Tales from journeys embarked upon.

 

Dear …

As I already mentioned earlier, I have become a student once again. The fact is just sinking in and right now I’m re-experiencing everything as though in a time wrap, but with all the distance, enjoyment, and analysis that age has given. But more about that later. Right now let me tell you about my commute.

Days have suddenly started moving faster. Mornings start with waking up quite early and rushing to the railway station to catch the train to reach college.

A journey of around two hours that I spend looking out of the windows at the green speeding by. The green sadly punctuated by a marked increase in garbage whenever we near a big station or city. I remember the long childhood train journeys from Delhi which always brought a happy sigh as soon as we entered lush green Kerala.

In spite of the growing piles of waste, these journeys still give me sights to dwell on. Light and shade play an amazing game of rendering in a prismatic symphony the tall areca palms, heart leaf colocasias, emerald paddy fields, dripping rubber trees, breadfruit trees, banana plantations, the winding rivers, its many tributaries that seem to play hide and seek with the railway line, glowing white churches set on deep red earth, tiny temples in its unadorned existence, schools with their weathered terracotta roofs and eager little faces, lazy buffaloes half sunk in wet mud, long necked cranes hovering around, the numerous cats, dogs, crow pheasants,… workers bent over in the fields, women in bright nighties and dupattas… sights innumerable, each one perfect in its fleeting second.

The image of a woman walking along a leaf strewn deserted road holding her sons hand, off to buy milk, imprinted on my mind like a painting. And also, there were office goers with determined expressions, school goers, pilgrims and other interesting characters in the various stations that we stopped at.

 A quiet village road lined by fragments of moss covered stone walls sent me in nostalgia to old towns I have lived in the past. Towns that have now caved in to the times and dwindled into dinghy places crammed with mindless buildings, narrow roads and unnecessarily huge cars. In some places tall teakwood trees stand sentinels to landscapes that are gone in a whizz.

The wealth of visuals are accentuated by the variety of fellow travelers I come across, a world unto itself. In just a few days, I came across so many people and their stories. Yesterday it was a young couple on their way to enroll their daughter in a nursing school in Mangalore...father a construction worker and mother a beautician, parents and daughter hopeful about better prospects that await nurses outside India, their lot within the country being deplorable. Then there was a woman, a marketing professional who travels constantly up and down Kerala, resigned to hours on trains and buses. She was worried about her newly pierced nose which was not healing and probably seeing my nose stud asked me for tips to heal it.

This morning I was reading about the Bengali film festival and the film, ‘ Manohar and I’ about two people who meet on their train commute and become close sharing entirely fictional, happier versions of their lives with each other. I sat down on an unoccupied three seater and a man came and sat on the other end. He was craning his neck looking towards the door and in a minute a woman came and occupied the middle seat. They greeted each other happily. She took out a snack box, offered idlis to him and both munched happily. From their talk I understood they were government school teachers. Both so engrossed in their own world, the small window of time with each other every day.

Another day, it was a young man, a jingle writer making his periodical trip to the medical college hospital for treatment. I sketched his portrait which was not so well done, yet he was quite happy with it. Santabai, an old lady, her wrists filled to the hilt with green glass bangles, gold-speckled, wearing an orange saree was the very picture of grace, strength and easy friendliness when I met the group of itinerant fisherfolk with whom she was traveling. Accompanying her family as they traveled for a livelihood, her life, quite similar to a huge section of our populace, erasing borders of place, language, and merging with the place they inhabit at the time. This was more evident to me while traveling in an unreserved compartment filled with young men carrying backpacks, earphones plugged in laughing and joking amongst themselves speaking in various Indian languages and switching to Malayalam spoken with North Indian accent whenever required. They were headed home or to the next destination that offered them work as laborers.

Humanity seems to be ever flowing in the railway station, surging and ebbing as trains come and go. There are also the homeless who unpack makeshift living arrangements and pack it all back in the morning. Brushing their teeth, washing their faces at the drinking taps, they carry on their routines unperturbed.

In a crowded general compartment, sitting tightly packed with feet of those crammed up above dangling in front of my face, hands, body parts of everyone touching everyone until the whole compartment moves as one to the rhythm of the train made me think of Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power” about how crowds essentially discharge the fear of unknown touch ( one of humankinds greatest fear) and merges to act as one when in a group.

The train pulls into a smaller railway station, where only very few trains stop. It often dons the air of a sleepy town with passers-by resting or napping on tree shaded cement benches, some just catching a quiet breath or two from their daily lives . It’s long, empty platforms become a preferred evening-walk path for nearby residents. I alight and walk a short distance up a road with a government medical treatment center for elephants on one side and ayurveda dispensaries galore on both sides, displaying neatly labeled bottles of cures for all ailments, and take a rickshaw to my college. I think of how the journey is part of the process of stepping out of my comfort zone, of registering the changes, accepting limitations, embracing my strengths and taking each day as it comes. Meanwhile Heidegger awaits with Van Gogh’s boots.

More in my next.

Ciao. Adios for now. 

#artlife #artstudent #arthistory #olderartstudent