TRAVEL stories

One day I felt uppish. Yes.

I travel when I feel uppish. I feel that I need to roll myself up in this show of magic and disappear. Hush.I leave behind some of my traits. Does 'my' sound kingly? Okay. Let's rearrange things. I leave behind some of the drab humanish traits. The dead cells, that I shake off during the time I roll myself, is one of the traits. I will one day teach you to roll. Again 'teaching' sounds kingly. I know you can roll yourself too. Quite brilliantly. Remember  we used to meet at random places and I haven't seen you since quite a time. I am just brushing up your memory to release off the smells which many call smelly but I know you will call it zinc-ky. I am not sure how much you remember me or how much I remember you. So I am recalling things in the virtual space.For us to see. Perhaps you too are doing the same thing. Its always a two way closed loop.Since the loop is large we loose hold of it at times.And we think it to have opened. I  would love to share my rolling stories again if we meet. Would you?

Images and the imaginations

Sometimes the scorning of the door sounds quite deliberate and instinctive.One door then another then another. Not obstacles but  journey-linkers. Numbers,doubts,age,colours,veils are inscribed on every such door and while an aged bulb tries to light the surrounding but the inscriptions it becomes no difficult for the journey taker to get hold of the moment, the translations, the withdrawals, the dreams, the sensations but what becomes difficult is the dilution of the moments as it creates patterns on the door invisible to the rest. There are images of the blank Durga trying to light the fire out of the broken woods, the stormed images of the shadowed wisp of rainy straws, recollecting of the burnt pandel that did not allow her to recite her to recite her poetry, that did not allow her to leave her home her mother and wait just wait,and that of sweat in her arms which tried to just play around.

He decided to leave his house when he was 14. Perhaps. The side crossings, the lamp posts, the man-holes, the closed pice restaurants, the red handkerchief lying mysteriously crumbled, the spontaneity of the reactions hidden in the leaves, the over bridge where he would stand and watch the dirty black flow alongwith miscellaneous things, some thrown to wash away identity, some with anger and sadness, some to keep secret only to oneself and show no one else to recollect in an evening when the winter sheds bringing in the summer winds and some which were meant to be thrown away. He could not leave.

He is 27 now.

He still walks every evening after working in the stationary shop selling pens,pencils,school books, water colours to the new artist, drawing sheets. And teaching grammar, history, geography, literature, mathematics to the small children in the floor of the shop halting and thinking in between travelling to the places, times, inside people, inside the lives of the living and the non-living things, inside his life still wanting to escape yet when his eyes focus on the meat shop overlooking his he returns back to the moment, the reality. 

The small shelter where the goats are pushed is dark- the scary sounds of the rats, the strong smells of the rotten leftover arabi leaves stamped by the comrades who have had their lives thrown into the hands of the young butcher, the smell of sweat and ator and the circling of the black and white hairs. The sand the mud trying to accumulate and relocate. The suddenness of the breath that draws her from the dark to the tree trunk cut short and then the soft and the crunching sounds of the strong knife getting stuck at times in the trunk and the dripping of blood still warm sending smells of insufficiency while the clouds murmur, the sound of the farther squashing of the flesh which would relax the customer and bring a smile to his face. He have seen the darkness inside.

To get out he would walk. Walk.

The different streets he would take and trace back was like a journey. And the stretching of the small things, the bounds, the constraints, the constants. The oncoming and the forth comings.


more of it as and when it comes......................