#Scurf114: A Travel Diary
From seven years ago
I woke up in Rudrapur today. With a crabbed neck peered out of the tattered Blue Tourism bus and counted the pine trees that unwanting-ly laced the newly repaired roads from Haldwani to Nainital. I last visited the town in 2012. With law school batchmates. I was madly in love with this boy then. I listened to “yeh haseen vaadiyan” on my HTC then. Network went off even today in all the places it went off back then. The sky was clear. Blue like the lake.
My chair broken, my back pained, lower back breaking into jagged bits, I remembered the first time papa drove us to this cosy little town. It was warmer then. I had fake-taken photos from papa’s Yashika then. Mama had put socks on my warm feet. Bhai had pressed his nose on the other window of the back seat of our Zen. Today I listened to Hota Hai, and Suzanne and Kaun Mera. An odd concoction of vivid sepia toned enquiries acknowledged the footsteps of my mind.
Haven’t booked a hotel yet. Plan on finding love here. Plan on wailing the ingredients of time that I have, here. The sun in my eye today is harsh. A kid in the bus cries, his elder sister calls the bus a “van” because that’s what her teacher taught her.
The milestone the van just passed says Nainital is six kilometres. There’s no network. My toes curl inside the borrowed shoes. With height, the heat is rising too. But the valley is beautiful has ever. No politics touched it. Broken Maggi shafts, tea points selling Parle-G still around every dozen steps.
I could make a photo or two here but I did that in Lake District last year. I had missed Nainital a lot there. Nothing like the scattered jaggedness of this town. With all the memories stuffed inside my bag, I’ll pull the chord on this note… the bus pulls over to a sudden left corner…
I sleep in Nainital tonight. The lights are perfect in this part of the world. There’s ample man-made post humous light and then the sky is a bride tonight of the weirdo that the moon is. I listen to Creep. Tucked into a quilt. In this hotel that’s ever so poignantly named ******. The ceiling is a wallpaper. The floors wooden. The bedside lamps are from a forlorn era. The guitar chords tug at the right parts of my heart, like most other times. I twitch my knee, the right one is being a pain off late. I think of when I was four and a house-help teased me off marrying me off to a ghost. I hid behind the timid slender bark of the amrood tree at home. I cried. Horrid, dry tears. It was a Sunday winter noon. The light, perfectly sat on mother’s lap where she collected bundles of wool. The house-help always wore black clothes. Creep is on repeat. It was my favourite poet’s birthday yesterday. I don’t believe in dates, but his was something I should’ve learnt better. I check my Twitter and Facebook and Instagram feed to check for updates from my favourite writers. One of them spoke of her “aimless romances” a day ago. She’s as fragile as all of us. Her words though, are soft – like the feel of toddy on your throats after a long day in the Kerala sun. No one told me Pico Iyer was on Twitter, so religiously I go through his timeline. Posts from several years ago fall upon my senses like old paint peeling off from a moist wall. Chapped lips, the body isn’t accustomed to the cold anymore though I’ve spent seventeen autumns surviving cold that froze to -1 degrees on peculiar year. I think of decay and stare into the ashes in the ceramic ancient muddy ash tray. A universe, so fucking feathery, frisky – worth it. All of it.
Image credit: William Wegman/Primary Information William Wegman: Untitled ("3 dogs one bone"), undated.