Road

Dark clouds cover one half of a crayon blue sky like a menacing army. Through the windscreen a road curls in the unforgiving dusk and eucalyptus trees frame themselves in the purple rays of the evening sun. They are assassins in greatcoats.  A peacock tries to fly. The evening gives way to night in Barabanki.

There are no such illusions in Faizabad. The road is meant to make cars behave like trainee yogis around pincushions or beds of nails or other such stuff and the landscape is grit and grime in the best postmodern apocalyptic fiction fashion. The trees seem tired and there are no animals alive except dead dogs. Somehow, dead dogs never die. Evening curls over the remains of the day like dirty, prickly blanket.

Midnight meals at highway-side dhabas. Skies that might or might not be portending rain. Cold egg curry and rotis that are either rubbery or hard enough to peel your palate like a potato-skin. Morning breakfasts in sickly sweet smelling hotels that begin their day tired, and work their way into exhaustion. The world might be ending, but it is not ending soon enough.

Somewhere, kids play a cricket match. A spin bowler chucks a quicker one and the middle stump does acrobatics. There is a whoop of joy which bounces silently off the closed glass window of the car. Scene change.

Thirty years ago, or maybe thirteen. How long has it been since you played cricket, ran a mile to deliver a ball supposed to travel twenty two yards; a small red object targeted at a stick with a vicious inaccuracy that would shame the arguments made in a political debate; how long since the last scrape on your knee which did not come hitting a wooden object during a powercut?

Boiling skies are beautiful. And somehow, from somewhere, a pale sun climbs out, heaving his bedraggled majesty into view to send one beam your way, flashing into your eyes for that one moment as the road moves on into a copse of trees. An 8-light minutes long beam of silence.

What the road takes from you cannot be described. What the road gives you is always dubious; the road whispers the words of your bright future as your sign over your life to the grand scam. Listen to the swishing of the tires and the slight crackle of tiny pebbles hitting the car’s frame. The road has no today, tomorrow or yesterday. There is only now, and now is forever. Listen to the swishing of the tires on the tarmac. You have lost the hand you were never even dealt, and the game is rigged.

Mornings. See the sun haul itself into the harness with the weariness that is your sole bond with it. It is either too hot, or too lazy. Somewhere in Azamgadh, a dust cloud follows you as you try to run away from it; it is not bound by the laws of physics, it will chase you to the end of time. And then one day, you will stand in front of a nondescript door of a nondescript house with your finger on the bell and the evening will start changing your mind in the hour of the witches and your fingers will acquire brains of their own and you will turn your back on everything. Listen to the swishing of the tires; they are music from the past and prophecies of the future.

Soon, it will rain and everything will be washed away.

This is about as close or far as you will ever get.