Thursday, February 16, 2012

Musings of a lonely traveller

It was unlikely that I would have embarked on a journey that I had not planned for in my wildest of dreams. But, you’ve been adamant. You wanted me to travel across the space -- alone and lost. You planned and packed everything for me, and bade me goodbye, saying that it was my journey and you cannot accompany me.

Deep inside, I wanted a company, the horror of travelling alone and touching upon unknown destinations in the midst of strangers are experiences I would love to forget. So, I wanted you to be with me. I wanted you to be my travel mate with whom I would have shared silences of mysterious distances. Distances as experiences suggest are mostly long, tedious and bereft of any familiarity.

Once in a while when you’re intoxicated with the idea of adventure, it is fine to be alone and travelling. The sense of adventure touches the crescendo, and your gregarious self becomes unabashedly shameless. It does not even bother before interrupting love-struck couple engaged in deep conversation of hearts to show them the ugliest pair of high heels you have bought from a flea market during your last vacation stint.

Of course, such efforts do manage to hold two seconds of glances laden with astonishment from strangers. But losing meaning to absurdity should be avoided at times. One should not stoop so low that your innocent act of attracting attention is construed as stepping into someone else’s privacy. That is actually bad, I would say, really bad.

That is when you realise that travelling alone, that too often, subconsciously affect your psychological bearing, which in turn turns you into a neurotic, to be mocked and ridiculed by unknown faces with whom you try your best to build a rapport. Such attempts do not work often. After all, most of the times, your co-passengers have partners to share the jig-jaw puzzle ride of a journey.

After a while, all you do is end up praising even the most moribund of landscape, dry and barren, as the most natural and rustic beauty you have ever come across. Such is the fate of loneliness that you don’t even think twice before blurting out the dumbest of comments not often associated with normal human behaviour. Insanity? Yes, insanity of unparalleled match that builds and grows every day in your mind and heart when all you have for companionship is loneliness.

I detest that perversion of loneliness. I don’t express my opinion often in regard to people like us who are abandoned in the embrace of loneliness. That is why in a bus jostling for space is often so silent that even human groans are perceived as usual playful acts staged by your stomach after a heavy meal? That is why perhaps, pain and its nemesis called happiness are measured in equal contempt. We all have become so immune to emotional outbursts that silence is what we encounter in every destination.

Otherwise, how could it be possible that even after travelling together for hundreds of miles two strangers leave each other as unknown faces at the end of the journey?

However, if you consider the same situation in a slightly different way there lies another beauty. Isn’t it good that after travelling together for several hours in the same train compartment, surreptitiously sharing glances, even if not sharing mundane details like your respective destinations, you both leave each other without ever expecting to meet again in another journey, to cover another distances?

There lies the thread of linking strangers. They are generous people, and set each other free from any bond. So, at times, I feel more strongly for strangers, as they don’t force upon me any session of questions and answers.

In my latest journey, which is your gift to me, I decided not to try hard to befriend any stranger whom I am mostly likely to stumble upon. I, for sure, would meet many people. But, I am adamant and to be the most stoic of strangers during the entire journey. I am going to give a tough competition to other stony strangers whom I am going to meet on my way.

Even if the elderly gentleman holding a newspaper, sitting next to me in the bus expresses his disgust in regard to latest “porngate” scandal rocking Bangalore, all I would do is give him a cold blank look. That would obviously silence him till he covers his entire journey. Or, it might happen that from next time onwards whenever he boards a bus, he would maintain complete silence, as a mark of respect to his co-passengers.

After all, city buses are meant to cover the annoying hours of life in Bangalore. They are no social clubs to befriend people. So, such pervasive silence thickening the red, blue and brown (or is it something else)-coated walls of buses is a well-established rule.

I am saying this with hell lot of confidence, which only a veteran like me of many bus journeys across the length and breadth of the city could ever possess. But then exceptions do happen, and I too have been blessed with befriending men, women and children, when they have opened their hearts to me, and shared those secrets which they perhaps cannot share with their loved ones. After all, they knew that I am just another co-passenger like several other thousands of them whom they had encountered in a bus, guaranteeing them not to meet again.

It is just that I carry secrets of a few strangers whose names I had never bothered to ask.

That is why I love big bursting cities, the anonymity they give you. Even the ice-layered Himalayan ranges from childhood memories had shared their names and addresses with me. They often used to visit me in my courtyard and my mother was always generous enough to offer them chai and biscuits. When you are a resident of a valley surrounded by mountain cliffs, all you have for friends are the mountains.

In small towns of India, a stranger is only a prisoner, kept secluded behind the walls of a mini jail, manned by the lone policeman, whose son is again a friend.

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