Panacea

(June 2015)

“I’m happiest when I travel. When I don’t, depression hits me the hardest.”

He was the owner of a resort on a secluded beach, I one of his guests. We had become friends for strange reasons. A day before I was to check-in, he informed me that women travelling alone were unwelcome at his property as a matter of policy. Furious, I berated him for being discriminatory and cavalier.

He asked, “What do you do?”

“I have a day job,” I replied scornfully, “by night, I work as a prostitute”. He was apologetic but insistent on knowing what I really did.

“Find out; you have my name.”

Over the next two days, the staff at the beach resort constantly fawned over me. He and I exchanged tales of our travels. He was about 45, well-travelled, polite and a depressive. My erstwhile psychiatrist had gingerly placed me at “situational depression with anxiety issues” in his scrawly writing on the hospital records. We concurred that travel was our refuge, opiate and perhaps the only thing that showed us brief glints of happiness.

An affliction of the mind takes you to the troughs of nothingness. On especially bad days it makes you wake up wanting to be dead. There is cold tar engulfing the soul. In travel, you seek the feeling of being alive, however fleeting. From it stems the allure of lying spreadeagled on a rock while staring at clouds, the feet numb from the icy waters of a stream born of a waterfall. Of riding a rickety bus that smells of diesel and decrepitude, through hamlets slowly stirring awake and going about life. Of flying halfway across the world and back, many times. Of trying to speak alien tongues. Of tiptoeing precariously on a rock to get a view of the other side of a dam and feeling like an explorer discovering a lost world.

You remember only a muddled narrative of sights, sounds and smells because your mind (or medication) plays tricks on your memory: The hiss of curry leaves being sautéed in a wok. Purple dandelions, tall milk cacti, anthills of red earth and palm groves growing beside each other. Ferris wheels silhouetted against the sky at dusk. Sangria by the glass, for a euro. Dancing and drinking the night away in a shady bar. Tiny, translucent crabs rapidly burrowing into sand and disappearing into the pits with a leap. Yellow sodium-vapour lamps lining a deserted street. Lying in the sand and taking on the tide of the sea. Sometimes its foam tickles the soles of your feet, sometimes the surf threatens to sweep you away. (“Does it matter if I drowned and died? Not really.”)

Inside the tiny shack made of palm fronds I had survived another desolate night.