There is something terribly mysterious about travelling. I could never make sense of it and the prospect of a journey makes me apprehensive like anything.
After all, travel is not like moving a pencil between two dots on a map. Two places are not just two dots on the paper. They are a landscape, a thrust of gravity into the atmosphere, anchored and rooted in the mud and soil. A landscape has a peculiar ethos of its own, its smells, its colors and forms. I fail to understand as to how can you travel with the entire landscape surrounding you changing in a different one while you remain intact! I actually, after a journey, go all the way to check in the mirror if my nose is still in its place and I get amazed to find out that it is indeed still there. Wonder how. How could this be possible.
Kafka used to wonder how can you reach the other village in a lifetime. I do fear as to how can you reach the other village at all without having gone through a metamorphosis.
##
The trajectory is not just a physical notion, it is also a philosophical one. People also have trajectories inside their soul. Some of them have a low center of gravity, some rise high, not in the physical sense, but in the realm of their intuition, their psychological reflexes. Those who reside in the lower trajectory of their metaphysical being, would always want to drop an anchor, dig a trench, and sneak into it like a snake. Those who rise tall and erect, would rather prefer to scale higher altitudes and will defy gravity. The former have the characteristics of a reptile, the latter are hawkish and predatory. The former live in a place as if they will live there forever, the latter never have any such thrust of gravity. The pace of life is different for both. The rhythm is distinct. The perceptions vary. The latter will always wake up and find their hat in place no matter where they are, by some elusive cosmic logic. The former will tremble at the very prospect of moving and even one element missing from their set of things, can fill them with enormous apprehensions. And the very idea of travel will turn them pale.
##
The cities are but a skyline. A clumsy pencil-sketch fading into dusklands. The barren, brown landscape of Central India : it is leisurely shrouding itself into the darkness.
A drowsy, faint slumber flutters on my eyelids. Last night was hazy, wild, full of visions and nightmares, as I barely slept it through, restless with the anticipation and apprehension. The travel fright.
A city just whisked passed where I drew a million breaths before.
But Bobby goes on singing, in those obscure 4th avenue clubs, strumming his acoustic guitar, whose notes would break a window, as I listen to his story all over again.
The train drills a hole through the space. It is the same train which had crashed to scores of deaths, barely a week ago, at the stroke of dawn, in bewilderment, in anonymity. Lightening never strikes twice at the same place, they say. Let's see when I wake up to another day to see the light on this saying, let's see when I outlive an idiom.
##
When deep into night, amidst much mist and haze and fatigue, and sleeplessness, and this tremendously ubiquitous stench of diesel and urine, you suddenly realize that your train is on a river bridge and it appears to be an enormous river, your internal GPS tells you that this could be no other than the Yamuna, and even when all windows are shut and the world is wrapped in drowsy darkness, and even when the train is full four hour late, you smile in your half slumber, as this only would mean that when the train will eventually pass through Kanpur Central, it won't be break of dawn of 4 am, but broad daylight of 8.30 am, no matter how much fog hangs over the horizon, as you will finally get to spare a glance at the Ganges!
The Ganges : finally.
##
During this frantic and breathless run through the hinterland of Uttar Pradesh -- Kanpur, Unnao, Sultanpur, Keshavganj, Pratapgarh, Amethi, and even Ayodhya if possible, a "Goddammit" has never left me for a moment.
Uttar Pradesh is a dust bowl. You hit the roads here and you literally bite the dust. For a sanitation fanatic like me (A known fascist trait, by the way), this has been some misery. It's incredible that everything seems to drowned in dust here. Even the leaves of the trees are covered in dust. After the very first rainfall, this whole dust country would turn into a mud country, a swamp almost, I am certain now.
This appears to be an unfinished landscape. A clumsy leftover, of sorts. A heap of garbage, at times. It's only painfully metaphoric that today the heartland of Uttar Pradesh is dotted with many unfinished flyover projects. Electoral promises, maybe, that took too long to get realized. There's is a ghostly presence in mist and mirage, and it only adds to the folklore of collective garbage.
Come December, and a frightful fog shrouds this cursed landscape and everything as if comes to a standstill. This ubiquitous fog has messed up my itinerary big time, as we are forever catching up with the lost time. Ever since I had decided to embark upon this journey, one thing was at the top of my mind : I needed to visit Benaras -- the land of myths and legends and a landscape of incredible texture -- anyhow. But the all pervading, all encompassing fog has rendered it impossible. Forget, Varanasi (176 km from Pratapgarh), even Allahabad (110 km from Sultanpur) is not accessible. Even Faizabad (58 km from Sultanpur) is almost unthinkable to approach, with tight train deadlines punctuating. The fog is so dense and thick here that you could even punch a hole in it, and why wouldn't you want to?
##
The train suddenly stops.
It's 11.44 in night. Which place it could be, I wonder. Then I check my GPS and it tells me, it is the outskirt of Lucknow, which also clarifies the existence of a solitary lamp-post over there.
The lamp-post spends itself away in white, cold glow, through-out the night, magnifying the mist, only to be remained anonymous at the end of all its days. Or which lamp-post is known by the world, for that matter. Lamp-posts are always so sad, lonely, melancholic, while I have known cities living off lamp-posts, bathed in yellow neon as soon as the sun sets and the cloak of darkness spreads, as if a black rainbow.
The train coos a whistle and starts moving at the meditative pace as the shroud of fog gets thicker and thicker by each moment. I caress the outer foil of the train -- I find it is wet under the cover of fog, until I realized that in fact everything around me is wet, soaking, dripping, as if it had rained profusely and had left a cloud of moist hanging in the atmosphere.
Was it the same train, which had departed from Varanasi at 4 pm, from where I was supposed to catch it and reunite with the rest of the party at Sultanpur two hours later? Yes sir, it is the same outer foil of the same train, and now when we have also left Sultanpur many miles behind, one can also ask the same thing as to, was it the same train I had boarded two hours ago from Sultanpur? Yes sir, it is. Or rather by all means it is and yet in many ways, it can be not, this mythical serpant, which rages on and on fiercely in time and space alike.
However, it is only the first leg of a long long journey and I need to relive so much that if I don't, it will grow larger to create a parallel history and universe.
Hence, hark, the fair maiden of memory, invade on me, make me your lamp-post and contemplate over me. I too am cold, solitary and nameless like my soulmate, at the outskirts of the city.
[ All clicks by author himself ]
