Death of A Bartender

The judge looked weary and bored in this hot afternoon. He wished he was home and having his two-hour siesta, sighed audibly and looked curiously towards the accused and asked, "Did you kill the bartender?"
The defendant was a suave middle-aged man, lean and tall with gray hairs and weather beaten face that had much used facial muscles. He wasn’t paying any attention to the proceedings in the courtroom therefore was surprised at the sudden attention diverted at him. Realizing that the accused had completely missed the question, judge repeated the question.
"I killed no man’", he said calmly. At this point his lawyer rose quickly and took control of the conversation. While his lawyer was saying," Your honor we plead guilty on temporary insanity…." The defendant again lost interest in the proceedings. He could remember the events of that fateful day very clearly as if it all happened only yesterday.
It was an ordinary barroom, ancient and dimly lit. The wood paneled walls, varnished repeatedly over the years on residual dust enhanced its gloom. It is strange that a place where people come to dissolve day’s tension should be so gloomy and yet faithfuls patronized this joint with clockwork regularity. The bar extended from end of the wall to three-quarters the length of the room but there was not much space between the bar and the racks holding arrays of sparkling bottles filled with myriad whiskies and liqueurs. He sat at the end of the bar near the wall brooding intently over a glass of whisky that he held between both his hands. From his end he could see the bending silhouette of an utterly bored bartender at the other end peering down at few customers talking in subdued voices as if they were in a graveyard. The bartender had tried to strike a conversation with him but he had responded very coldly. He raised his head as if woken from a deep slumber and looked straight in to the wall. There was a faded mirror hung in the wall right in front of him near the end of rack. He could see his blurred image in the cracked mirror. He was puzzled at the existence of mirror there! Then he saw the mirror had been hit as if by a bullet the top left corner. There were cracks radiating from that point and also cracks circling the focus making it resemble a cobweb. His eyed were now focused on the origin of the crack. As if mesmerized he felt he couldn’t take his eyes off that mirror. He felt heightening of depression within him as if the general gloom of the bar had seeped into his being. As he looked at the mirror, utter futility of life seemed weighing on him. The deeper he looked at the mirror the closer it appeared and then he saw the cracked web lifting off the mirror and engulfing his head. Suddenly he felt his eyes have flipped and were now looking at the grainy brown matter that made up his brain, yet it was covered in the same fragments of cobweb strands as if lying dormant and unused. Is this symbolic of a jaded mind! This frightened him but there was nothing he could do about it, making him squirm with unease. His thoughts now focused on the killing monotony of life he led, utterly meaningless and purely functional. He thought he was an ant, a worker ant at that carrying out a dull but necessary routine but why him? The question rattled him. He was tied down to his wife and children and answerable to a monolithic society. He realized that it will not be sufficient to make adequate financial settlement for his family and buy his freedom because he still will be tied to them emotionally. He wasn’t a free agent.
Then he saw a figure stirring to life at the bar. He threw a languid glance at the stranger, was surprised to see the man resemble his own self. The man looked malevolent, his eyes blood shot revealing bulging veins in the cornea. He was moving towards him with both hands pointing towards his throat in a stance to throttle him. Involuntarily he pulled his revolver from his pocket and fired repeatedly at the stranger. There was complete silence in the bar after the gunshots were fired. The man, he thought, assaulting him slumped over the bar and collapsed. He felt very calm and relieved and began to sip whisky from his glass. He looked amusedly at the few frightened men who were in the bar, leaving the bar very quietly. He remained in the bar for an eternity until, an inspector with a revolver pointing at him, followed by two constables asked stiffly, "Did you kill the bartender?"


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