dev2r

Later in the night, the potholed road took its toll on the bus with a flat tire. He gingerly stepped out of his berth, careful not to wake the woman. Which didn’t work as fumbling in the dark for shoes has never proven to be an easy task, ever. She looked at him with sleepy eyes and asked something in her language. He gestured her to stay put, managed to convey to her everything was ok, and went out to stretch his legs. Their semi-forced cohabitation of the berth for a few hours seemed to have given rise to years of simulated nocturnal comfort and safety in her.

When he re-entered, he found the woman asleep, comfortably and fully stretched on his berth, his backpack and book neatly stowed to the side. True, he had enjoyed her very present presence, but he was determined not to switch places with her. He gently prodded her in the leg, and she woke up startled. Grinning sheepishly, she moved back to her seat and fussily gathered the shawl around her.

When he awoke next morning at the noisy terminus, he found the woman pressed against him as before. Nothing had really changed between him and her, the two strangers. Separated by a thin shawl and cold metal, separated further still by who they were, they had been together for a night, tentatively seeking, and finding from each other something that was either teleologically superior or inferior to the simple act of two physical bodies voluntarily inhabiting a confined space together for an extended period of time; superiority/inferiority being purely subjective.

***

As she left the bus in a hurry, she forgot her shawl. he called out to her and handed it through the window. She smiled her brilliant, toothy smile. He smiled back. He didn’t know her name or anything about her; he didn’t want to.

*

Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1

He embraced the fine yellow dust that now permeated his clothes, his skin, his breath. He had traveled through the dusty landscape of a part of his country that was as foreign to him any other land thousand miles away. He had soaked in the strangeness of the people and the places, but he couldn’t always evade the memories of loss and loneliness during these idle hours of solitary travel.

He was at the far reaches of his country – frontier-lands where people were seemingly honest, hence suspect. Suspect, and curious. The natives didn’t understand why someone who looked so clearly like them could only speak stutteringly in their language, and the itinerant backpackers didn’t understand why a native was trying to make conversation without selling them something. He had begun to enjoy his unique position in the ecosystem of Terra Tourismus. Even when the ecosystem was inverted, as in the one he inhabited elsewhere, where the backpackers were the natives and vice-versa, his position remained the same.

Now the trip was coming to an end. He was content – the nighttime desert (with only a faint whiff of camel dung) and the majesty of the old palaces (best paired with a complimentary bouquet of horse manure) had filled his mind with wonder and peace. One more bus ride through the night, and his journey would end. He would leave this place, perhaps not to visit it in his lifetime again.

He had booked a berth on a ‘sleeper’ bus. The sleeper bus was a recent attempt by the natives to bring the experience of lying horizontal and being jolted all night in a cramped 5-by-2 faux-leather plank while traveling on railway tracks, to the potholed asphalt roads of the land. As he boarded the bus and checked his ticket, his heart sank. His berth was at the very end of the bus. While trains restricted human-brownian motion to two or three directions, the tail-end of a bus meant being granted five degrees of freedom to be thrown around. He settled down and made himself comfortable as much as he could.

The bus was filled with backpackers. Two berths ahead, a German couple on honeymoon had found the sweet spot – the middle of the vehicle, where neither rear-vehicular whiplash nor blinding headlights through the front could disturb their sleep. Across the aisle, a duo of Spanish females had taken up residence. He watched with amusement as a fat, middle-aged tour guide tried in vain to get their email addresses. “Tu es mentirosa”, the girls told the man, and the man offered as proof his whiskey-unstained integrity from the night before.

***

next… Mixed Company

Havasupai Canyon, June 2010

Implacable and red

the Desert lay siege
Upon the Island of glass and neon
In waves of heat
And shimmering white.

On these shores of perpetual war
The weary traveler
His head bowed, eyes lowered,
Hair bleached, skin brown

Remembers

Her damp tresses,
Those moist curls of invitation;
Out of reach, black.

As the ferry left _____ harbor, the clouds were beginning to roll in. When the ship finally turned and belched its way out through the tangle of masts, an insubstantial rain had started to fall. The weekenders had scurried to their cabins by then, eager to catch up on sleep that had surely been lost in the last few days.

The upper deck was left to the stragglers and the students. The backpackers were already rolling out their makeshift beds, looking for spaces in between the blue wooden benches that would provide them shelter against the night’s wind. Those who were strolling the deck and peering down the railings looked confused, as if they were not sure if the mist coating their faces was the sea spray or the insubstantial rain. A few others lingered, careful to avoid the spaces the pennywise backpackers had appropriated.

She sat at the edge of one of the blue benches, because she wanted to be as close to the sea wind as possible. She was huddled in a black waterproof jacket with only her head sticking out. Strands of her hair fluttered defiantly against her infrequent attempts to pull them away from her face.

He appeared to have been trying to photograph the harbor as the ferry departed. With darkness rapidly closing in, he sauntered without aim around the deck, looking down and behind at the wake left by the ship’s propellers. When his peripatetic tour landed him near where she was seated, she looked up, flashed a brief smile that didn’t go past her lips. He smiled, looked away and looked back again.

“Did you visit ______ on the island?”

Yes, she said.

“Not a lot of tourists if you went before ten, and you get half price on the bus too”.

She nodded, smiled briefly and looked away.

“How long were you on the island?” Two weeks. “Did you also visit ______?” Yes. “I almost missed the tomb there.”

So had she.

A few minutes passed while he lingered and blinked against the wind. He turned and looked at her twice but she pretended not to notice.

“I just wanted to talk.”

He held her gaze for a few seconds and started watching the wake again.

OK, she said.

He took two steps back from the railing, and sat on the blue bench next to hers. He told her where he was from and how long he had been away. She told him the same. He told her where he was going next and how long he wanted to stay there. She told him about her husband and how he was going to talk to his friend and get her a job just like the one she’d quit before she left.

Just when the sky had turned black and stars had begun to appear, the horizon turned an unnatural yellow. It was the port at another island, and they were going to dock soon. The conversation turned to things they had seen and things they had bought on the island. She told him about a special gift that she’d found for her husband in a village, one that the tourists never went to. He told her the exorbitant price he’d paid for something similar.

When the ship left the dock, the mechanics of the previous island’s departure were repeated, with little variation. A few more sleeping bags sprouted between the blue benches. The night air became colder and she began to shiver. She told him that she was going to get some dinner at the ship’s restaurant and would he care to join. They walked down two levels, took the wrong turn twice, and finally found the restaurant. They ordered club sandwiches. He chose a Japanese beer and she had red wine. It was her last night out on the sea for a long, long time, she told herself, and then she had one more glass.

“Could I take a look at the _______ you got at the village? I’m sure it’s better than the knockoff I got at the port.”

She got up wordlessly and paid both their bills. She remained silent while they went further down a level and took two more wrong turns before reaching her cabin. She rummaged through her backpack and unwrapped the gift. She handed it to him and he turned it around in his hands and tapped it a couple of times. Stepping forward, she took it from his hands, and placed it on the top bunk. Still saying nothing, she put her arms over his shoulders, pushed the back of his head towards her. The kiss, at first tentative, became natural and insistent. While his hands traversed her back and stroked her neck, she closed her eyes and decided to savor the kiss.

***

She could see the dawn through the porthole when she awoke. Black smoke and seagulls were visible too, which meant that they were almost at their destination. Lifting his hard and encircling arm wrapped around her waist, she rose and went to the miniscule bathroom to get ready. When she got out, he was already dressed. He slipped behind her and reached the door when she went to retrieve her gift from the top bunk. He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, opened the door and stepped out.

“I really just wanted to talk.”

She nodded understanding and let the door close.

I take the HBLR to work. If you live and work on the Jersey shore across Manhattan, it is the best commute possible. The light rail runs nearly 24 hours, quite frequent and less crowded than any other form of public transportation in New Jersey. But there’s a peculiar downside to the light rail that might be just my own imagination.

Contrary to the light rail’s simple, elegant lines and aesthetics, the doors open and close like a medieval fortress. The sliding doors of the rail are unlike any elevator doors or even the New York subway trains; they are unforgiving of tardiness. These simply won’t pull back if you put any available limb in between them to prevent them from closing. Much like Jersey Citizens’ noted surliness, they will simply stop trying to crush your arm and wait there until you give them a firm push backward. The driver, very much an extension of the light rail, will voice through the microphone in a monotone, “Please do not try to enter while the doors are closing”.

But that’s not my problem with the sliding doors. The opening starts a deep KADAK that rumbles in a deep bass tone, and then the doors slide open with a noisy whirr. And everytime there’s a KADAK, my left ear drum experience a short stabbing pain. This is not a random occurrence but happens every single day. The noise gets my left ear even if I have my mp3 player’s headphones on.

I was reading today on /. about a device that emits ultrasonic frequencies inaudible to older people but audible and annoying to teenagers. Could there be a counterpart to this frequency at the other end of the spectrum? Should I just wait for the sliding doors of the Star Trek future that open with nary a whisper?

here.

Here’s one from me:

I skydived (skydove?) for the first time yesterday. The rush when I just walked off the airplane into nothing and realized what gravitational acceleration actually meant was incredible. The experience would have been even sweeter had I actually pulled the cord myself and steered some more.

Still, jumping off a propeller plane with a 220-lb hungarian man strapped to your back and realizing all you have is 12000 feet of thin air between you and the ground is quite exhilarating. I would definitely do it again, if only to prepare myself to do a solo.

Here’s another reason why Canada rules – Smart cars. I thought the car I had spotted during my trip was a custom-ordered model. I was planning to google it up but had no idea what it was called. In one of those happy coincidences in life, it turned up on MeFi today. Turns out the smart car is marketed in Canada exclusively and outsells Minis and Beetles.

The last line of the article was particularly apt. It took all my motor skills to drive at 70mph and get a proper picture of the Smart Car.

He wore black. He had white hair. And he had a square face. Except for the glasses and his height, he looked a lot like Johnny Cash. He was going to drive me to the airport.

It was a sunny day; as sunny as it gets in October in Calgary. Being the only two people on the bus, we found common ground on the time-tested subject of Weather. Johnny Cash told me of the drought six years ago, when all the grass was burnt to a crisp. He spoke of the melting ice-caps and the extreme phenomena all around the world.

“It says in the Bible that Man will destroy himself.”, he said. “Yes, but we can’t just give up”, I said. He softened. “That’s true, we just have to live it one day at a time, and that’s what we do.”, he said. I agreed, and I arrived at my gate.

While I was there, it snowed. After a while, the sun shone. It could be the next ice-age in a few decades, or global warming could melt the ice-caps into oblivion; but looking at the lake, it felt good to live today.