We were stuck in the taxi a long time. Behind other cars and
buses, scooters and bikes carrying locals to their lives, who were able to
carry on unlike us. I felt the time solidifying against my reclining form at
the back of the taxi, that I wouldn’t be able to escape the failure of this
moment.
To me it was disappointing that we’d spent so much time not
“experiencing” things. I wanted to get off and push the car, or run to our
destination without a break. Anything to escape this crushing race against time
and an unexpected traffic jam.
As it happened, we didn’t make it before closing time. We
missed seeing something we’d talked about, planned on and plotted to see. A few
days for me, a few years for my friend Sanju. The volcano in Bandung in
Indonesia. She’d heard all about it from her mother, who’d been there years
before. I understood this need to share a moment with a parent. It’s why I
always call my dad from a jazz concert. Both of us looked out of the window to
the greying skies that had turned the colour of ash sooner than we expected it
to. We were blind to space or time in this foreign land. We seemed to be moving
in a linear fashion, yet it seemed like we’d been turning circles right where
we stood, digging our heels into the mud. With one final look of resignation
towards the mountain we had just begun to approach, we gave up, told the driver
to turn around and decided to make our last bad decision of the trip.
I was upset for a long time that day. I was sad because
there wouldn’t be a picture of us against the sunset atop a volcano. Of us
climbing down to the belly of the earth, of claiming that one moment for
posterity in a photograph. I wouldn’t have exclamations of joy and jealousy
when friends looked at the picture, when for a minute, I would’ve beat them in
this race to be more worldly.
Isn’t that why we travel? To know more, show more. Show how
we left our imprints on different parts of the planet, claimed a bit of foreign
land for ourselves and were also able to shed that bond like old skin, like a
coat heavy with damp, to move on to new destinations, new ideas to be part of,
new territories to capture. Stuck at the back of the unmoving taxi, I had
already begun to realise how futile this was, this conquest for the sake of a
never ending race. Why did it matter that I hadn’t clambered down to a volcano
that day? Why did it matter that I’d spent most of my time in a vehicle
negotiating in a language that I didn’t understand, over foreign money that
didn’t feel real in my hands? Like I was
playing a part of a merchant trading experiences for cash? Why did it matter
that on that one day, our trip had been a failure, our best efforts were
thwarted, that it being spontaneous hadn’t paid off.
And then, when Sanju said we were in the southern
hemisphere, that we’d flown over the arbitrary line that converts the earth
into a complicated minefield of time zones, forests, ice caps, deserts and
people, is when I realised why I’d been a foolish tourist in the back of a car,
blaming the universe for standing in my way. We were flying back, sipping tepid
coffee at the KL airport from our last few Malaysian ringets. “ Is this why the
days were shorter?” I asked her, the foolish tourist. She smiled and nodded. I
think she knew what I was referring to.
Travelling is about people, she
said. Through people, I added in my mind. I had travelled through her. Quite
literally, she’d let me come with her as a last minute addition to her
itinerary. More than that, I’d seen
through her eyes, her vision of a perfect holiday. She’d been disappointed too,
maybe even more than me, that we never got to the volcano. But for her, this
trip was a lateral experience, like a file cabinet she could pick experiences
out of. She could file away Bandung, only returning to it as a cautionary tale.
An antidote for further trips. Maybe what she would open regularly was the day
we stayed up for 24 hours, starting in a Buddhist temple and ending in a reedy
club in Jakarta. The time she held her friend’s baby for the first time, or
when she began to giggle, uncontrollably, at a reggae singer’s high-pitched
laugh.
My dad has the travel bug. He passed it on to my mother, by
telling her stories of the places he’d lived in and the food he’d eaten.
Impossible stories of how monkey brains were scooped up in spoons and eaten
with their bodies wriggling under the table. She’d laughed herself to tears,
she told me, and then decided to marry him. Since then, they’ve taken my
brother and me to fantastic places both within and outside India. They were
conventional travellers to unconventional destinations. Instead of Paris or
Rome, they took us to Jordan first. We saw the Bhimbeteka caves before me or
any of my classmates could locate Madhya Pradesh on a map. I still remember the
insides of a cavernous dark room in Chakori, where by candle light, my dad told
us ghost stories of station masters whose hands would stretch like rubber. It
was always the same story, about arriving in a strange place at a strange hour
and meeting strange people. In some ways, it mirrored what he did on holidays
with us. He planned to the very last detail, booked every minute of our time
onto mundane tours meant for old, crinkly people and herded us like lost
members of a flock, snapping and gesticulating wildly when we were late. We
can’t waste time, he said. Time is money. We’ve already paid for these. His
string of reasoning was inexhaustible.
As much as I awed by where he took me, I was annoyed at how
he did it. He still does it to us, at malls, for movies, for functions and on
holidays. So that day, on a taxi ride with no end in sight, I heard my father
chiding me for being late, for the lack of planning, for not wringing joy from
every moment. Trying to deafen myself
from it, I watched the sun slice the sky into dark and light halves, and
shutters of shops go down as we sputtered up the narrow highway, still hopeful
we would make it. I was unable to reconcile this, I urged the driver to press
on. In my version of a holiday, there was no question of wasting borrowed time.
And that was my second revelation. Flying back, I realised
how the airlines had tricked the time barrier itself. I’d never felt it so
starkly because I’d never flown through three different time zones. We were
almost making a mockery of the linearity of time, going ahead and forward in
calculated strokes, so that somehow, we managed to arrive in Bangalore the same
day we left Jakarta. We flew back in time. We controlled its flow. It was up to
us to decide how we owned it. We owned
it. We’d earned it. It was ours to waste, to hold and to lock up in
memories that were a consequence of only our decisions. Suddenly, I wasn’t
being held hostage by the idea of time slipping by me. Instead I stood directly
above and parallel to its flow, like a river I could dip my toe in and out of.
These moments of enlightenment are still nestled in my
brain. They go off as light bulbs as I write this. Create a fuzzy frequency
between the two, urging me to stay beyond the realm of everyday disappointments.
It won’t last, this heady feeling, this emancipation from the need to be
“switched on”, on being a slave to time, destiny and logic. But it has
re positioned things inside me. Like pieces of a jigsaw, they now sit better
together and I am able to move more swiftly through the day with the knowledge
that I failed, but I moved on. That experience and memory and joy are, at the
end of the day, under my control, and the world is still my oyster to pry open,
only with different pliers each time.
