Page 112 - KCN 2020

Café Encounter

Mr Chan Teik Onn

“The only reason he succeeded in taking twelve lives because this generation is so apathetic,” the old man across my
table said. “They make me laugh.”
He turned to the waitress.

“You were here when it happened, weren’t you?” the old man said. “All twelve of them. All college students,
killed because they thought the bomber was a prankster.”

I raised my hand, ready for my order, and the waitress came with the menu.
“Yes, I was,” she curtly told the old man on her way to my table. “What will you have?”

“You know this generation has gone to the dumps when a terrorist can be mistaken for a prankster.” His voice rang
in the background.

“Espresso. Single shot,” I said to the waitress.
She smiled at me and walked back to the counter.

“I mean, think about it. When the guy walked in with a set of bombs on his chest everybody in this café laughed.
They thought it was a joke!” The old man continued. “Everything is a joke to them. It’s like they want to die.”

“That’s a very insensitive thing to say,” the waitress said as she removed my cup of espresso from the machine.
“But it’s the truth. There’s nothing more serious than a person with a set of bombs strapped on his chest,” he said.

She shrugged.

“People back in my day were men of action. We did not tolerate nonsense. People nowadays are too distracted to
care.”
“No one could have foreseen this.”

“And yet you were the only one with enough sense to take cover,” he shot back.

“No, I was in the storeroom.”

As the waitress placed the cup of espresso on my table, I pulled out my laptop, hoping to get at least a few
words into my thesis despite the distraction.

The sky began to drizzle. Rush hour was in full swing. Strobes of light from vehicles outside the café emerged thicker.
Umbrellas bloomed on the street. People quickened their pace. Distant lightning.

“You,” the old man called out to me. “Would you have laughed at the bomber?”
I searched for a suitable answer and settled on ‘I don’t know’. He chuckled and told me, “You’d probably be the one
wearing the vest.”

109 “That’s enough,” the waitress interrupted. “Please leave that young man alone.”