Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Incredibly Fast and Positively Good


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.