Café Shahib

When Inga’s husband dies, his estate makes her a wealthy woman. She settles into a million-dollar oceanfront apartment and begins a new life. Enlightened, she thinks. Eccentric, her daughters insist.

Inga keeps on: booking taxis and inviting foreign drivers to dine with her at restaurants serving their national dishes. Her daughters are enraged.

Then Inga meets Abhaidev. He is a Sikh. He introduces her to Café Shahib.

Author’s note:

We’re held in a web and time is the spider.

The passing of the years works at the gossamer, making more and more threads. They bind us. Attach us to this person, that place, and those things. Sometimes, a thread can be snipped after decades with just a liberating tickle. Sometimes, we feel nothing at all. Sometimes we wobble and weep when a new thread breaks after just a little while.

And then, there are those occasions when our lives' defining anchors ties are cut – by choice or by accident – and everything changes. We discover other people, places, and things were held by those very same ties and all that balanced our little world – all that held our little web in place – is set adrift. 

Then comes the realisation that no amount of insisting will fix what’s broken. What’s gone, is gone for good. If we’re brave, and industrious, we keep on. That's when time’s spider begins spinning of a new web. Hangs it differently. Perhaps unexpectedly. Makes it newly wondrous.

Where can I read it?

Published in Going Down Swinging. Find it here>