“The thrill of the chase, the blood pumping through your veins…”
There’s thrill, sure. And blood pumping through my veins. But there’s no chase. At least not the kind Sherlock meant. I’m chasing time instead.
Let’s start over.
We’re planning a trip to one of my favourite parts of India: Kerala. And I can’t sleep thinking about what to do, what to eat, and how to make it more than just another holiday.
There’s so much joy and excitement in planning for a trip. I’ve never fancied myself as a person sticking to plans and schedules. I like to just go with the flow. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy making plans.
Every morning when I pick out the day’s clothes, my eyes land on that one pair of jeans, or that shirt that would be great to wear on the trip. Or when I’m munching on a new flavour of fries, I make a mental note to buy it for the ride. “Ma would enjoy it,” I’d tell myself. I browse through cakes online to get “an idea” of the kind of cake we should order.
I take a virtual tour of the route we would take, look for decent rest stops, snack shops, sweet stalls, and memento stores. I zoom in and “search nearby” on Google maps, looking for fancy restaurants and coffee shops.
I go on trip planning sites to read through reviews of speciality food, and I scroll through menus and imagine myself ordering steamed fish and savouring how well it goes with the fried rice.
And I plan my work around my trip. I’ve become extra productive this week, so I could be at peace when I leave. I beg my colleagues to finish tasks soon because I wouldn’t be at work to check them out next week. I’ll go around bragging to every tea lover that I’m off to holiday amidst tea estates.
And all the while, I pretend like I don’t even have a plan. But every night, as I twist and turn in bed, sleepless, I’m glad I’m a day closer to the trip.
We don’t often realise, but the world isn’t as corrupt as we think it is. Sure, there’s a lot of cheap politicians, crappy streets, smelly alleys, unclean water, and even contaminated minds.
But there’s also beauty. There’s clean and detoxing air. We just have to look in the right places for purity. Like the sky through an aeroplane window.
I was fourteen then. Everything that caught my eye caught my mind. Life was school. And school was a routine bore, with a few interesting classes thrown in at times. My text books and note books were all just calculations, corrections made in red ink, and the occasional green signature.
It was yet another day, yet another class, with yet another teacher asking us to turn to page three hundred and ninety-four. The faint Harry Potter reference was all the entertainment we had. That was until I saw the picture in that page. It was an English class and for reasons still bewildering, the lesson was about gondolas.
Venitian majesticity
For some odd reason, I thought of orangutans. Perhaps it was the sound of the two words, or the colour of the picture facing me. Nevertheless, when I took in the word, gondola, I could only imagine an extra-large orangutan crouching itself inside a deep brown boat staring at the camera, and at me.
It took me a while to erase that image from my mind and look at the topic of discussion: Venice.
That’s how I fell in love with gondolas.
Now that I think of it, I don’t even remember the contents of that lesson. Except that it spoke of the no street Venice and the gondolas people used for transport. The idea fascinated me. I was never a fan of the Indian roadway system. Somehow it always makes me regret my food choices.
But this, this was genius. Travelling through the city in boats. I could picture the beauty of it, the environmental awareness in such a system. This was a time when global warming and pollution were so huge that they were essay topics for school students. Here was a city that boycotted them all. And I wanted to experience it, despite my aversion to all water bodies — I had taken swimming lessons for three years before my mother realised I wouldn’t do anything more than holding on to the edge of the pool with my head high above the water.
Staring at that pixellated picture of the gondola and the people in it, I realised I wanted to go to Venice. Just to ride around the city in a gondola.
For about three to five years after that, I didn’t think about Venice at all. It had become one of those school-days’ fantasy that people only cherish when they grow too old to pull themselves off their armchairs.
But one day, I thought back to the tingling sensation I had felt when I saw that picture in my text-book.
Craving for more, and clearer photos, I went looking for Venice and gondolas in Pinterest. The next thing I knew, I had created a board to collect all the beautiful Venice photos I could find. I still don’t know what good that would do, but that’s how love works: you never know why.
So Venice is my ideal destination. I’ve spent a lot of waking hours and much more sleeping hours wondering how I’d go to Venice. Or if I’d go at all. It didn’t take long for me to realise, going to Venice was no big deal. At least the dreaming part of it wasn’t.
I’d go alone. Because I haven’t found that one person who’s worth going with, and I don’t want to wait if I could go instead.
When? Tomorrow if possible, but this is just a plan so I’d leave the “when” to availability of flights and possibility of cash.
Where? Venice, of course. Perhaps once I’ve seen enough of Venice, I’d go somewhere else, but I’m not the kind to draw out detailed itineraries. I’d go where my gut takes me.
However, I’d like to make a stop in Bulgaria and Croatia on the way. I have no idea what’s best in either countries, but people don’t talk much about them, and I’d take that as a sign these countries need more travellers.
Oh, and since I’m already landing on Italian soil, I might as well pay a visit to the Colosseum, make a tribute to Madame Nightingale’s birthplace, and say hello to a few models in Milan. And once I’m done mingling with the tourists, I’d traverse away to some of the less known parts of Italy. Grab a pizza at Crotone, maybe, and spend a day watching Friends.
And then, when I’m ready to come back, I’d go back to Venice again, thank the gondoliers for a few more rides, and return with memories worth bragging about.
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You know you don’t belong when you have nothing to say. You know you don’t belong when you have no reason to stay.
I have nothing to say.
People around me talk about what that one person told the other person, who that dark haired girl slapped, who followed her home, and about who’s in whose friend zone.
While I stare at my phone, scrolling through fancy footwear without the slightest intention of buying.
But I have a reason to stay. I’m a part of society that won’t let you live unless you endure. So I endure. Though I censure.
I hear a friend talk about her trip around the world, and my insides burn with a yearning I can’t bear. I am happy for her, yet jealousy creeps through my veins, for me. It’s torture to listen to someone else’s stories when all you want is to go yourself.
That’s when I realised: I don’t belong. And I have no reason to stay.
Except, a poor bank balance.
It’s a vicious circle of self-hatred. Which results in posts like these.
It’s June now, but I’d still like to think March was recent. Having said that, I’d give anything to revisit my recent visit to the western borders of India. I’ve written quite a lot of my travels, and spoken about it even more. To be honest, I brought back over a thousand photos, and I needed a way to flaunt them.
But it wasn’t just about the charming sights and endless stream of photos. There were so many new things I had to get used to, and I did. It wasn’t easy being thrown into a vehicle with five others and travelling uphill with my head swirling. But I got used to it. I had no choice, but I enjoyed it too.
And we travelled with kids. Small kids, infants, even. That was my tipping point. I wasn’t keen on having kids on the trip, because they have a tendency to ruin it for the rest of us. And sure enough, there were a few tears, a few tantrums, and plenty of throwing up incidents I’d rather erase from my memory. It’s not something I liked or would recommend, but I got used to it. I just had to accept the fact that we were a party of twenty four, including three senior citizens and five kids, braving a temperature as low as -6˚C.
I hated having to give up the window seats and making small conversation every time we stopped for tea. But when I look back at the whole trip, I have nothing but memories I cherish. I enjoyed every bit of it. It was hard at first, and I had my own inertia to overcome, but once I did, I saw how beautiful even mundane things like a steep U bend became. It brought me closer to the people I travelled with. I hadn’t expected to meet a sixty-five year old eager to jump into a freezing lake. It showed me a different side of the people I thought I knew. I hadn’t liked the idea of travelling with my colleagues’ parents, but I had judged too soon. Because by the time we returned, they had became as close to me as my own parents.
Every morning when I pick out the day’s clothes, my eyes land on that one pair of jeans, or that shirt that would be great to wear on the trip. Or when I’m munching on a new flavour of fries, I make a mental note to buy it for the ride. “Ma would enjoy it,” I’d tell myself. I browse through cakes online to get “an idea” of the kind of cake we should order.
