Diary of Days | Plumtree Border, April 2017

(Somewhere on the land border between Botswana and Zimbabwe.)

 

We're at the Plumtree border, clocking our fourth hour here. The sun is now bright. As the 4am chill in our skins starts thawing, our bodies forget the sensation of cold. 

Customs officers are checking bags. Or rather, sacks. One of them demands that a sack be emptied so that he can inspect the items. Two men handle, haul and wrestle with the sack as the officer stands by. Out come potatoes, and a pack of butternuts. There is also 2 kg pasta, a few feet of wire and random cans of beans. The men are gently amused and they put back the items. The potatoes go in first.

***

The lead conductor is in his element. He's walking around in his bus t-shirt, jacket tied around his waist, chewing gum with vigour. He's segregating bags, pouncing on the occasional passenger with customs-forms advice, and summoning his stout, hard working colleague with a gruff "Bighead -- Bighead!". He doesn't seem too concerned that we're steadily heading into our fifth hour at this border post.

***

Bighead works steadily, and is unassuming. He has a friendly face and is much slower at writing (filling in our passport details on the ticket sheet) than at shifting around heavy bags. His deftness with the big sacks is an interesting contrast to his in-bus persona.

Everyone is waiting, waiting good-naturedly. They're mostly Zimbabwean, and are calm and pleasant. Though there is the occasional worn-out youth who was up all night in the bus since the "standing" section of the bus were encroaching on his aisle-seat, sitting in his face and propping their legs up on his knees. He tries to catch a wink of respite out on the border-post platform, his bag propped under his head.

***

I of course, am feeling quite at home on this random border in Africa. Existential thoughts start whirring and settling. Why do I work so much? Do I need a break between jobs, and can I take one? I run so fast to keep up with life. Why don't I write everyday? I borrowed K's book and reading soothes me so. Why am I not reading more? What do I want to read? Am I on the way to becoming the person I want to become? I'm 24.

***

L, the worn-out youth, is now sipping coke. He brought a straw with him, I don't know from where. He looks buffeted and resigned as the sweet girls next to him laugh gently at something.

There's a single tree with big red flowers against the canvas of the sky. A woman sits eating a banana. In my line of vision she's directly under the tree. Life is so pretty.

My love affair with Kamla Nagar

The mad search for identity in the colour stained streets. Living the market life, where a quiet moment of solitude happens on the floor of a balcony, from where you can look up at the telephone lines and clothes lines. You can't see the chatter then, though you can always hear it.

A quiet moment of wonder comes when you look across a street into a lane you didn't notice before. A lane studded with its own houses, its own children taking turns on a bright green bicycle, even its own roosters clucking around and disrupting motorcycle traffic. But in the split second before you witness what lies behind the opening of the lane, you know it could be the lane leading to a seller of magic carpets, or a motherly tarot card reader who you could patronise, just to have someone to talk to.

The air is heavy with chatter all the time, the lights are always flashing, the rickshaw wallahs always beckoning. The heat is unrelenting, the life of the market palpably throbbing against it.

It's a home. You always return here tired. Often in search of some alone time to think or cry. Often not getting that moment, even one moment. Distracting yourself in a conversation with the warden of the PG, which leads to the conversation with your PG friend, and you visit her room and sit on her bed to evade the sense of loneliness that started reclaiming you when you climbed into that rickshaw back from college. 

The hours melt away here. The signing in at the camera-guarded gates and the picking up of keys from the key-box and the walking up to your friend's room and then coming down to dinner in a group that has ballooned to so many girls, and then chattering loudly, laughing, and seeming like the least lonely people in the dining hall, and the final return to the room to finally turn the unused key in the lock, and collapsing into bed in a fear of losing all this tomorrow. All the moments of the quarter-day fused together by the heat of time. 

The imaginary tinkling of music in a far away lane that you saw in the morning, which you imagine to be lit with soft yellow bulb-light. The image (in time it will fade away) of a girl or a boy sitting at a dull PG window, plucking away at a guitar.

I can feel, in my balcony (one of the only balconies of the congested market), the golgappas being fried at Vaishnav Chaat Bhandar, a kilometre away. I can feel the taste of the quick burger that I (exhausted after heavy efforts to draw out my innermost feelings in portrayal of a character on the carpeted stage of a dark auditorium in SRCC) bought from McDonald's in a new-found freedom to spend my money. I can feel people I know, at the coffee shops, and the juice shops, and the departmental store, that line the outer boundary of my market. I can feel the chowmein being prepared by "Maharaj ji" as his helpers wipe plates on the terrace. 

Once, four of us rode back on a rickshaw singing Don McLean's Amerian Pie, and alighted just as the song ended. 

Once, Shivan and I stood and just watched the owner of the egg-thela in his astonishingly meticulous cooking. 

Once, I got very scared on a long walk around the campus, when I thought I got lost.

And one day, maybe around the death of July, it went away. I've never found Kamla Nagar since.