There is a restaurant without a back. It had a back, it really did, only it doesn't have one anymore. It's like this- There used to be a back wall to this shop, only that back was part of a larger structure, an old building that got broken down to make a big new building. For some time they left the back wall there out of consideration for the shop, but in the end they had to tear it down. They left the front of the shop and the sides intact, because it was an outside wall, and they never tore down outside walls unless the definition of what was to be inside changed.

The shop was on an old street, with very fixed ideas. This street knew for absolutely certain that a shop, even a flower shop, had to have, in addition to flowers or the respective item of produce, a shop-window, two side walls, a roof, and a back wall. They could even omit the side walls and the window, as for the makeshift establishments with plastic sheets over them that solf food on the footpath, but never the roof and never the back wall. The flower shop had committed an error, a greivous error, that like most greivous errors was practically impossible to put right.

It did try. It thought of putting a plastic sheet across the back, but people remarked it would look like a photo studio, and the flowers as though they were posing for a one- minute passport-size, and so that idea was quashed. Then it thought that if you put a lot of flowers on stools across the back, people wouldn't notice the construction site that much, and so they tried it.

Something about the picture of those flowers against the background of a dust-covered, cement-coloured construction site appealed to the shop, and it left it that way, though everyone still noticed the site. These things are impossible to hide anyway, it thought.

The flowers against such a contrasting background looked either brave, in all their glory of colour, defying everything beyond, or pathetic, with a dust-layer beginning to settle on them at any point of time, only flowers against the idea of the great things that were to come up beyond. Both ideas occurred to the flowershop, and that was the reason why it left itself that way, even though the street looked gently disapproving all the time.

Then one day, someone remarked while buying an assortment bouquet, that it looked like a flower-stall rather than a flower shop if you asked her, which nobody had, but she ventured it anyway. The street was sympathetic and slightly triumphant, looking like as many told-you-so's as it might ever have wished to say.
The shop thought it should feel hurt, for a moment it was, but then the sight of the red roses and yellow chrysanthemums and blue-dyed orchids and pink plastic ribbon in the bouquet made it forget, and chuckle. Then the street shook it's head in disapproval and a bit of disappointment, and things forgot all about it and went on.