It was a very hot July afternoon and we were hungry and groggy, having taken the early morning flight from Charlotte to Washington D.C. Google maps had made us get off one metro stop too early for the second time (the first time was in Paris) and we were lugging our bags around with no clue about how much farther away our hotel was. There was a whole line of Ethiopian restaurants on the street but they were all closed as it was past lunchtime when, miraculously, we came across the cheerful looking Cafe Saint Ex almost yelling to us to come on in already in a slight but very endearing French accent.
I really must add a bit of background right here to address the crucial question of why write about the prosaic incident of finding a cafe while walking around in Washington D.C. A few years ago, when I was still a student, my French lessons had become my outlet for my limited imagination and I used to find myself gladly conjugating verbs in the subjonctif imparfait and writing something about how la vie sucked and not completing my practical record for Statistics, which was one of my majors in graduation. Those French classes had all the appeal to make me want to spend all my time learning the language - a) It was French b) It would not help me one bit in earning my real degree in Statistics, Math and Economics. At some point during our fourth year of learning French, we were asked to review a book and present it to the class. That was the time I briefly gave up on doing everything and limited myself to reading and re-reading Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
The book, written in the 1930s is about the pilot Fabien who works for a commercial airmail company in Argentina and is tasked with flying out during a storm to deliver mail. His boss Riviere has committed to himself to take on the most fearful risks to make commercial airmail more viable than other means of delivery such as rail or road. He is undeterred even when some of his pilots have lost their lives just to adhere to his instructions of departing on time irrespective of what the weather is like. The narrative is very simple and presents the story from the point of view of Fabien, Riviere and Fabien's wife. All I remember now are disconnected passages - about how Fabien is able to see the porch of a house from his lonely perch in the middle of the night sky and wonders if the person in that house knows that someone many miles up in the sky watched the lights of their house go off, the other about how he looks at the stars all around him and takes in the bejewelled death trap he is in after he realises that he is going to die in the storm that he knew about even before taking off.
This book was published in 1933 and in 1944, Saint-Exupery, who had previously been a pilot himself, died almost the very same way Fabien did, except that he was on a mission to get intelligence from Germany for the Allies. After that obsessive compulsive reading of Vol de Nuit, I chanced upon the ultimate work of published genius that is The Little Prince by Saint-Ex and that permanently altered the rank-ordering of the Greatest People Ever that is a running list in my head.
And that afternoon, when we entered the cafe, there were models of what seemed like WW1 and WW2 aircrafts and propellers hanging down from the ceiling, there were pictures of Antoine de Saint-Exupery and I ate the best French toast with blackberry compote in the world. The bookshelf they had there wasn't as big as it should have been for a place like that. But then I took one more bite of the toast and looked all around me and knew that while life would largely want to make me scibble furiously about the many ways in which it goes wrong, this was one of those rare moments, like the lining up of major celestial bodies in a straight line is for astronomers, which I had to soak in entirely and carefully note down.
