Not-so-lonely planet
(June 2014)
To travel far and wide is to know the feeling of digging one’s hand into one’s pocket for loose change and finding it in four currencies. Or of setting one’s gadgets and timekeepers to another time zone and forgetting to reset them, so that each one displays a different time of day. To take off to new destinations is, of course, to contemplate Picasso’s paintings, to behold gigantic ships in the harbour, to ruminate over the sights of memorials of war or peace, to meet new people. It is also — strangely enough — to discover new layers and sides of known people. It is to arrive in unexpected rain and sleet in another country; to arrive to an old friend who carries half the baggage in the cold and rain. It is to feel grateful for the serendipitous moment of making friends with him, the scraggly boy in college.
It is to spend a week with a friend at her home and helplessly watch her fumble and almost trip over furniture or shoes in her earnestness to be a good hostess. And to discover by chance that the room heater is a borrowed one. That she had sensed my discomfort in Delhi’s winter, stingless but severe, playing climate change-induced roulette with the temperature. It is to sleepily realise she has been waking up every couple of hours to ensure I was warm and comfortable.
Being itinerant entails being asked “When will you meet me again?” at a train station, mid-embrace, slowing feeling the weight of the question and disconcertedly scrounging for an answer. It involves being unceremoniously told to check out of a government guest house and deciding to call every friend in the city to ask if they’d host you for two days. It means finding shelter in the house of the muhboli ma and feeling the rush of unfettered joy at meeting her after three years, of spending the night chatting with her about love, life, loss, and the future.
To travel far and wide is to meet a chatty, friendly sanyasi who wants to be friends on Facebook. It is to pick his brain by asking what the point of renunciation and detachment is, if he was using Facebook. It is the curious realisation that people one met merely five days ago have begun to seem like one has known them forever. It is the simultaneous amusement and twinge of pain on hearing “Come back soon” — half request, half command doled out with a wry smile.
To be perpetually nomadic is to feel fortunate to have made friends everywhere. And to measure those relationships as the sum total of sweet memories. Recollections of saying one’s byes before boarding a train only to spot a beaming smile across the glass window. Of texts that read, “Did you reach your room safe? Your phone is switched off. Call when you see this!”
To travel far and wide is to know how to strum heartstrings.
