, she turned towards us with a reassuring smile, and I saw that her eyes were closed; unearthly luminous eyes had been painted on her lids. I could not help but ask, 'Why...' To which she, simply: 'I am blind; and besides, nobody who comes here wants to be seen. Here you are in a world without faces or names; here people have no memories, families or past; here is for now, for nothing except right now.'
I know, the chances of reading something you came across during the day is not unreasonably low (in fact, Jabberwock has talked about something similar today!). So we shall not be creeped out too much by that. What I wonder however is, did life imitate art ? Dialogue in the Dark opened in 1988, Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children in 1981. While such dark restaurants are aplenty now, I could not find any reference to any other such concept that pre-dates Midnight's Children. Or did such a concept really exist in India, which Rushdie discovered during his travels in the country before he wrote the book?
I just wonder who owes whom a hat-tip here.
Interesting idea. My story however doesn't end just yet. That very night I come back home and open Midnight's Children to the page I had bookmarked it. I turn a few pages and I come across this:
Twin problem of the city's sophisticated, cosmopolitan youth: how to consume alcohol in a dry state; and how to romance girls in the best Western tradition, by taking them out to paint the town red, while at the same time preserving total secrecy, to avoid the very Oriental shame of a scandal? The Midnite-Confidential was Mr. Shroff's solution to the agonizing difficulties of the city's gilded youth. In that underground licentiousness, he had created a world of Stygian darkness, black as hell; in the secrecy of midnight darkness, the city's lovers met, drank imported liquor, and romanced; cocooned in the isolating, artificial night, they canoodled with impunity.
We were led down a lush black carpet -- midnight-black, black as lies, crow-black, anger-black, the black of 'hai-yo, black man!'; in short, a dark rug -- by a female attendant of ravishing sexual charms, who wore her sari erotically low on her hips, with a jasmine in her naval; but as we descended into the darkness, she turned towards us with a reassuring smile, and I saw that her eyes were closed; unearthly luminous eyes had been painted on her lids. I could not help but ask, 'Why...' To which she, simply: 'I am blind; and besides, nobody who comes here wants to be seen. Here you are in a world without faces or names; here people have no memories, families or past; here is for now, for nothing except right now.'
I know, the chances of reading something you came across during the day is not unreasonably low (in fact, Jabberwock has talked about something similar today!). So we shall not be creeped out too much by that. What I wonder however is, did life imitate art ? Dialogue in the Dark opened in 1988, Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children in 1981. While such dark restaurants are aplenty now, I could not find any reference to any other such concept that pre-dates Midnight's Children. Or did such a concept really exist in India, which Rushdie discovered during his travels in the country before he wrote the book?
I just wonder who owes whom a hat-tip here.
