JOURNEY: DISTANCES

Though we are seated on the same vehicle

How  very different are our journeys

And  sometimes, though we travel quite apart

How similar are our inner trips.

Somebody started a song smelling of toddy

The bus went on a climb to the hill top

And as you went up

You could see a vaster area

While down below

 You  noticed the intricacies and finer detail.

There were those who had managed to get seats

Everybody going somewhere

Because the bus may still reach some point.

The rugged looking man next to me

Was sleeping with his mouth open

And I peered in expecting to see the world inside him.

A little kid started belching and throwing out

As we climbed

And those behind him

Pulled down the shutters.

There were people of  many types

Moving towards or away from something or some place

Work, family, lover, friend, school, meeting, war…..

The distances between them did not go

Even when they were sitting next to each other

And sometimes they were far apart and still connected

Religion, rebellion, art, history, nature-

Which trip were you making this time?

There were people who had been confined within the room

And yet had travelled vast distances

And those who had travelled all around the world and yet

Were still in their cozy room confined.

There were those who had made the train compartment

Their home

And those who had made their home

Into a train compartment

And there of course were those

Who had left the train compartment as a train compartment

And the home as a home.

The sailboats  of the modernists

Travelled  to the ‘primitive’ and  back

They had imagined themselves as both shores

And as the bridge between them

And as the flag of freedom flying high.

But for the ‘primitive’,  journeys were banned-

The tour companies had made sure

That they were not to travel

To another person or place.

They were imagined to be living vegetative lives

Ineffective and constant, without change

And their capability to speak

Was held in doubt

Somebody else’s tongue always spoke for them.

Cutting through the oceans

Came somebody

From among the Mahars

His voice

Like the saltiness of salt

Took in the margins with it.

Politics was no more to be searched for

Only in the elected bodies,

Because it was everywhere

In the dirty clothes, in cleanliness, in water, wages

And on the streets.

The sun had left after the 

Harvesting in the salt fields

And the moon after patrolling the streets at night.

In the memories of the nomadic tribes

The nations existed

Shorn of any adornment

And with borders

Meant to keep them out.