Home is on The Road
Added on Monday, July 7th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Indian architecture
Each day I get back on the road like people go to work. I wake slowly. I am in Delhi. The drone of the air conditioning unit mesmerizes me. I lie in my bed not moving a muscle, wishing I could lie in bed all day, soaking in a half awake life not wanting reality to seep in.
But it does. On the road to Agra.
I get up for breakfast in some hotel on the side of some road south of Delhi. The boy pours me a lime soda and maybe it is the syrup or the reaction the soda has with the lime, but it is so active I feel the effervescent spray on my face.
In a place where there is no privacy, I am starting to crave the small things. I need the detail; to drink chai alone, watch the blue moon over Pushkar, sunbathe on a Kerala beach, drift along the Varanasi watching the ghats. It is the small things I want and not the big ride, yet I have set up this journey in such a way that the small has to be extracted only from the bike.
Masala chai arrives and it is poured for me. Strong fans pulverise stale air across the breakfast tables as I sip my tea. As I sit quietly, exactly half way around the world in time and place. I am very far from home and yet not at all on my way back.
There is traditional song on the radio and to me it is indistinguishable to all the others. A soft voice sings about loves lost, loves won, love withheld or no love at all. She will also sing about crops that will have grown or failed, she will tell us how the gods will have been worshipped and the village will be happy or sad. How simple to be as simple as that.
The masala chai comes alive with sugar. The Indian palate comes alive with sweet things. An Indian is never happier when he is eating something sweet or so much panne that he cannot talk. Madan was a quiet intelligent man and came over to talk. He opened up to me in the way people do to strangers. He told me secrets he knew I would take away with me. It’s like talking to your sacred tree, you can spill out your heart and not even the twigs or leaves will flutter a word. Since he was married at sixteen, twenty-four years ago, Madan has seen his wife for only ten days a year. He has worked away and for twenty years in the Rajasthan Motel. He said he couldn’t think of leaving her because in the villages, arranged marriages are for life. If he left, he said, the villagers would kick him out. His family is only four hours away by bus, on the road between Agra and Jaipur, but if he leaves more than his boss will allow, he will be told not to return to work. Like millions of other low wage employees Madan is a slave to an almost feudal process that governs every way he lives. I drink my masala chia and leave. This is how it is for me because I can always leave. Unlike Madan, my world is one of moving and never staying.
Up the road the usual cacophony of sound edited precisely with what I saw; auto rickshaws crammed with people in cheap shirts, scooters with fat wives sitting side saddle, batches of thin men squeezed on two-wheelers, truck drivers waving their heads from side to side wearing that silly grin.
On the left I saw a McDonalds and for old times sake bought a Mexican wrap and fries and thought more about Madan. Loves lost and loves gained. Him the undisputed father of his three children, me, the parent marginalised by an ex-partner in order to make way for the new man. It’s a Parallel World. A land full of contrasts. A mental landscape of diffracting moments. I looked out of the McDonalds window and saw the Carriers honking their way slowly ever closer to Agra or Hyderabad. National permit holders would cross India and I would pass and re-pass them as I headed south. I wanted to see Shri Shri Ravi Shanker but he was out of the country until August. I wanted to ask the Beatles guru what he thought about life, because just then I didn’t know.
Back in Delhi I rode with Caroline. She had travelled hard in Africa and sat as pillion on the most challenging of bikes to go two up. I know of very few women who can do this. Then she left. I set off for Agra in the wet. I saw nothing interesting in all the interesting things there was to see. New wave Indian architecture was exciting but just then all I saw were the scratches. Everyone was friendly but all I felt was my invaded space. It was time to go home, then I remembered that home was on the road. It would get better.
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