Things you remember for no reason! There is an escalator that goes down from the airport train to terminal 1-B at the Frankfurt airport, if you pay attention, that sounds like a swarm of bees. Every week as I go down that escalator, I remember Kevin Smith’s “Dogma”; every scene when the kids who play Satan’s pawns appear in front of Linda Fiorentino, you hear the same exact noise in the background. Every week I get fooled and think there are bees around. Escalator, bees, noice, Dogma, smile.
I am so lost today. It is rainy and gloomy here in my town. It is the sort of rain that makes you want to weep (refer back to my earlier post on “Blogs You Want to Avoid”). I am listening to Adnan Sami on my iPod. A half-hearted half-ended conversation rings in my head. I wish I could run until I am tired.
In my ancestral home (or more fashionably, “summer home”), during rainy days like this, I could walk to a simple mound in the middle of an open field and sit under a forlorn flowering tree that stood there for no reason. There was a large hole under it that I could almost crawl in. From that vantage point, with the protection of that giant tree over me, the world appeared alright. Then one summer, it fell without any warning, roots and all. For a long time since then, a large hole remained where it stood. A few exposed and orphaned roots were all that remained in its place.
Sometimes in the evening, the local boys would gather in the open field to play cricket with makeshift bats and rubber balls. I watched from the top as they hit the balls in all directions. Their cries and shouts were the background music to those crimson sunsets.
Years later, I would often listen to those shouts and cries whenever rain visited me unceremoniously in a Chekhovian fantasy.
I am a slave of my obsessions. Of course obsessions do not make any logical sense, but they are nevertheless crippling.
It was in that place that I learned to climb trees. They must have been small trees in retrospect. Because I remember climbing them with ease, and often because at the end of the effort was the reward of ripe guavas or mangoes. Sometimes, all the cousins would climb mango trees with a packet of salt so we could savor green unripe mangoes with salt, sitting hidden by the foliage in those branches.
A few years ago, I was on my way to Pondicherry to look for something that was not to be. The taxi driver was very amused when somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I made him stop the car and I climbed a guava tree. I remember that journey like a dream for all the right reasons. The sunsets in Pondicherry were spectacular; the dreamy sight of people walking idling by the water as the sun slowly descended was least of it all. Sunsets in Pondicherry were spectacular for the same reason as they were spectacular in Laguna beach. It was the soul.
It is all about associations. Connections. Everything in the present working as a conduit to the past. Everything in the past working as a clue for the future. Unspoken things and feelings, unfinished sentences and dramas. But I know that you know that I know that you know.
I don’t know which memories to trust and which ones to forget. Unfortunately, life never gives you clean options.
It is easy to wake up the one who is truly sleeping, but it is impossible to wake up one that pretends to be sleeping.
I am feeling so lost.
