Time Travel on the Road to Nowhere
India
I lay on my bed reminiscing about 1960s northern England where I lived as a child. It must have been about midnight and I thought about terraced houses and smoke stack chimneys rising in the distance down by the docks, and rag and bone men crying, “Any old iron”, in sing-song wailing voices as they walked the streets. Of course, there were also parents, family, and friends. Nearly all of those old working class streets have gone the way of the bulldozer, and the people – most are still alive, but a few are now dead.
Then my thoughts drifted toward where I was – India. Images began to flood my mind in the form of temple elephants, road-side vendors, film music, power cuts and generators. I could see foamy mouthed bullocks pulling carts, sky-high kites being flown by children from rooftops in Delhi or in blue walled Jodphur, and puja being offered on the banks of the Ganga. Then there was the almost silent air-conditioned swishness of Spencer Plaza on Chennai’s Anna Salai (Spencer’s is India’s biggest shopping mall). As I lay half-asleep, half-awake, it was clear that they had their own unique resonance; some obvious and abrasive, others more subtle and lilting. Nonetheless each possessed a certain commonality – they were the sound of the present.
And then I thought of the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Sun Temple at Konark, the Vijayanagar ruins at Hampi, Bodhgaya were Buddha achieved enlightenment, and the Kailasa temple at Ellora, carved out of the very mountain where it sits. The full weight of history hung heavy as I lay thinking about the great monuments and sites of India. And I remembered virtually every face that I had seen on the street during the day just gone. All of what I saw, from the temple at Konark to the people on the street, had one thing in common. They were echoes from the past; products of labourers, rulers and of great-great grandparents now long gone.
For me, the echoes grow louder with time. The further into the past people and places become, the sharper the significance and memories of them are. Phrases uttered by people no longer here or no longer seen, now seem more haunting and clearer. The expressions of history, manifested through palaces, monuments or the dull, grey streets of northern England, appear more significant and meaningful than they ever did before. And because the reverberations of the past are stronger, the appreciation of the present is greater. Maybe, I have just learnt to listen harder.
When I step foot on the street once more, in front of me will be a kaleidoscope of brightly coloured saris, dupattas, marigolds, and all of the paraphernalia that I associate with India – with the “other”, with what is different to what I once knew. But then I will turn around and look toward my past, and realise that it has caught up with the present and hitched a ride to India. It will not be such a heavy burden though. In fact, it will make the journey that much more interesting than it would have been than if I had travelled with youth alone.
For some who travel, the experience is all about seeing the sights, mentally ticking them off some list, and all accomplished within a fixed timescale. I have met people who adopt this approach and then tell me that they have now “done” this or that country. It all seems a bit too calculated, suffocating and tedious. Through memory, the past is always present; and through our constant anticipation of it, so is the future. Whereas the past can be a comforting companion, for some the future can be filled with dread if there is nothing to control it – control of the unknown. And what better way to constrain the future is there than to adhere to a highly rigid and predefined travel itinerary? It is the safe way to “travel”; a kind of second hand sanitised version where a true sense of exploration is lost.
Travel is freedom. The spirit of travel is not about getting from one physical point to another, but about embarking on the road to nowhere – a future shrouded in mystery. When this happens, the future seems inviting, and the present becomes more engaging. No physical end-point is required; just a willingness to live in the here and now. Time implies a future and past, but really, there is neither – only the now. And travel should be about the now – what takes place in the present. It is all a state of mind. The past and future are virtual reality. The present is all we have, soaked with echoes from the past and electrified by anticipation of the future. So the aim is to make the most of it by letting yourself be transported to somewhere else, somewhere different in both time and space, body and mind. It can be a difficult place to get to, but that is the aim of many a traveller?
