There is something peculiar about being displaced against the direction of the line of sight. It isn't merely about being a mild physical anomaly. It extends to the mind as well. As I'm being borne backwards from Dadar by the Jan Shatabdi Express to Aurangabad, my mind refuses to disengage from the metropolis that I'm oriented towards. It dawns on me that there is such a thing as leaving a place and all thoughts associated with it behind. Staring vapidly outside a window at the landscapes shooting forward, I find it hard to forget the trappings of work. Soon, I am distinctly aware of my mind replaying the events of the day in reverse.
It begins with a vignette in which I am fretful, rushing back home in an auto-rickshaw and wondering how everyone else waiting at home is playing it so cool. I am late and yet have received but one phone call asking as to how things have progressed. Then the scene loops back to the loveliness that is the folding action representing the closing of a work laptop. There is something about the manner of this activity that clears the mind. I'm struck by how the mind is once again influenced by the mechanics of how we do something. The next vignette is characterized by infinite limbo. I'm stuck waiting for something to arrive and it never does in this replay for the scene does not segue forward. Dazed, I look to my mind for succour and it obliges, looping to the next vignette. This is a flashback of sorts for I'm presented with the arrival of my uncle and aunt from Dubai, a happier memory to dwell upon.
The six of us - Ma, Pa, Kaamya, SM, Pushpa - are seated in my bachelor pad, now feigning a pretense to being something more. On cue, I rewind to some hasty rearrangement the previous morning before my parents and sis had arrived. I am in the middle of my living room and, a biannual upheaval. After a significant chunk of time spent achieving the quixotic dictum of a thing in its place and a place for everything, I am somehow left with residual energy for fussing about with a colour scheme of sorts. Eventually, I decide on a combination of earthy maroon and demure orange. A trio of petit cushions make their way on to my coir bed ...... and the final vignette segues to the maroon interiors of the Jan Shatabdi at this point. Part of it had begun to feel like work again, belittling the move towards cozier memories.
The six of us are now seated in the train. I try to detect any sense of facial discomfiture wrought on the others by preoccupations. Sure enough, I catch all of them at various moments grappling with their own sense of work left behind and upcoming. Pa wears any such preoccupation in languid fashion, in the manner of someone who is used to the consternation it brings from years of experience as a practicing Chartered Accountant. Ma is keen to get a discussion on familial complications out of the way before touring begins in earnest. I sense she is too dutiful about our trips to let anything serious get in the way of fun - a paradox! After many attempts at meaningful conversation, we are defeated by the physical anomaly alluded to earlier. The best antidote to the mental bedlam these things result in is sleep. Kaamya lands a winner at this by seemingly being able to doze anywhere, anytime. I see it as her own response to a general malaise at continual displacement that has consumed the better part of the year for her.
Pushpa and SM have, after a series of booking misfires, emerged on the other side of vexation where things are clear again by way of resignation. Their respective work situations nags at their thoughts as well, compounding the issue. My aunt isn't sure if she will be granted leave at the school in which she teaches. Uncle, IT man, stands poised to spend a good hour each day on the trip on the phone; only we don't know it yet. Kaamya, in the midst of a PhD, has her recently completed field work and the prospect of an unpeopled winter in Denmark to contend with. By and large, our countenances are writ with vague concerns. It occurs to me that this is an all-adults trip, a first for us.
Every now and then, the vagueness is dispelled with a joke - someone has had a series of light bulbs go off inside their mind! We are a faithful group in conversation. Sensing the importance of such an opening, everyone pitches in with something alike in tone and mood. This leads to a spell that is markedly pointed in the manner of its participation and its effect. The subjects inducing such spells are as diverse as the nature of Kolaveri chap Dhanush's new-found sangfroid in performances, the degree of truth (or untruth) to the pronouncements of family astrologer Raasikkal (Lucky Stone) Raghavan, or even how we have finally reached our hometown Madurai's rail soul mate Manmad after years of talking about it. In a family dominated by ferroequinologists (now that's a hell of a term), the occasional rail joke can be lost to outsiders in the dizzying depths of a shared hobby!
And when the laughter dies down, the vagueness returns. Inevitably, at some point, the baton doesn't get picked up and everyone settles into their own mindspaces. This trip is to be one such, I think at this point, where many of us are beset a touch more with care than we've known on trips prior to this. In a way, that is novel too. Having reached a seamless transition point of the reverse chronological exercise my mind has been perpetrating on me, I am less beset with concern now. A deep breath and a sigh later, I settle into the line that's been my refrain for a year now. The years shall run like rabbits. For in my arms, I hold the flower of the ages and the first love of the world. These two lines of Auden are so incredibly context agnostic on their own that I fit them to whatever I'm feeling when I evoke them for my comfort.
Looking out to see vistas of hills punctured by pretty wadis, I am more certain in the notion that we are going somewhere else now.
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