Tonight is the flight back to Bangalore. We want to go see the Taj Mahal, but we are short on money and time. Depression hangs in the tepid air of the hotel room, so we open the balcony door to let in some fresh gasps of wind, but all that comes in through the door is the humidity of summer night and the dull cacophony of the streets of Delhi below. The room is near Nizamuddin railway station, and the throng of humanity below are either arriving or leaving, some of them in a hurry, some of them hurried. Something is taken away from the romance of travel by hurrying. Something is taken away from life by hurrying. It is a sign of not being present, of being too busy to notice things that should be noticed. It is a sign of the mechanical, and not the organic. You don't see nature hurry, or change its pace. I haven't heard a tree complain to its branches that it needs them to bear fruits by the end of day. Nature has no deadlines to meet, and that is how it should be.
I am standing on the balcony, swatting at the attacking mosquitoes, looking down at the heads of the migrating mass of people, all moving, shoving, pushing, climbing, overtaking - to get to another place. Anywhere but here. I am the same, I tell myself. I also have to constantly move. I also have to constantly change. There is a calming solace in change. It tells me that one day we will all disappear like smoke into clouds; that all that exists is here and now, and the only time that we have some measure of control over is the present. Each empty second is already too far away. And so are the seconds you've made full by simply being aware. It tells me that the more we are aware of each moment, the more we are aware of its tender fragility.
An hour later, our bikes are on the platform, waiting to be shipped back to Bangalore. As we roll them up one by one onto the train and tuck them in, we know in that moment that this is the end. The train rolls away and with it our motorcycles, and with them go the days of the trip. These very days will never return, except flicker to life momentarily in the sharing of memories and in the photographs we've taken. These days are, forever, in hibernation. These days will now forever be used to invoke laughter, wistfulness, energy, memory, wanderlust, awe, nostalgia. And because we've filled this last fortnight with pockets of our traveling spirit, we can reach out to them in thought and memory and visit them. We are allowed this license to the past because we marked its presence with our presence.
And so I am content as the train disappears around the bend. I realize there and then that there indeed is such a thing as destiny. I am not saying that this trip was destined - but by undertaking this trip we did what was not destined, and thereby used our force of will over the natural flow of time. Destiny and fate do exist, and I find they happen at the absence of will and effort; at the absence of dreaming and planning. Something has to happen - your story must go on! And if you don't take over and drive your life in the direction of your choosing, nature's autopilot will kick in.
We catch a taxi from the station to the airport, and spend the time we have remaining watching massive white airplanes touchdown with unexpected gentleness and take-off with necessary anger. It is a time without any rushing agenda, and so we spend it exploring the airport, and exploring our friendship within this new context. Someday we hope to fly to the world, to all those faraway lands and fulfill these dreams recurring, and this is a good education.
Night is falling outside, and everywhere the night enters lights begin coming to life. We are back in the heart of civilization, and we all feel a little lost, as if the world has changed since we began our trip; as if the world has moved on, and we have been left behind - in the span of fifteen days. There is only the consolation of each other. And as we adjust again to the realities of coffee and too-expensive sandwiches, we realize through our conversations that it is not the world that has changed, but we. We are all a little different because of these past days of adventure, and the only people who recognize us now are the four of us. We are different, but equally so. Something that does not need to be explained has changed, has appeared in all of us, has grown within us. Something has modified our perspective, and now we see the world through lenses smudged, perhaps even repaired, by wanderlust.
Our flight is late, but we eventually take off, and land into a cold Bangalore night two hours later. We are still travel-inked, and so the four of us play around with the luggage trolleys in the resounding midnight-emptiness of the airport, while we wait for Suhas, who has agreed to pick us up. He is the first person we will meet from the gang, and we know he can tell.
When we meet, Suhas tells us that a plan to meet up at Manoj’s room was already afoot but Manoj had gone out in the evening and hadn’t returned. As we cut through the sleepy lanes of Shivajinagar, I take out my cellphone to call him, when suddenly there is a honk near Suhas’ car. We all turn to see Manoj on his bike, waving at us, completely taking us by surprise. Inside the car, with windows rolled up, we are laughing and surprised at this unexpected rendezvous. He can’t hear us, but he is nodding, and he follows us to his room.
Within all of us is a rising feeling of something having come to an end, and the crescendo of something about to begin. This we cannot let go of. This we are unable to mask. We don’t even try to seek an understanding of this feeling. All we do is talk. And the warmth of our friendship is displayed in the fact that our conversations don’t have a linear, formal flow. We begin where we left off, without any need for re-introduction, for formalities and for how-are-yous. We begin where we left off. We don’t say goodbye either, which, in a world of endings is a precious thing. It is clear more and more that we are in the middle of an endless conversation.
This is the last night of the trip. We hadn’t planned to be here at Manoj’s house, but at the airport it felt like the logical thing to do. Suhas was supposed to have returned to Mysore that evening, but had stayed back because of an hour’s work, and when we had called him up from the airport he was just about to go to sleep. Manoj had cut his date short in order to meet us, and was on his way back home when we ran into him in the streets of Shivajinagar. We were all there either by chance, or by force of will – something had brought us all together. We discussed these minor miracles over weed, as one does, and thought deeply of them, and thought nothing of them. After all, we had been friends for close to a decade now, and a little telepathy is logical and permitted. With such things in mind, we climbed to the terrace of Manoj’s house, creeping past wicker chairs and empty one-roomed apartments, the night wind whispering through the thin, long leaves of the lone coconut tree. From the edge of terrace, we could see the Hanuman temple standing in silence far below. The darkness there was dispersed by the presence of a solitary lamp, flickering in the wind, making shadows dance. By and by the moon ascended and increased with its height the silence of the night. Suhas, Moham and Sumanth fell asleep, leaving 3 and Manoj and me deep in conversation.
There is a certain smell that is carried by the winds of the night; a reminder of faraway lakes and summer breeze and the salt of sea. It promises adventure, and mad, unrequited love, and promises to hold you afloat if you dare to step off the edge of the roof to try to fly. This we tried to do. As we looked over the edge at the ground far beneath, the air promised the buoyancy of the sea. This we had to do. Manoj and 3 promised that they had done this before; tasted electricity before. With confidence in their experience, I climbed up the thin wall that separated roof from ground and people from a sixty feet fall. They held me from behind, and I stood to my full height on the edge of a two-inch thin wall, staring into the eastern sky watching very early birds or very late birds flying into a dim glow, glorying in the feeling of flight, relishing the fear of falling and the fear of height, with nothing to stop me from falling sixty feet to a hard earth far below.
I descended a full minute later, giddy with adrenalin, to find 3 and Manoj rolling on the rough, cemented-floor of the terrace laughing, revealing to me between gasps of shuddering breaths that they had never done anything like that before, and that they had lied to me to make me do it. The idiots. After Manoj and 3 took turns climbing the wall to ex
perience what I had experienced, we woke everybody up and went back to the room. It was near dawn and I could see the glow in the east increase in intensity as we descended the stairs. Inside the room, we fell asleep wherever we could find place. Right at the blurry edge of wakefulness and sleep, my phone buzzed. With bleary eyes I opened the message. It simply said – Happy Friendship Day. I nudged 3, who grumbled and opened his eyes. I showed him the message in my phone; he read the message, closed his eyes and smiled. And in the light of day the night made sense, and we fell asleep on the first Sunday in August.
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The Anatomy of Words
Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words to change people's consciousness.
Alan Moore