Train rides are an essential aspect of travelling- staring into the vivid sky and across the green, always a blur of darker green.
Revelry often involves an adamant frog and music which throbs steadily into the tremble of the night. Outside, incessant insect-music and tree-conversations. A bohemian man drinks up the beer, staring at stoned young strangers across the thatched bamboo mat, and insists on talking eloquently. Before the fire crackles and shoots tiny star shaped sparkles into the darkness, something slithers behind the circle making my wretched city-heart shiver.
I smile as we stare into faces, half-known, cosy in our familiarity. Quaint wooden uncomfortable bunk beds filled with the scatter of the temporary, the busy. All our dreams mingle in the ritual mess.
Dusk, we sit on a tractor, filled with sand, jiggling chests, shrieks and thick, still, swirls of smoke from the chillum.
A slow trail of rickshaws, almost a caravan, snakes its way through crumbly red lanes into the heart of a closed market. Fireflies, like stars, pulsate everywhere, lighting up dark trees, and the violet sky dances nimbly, slowly, taking its time like a caress.
Bauls sing known songs, and we stare at the half-moon between two branches, startled as someone unknown, faceless lights a cigarette and his contours slowly become visible.
I sleep happily, in another room, and run through the jungle in the middle of the night. We meet a bunch of snarling langurs sitting close together, and a small one on a tree. I think of a languid hour spent in a circular red room, staring at kindred trees, head resting on my bag, and fold the image carefully away for keepsake.
:)
