Amar's Cup: A Short Story

An ethereal symbolic short story. Read if you like intuitive symbols, "reading between the lines", and archetypal characters.

Amar, a young adult, stood in his balcony. He held a cup in his hand. An empty one.

"Sometimes, we should fill ourselves with nothing," spoke Amar to himself as he sipped short wafts of air, "Actually, a cup is never empty. It has air even though it may look like "nothing"."

The clouds in the sky seemed to be fighting for more space. A bright blue sky slowly draped an appearance of a grey overcast, dull to the eyes of someone who always saw but never looked. Amar was someone who looked.

The winds chose this moment to make Amar's locality, at least from what he could see, the Roman gladiators' battleground. An arena where corporal prowess earned visibility.

The cup dropped from Amar's steady hold, a calm grip. It went two floors down and shattered into pieces.

Amar kept looking. He kept staring at each broken piece of white polished chinaware as though by the mere act of looking could somehow bring the pieces together. Into a cup.

A squall suddenly overpowered Amar. It overpowered the steadiness, the rootedness with which he stood in his balcony, holding the railing. He fell.

"A sign," he said.

He got up, pushed open the glass door to the balcony, and ran downstairs to reach the site of the cup's death.

He drew open the ornamental black metal gate that marked the boundary of his house.

And saw nothing. It wasn't empty. The jigsaw pieces of the cup were absent. Small and tattered pieces of cloth, bits of old paper, dry leaves, and other articles of scrap began their unlicensed aviation. The winds powered them. They resembled the gladiators that must have once delighted in wrathful combat to make it performative art. At the Roman Colosseum.

The scrap gradually began to resemble a cyclonic vortex. Rather, a tornado's airy flask. A small one. 

While this happened, Amar looked again. He looked up to see that the pieces of the cup were being taken away. By the wind.

They were going away.

He now looked at the small airy flask, the seedling of a greater tornado. He walked past the scrap into the eye of the vortex. The eye that looks, undisturbed. He became, rather always was, the pole star to the wandering bark, the one that witnesses tempests but remains unshaken, as Shakespeare once described it in one of his sonnets.

He looked up at the grey overcast. That was enough to still the combat, end it. The clouds remained. But the winds had stopped blowing. The pole star was not to be seen. But Amar was.

***

He was back home. He pulled out tattered pieces of cloth from his pocket and neatly arranged them at the sewing table. He walked to the balcony, a seat overlooking the silent Colosseum, where he pulled out bits of old paper from his pocket. Upon holding them together, they seemed to connect as one sheet. The jigsaw was scrambled only for eventual completion.

After sticking the torn edges, it looked like a letter. A heartfelt one to someone dear. But was lost to "Time's fool", as Shakespeare once wrote. And to the broken walls of a Colosseum for combat.

A teardrop rolled down his cheek and fell on the letter. He had saved it from being eternally unknown. He had saved it from erasure.

The water of emotion had obscured his vision. Like the turbulent waters on which the "bark" chaotically floats and struggles to anchor.

Holding the paper away, he looked at the ground. Even in the watery obscurity of vision, he was able to recognise... pieces.

They were of the cup.

He sat down to put them together.

Because he was Love.

Gaurav Chandra Tuli