moving north

Another early rise but this time rather than moving off for a light cruise through the jungle we head towards a trains station to get some kilometers behind us. The monsoon season has only really begun but I have never seen rains like this; drenching and heavy, wide and white. It falls soft and warm and feels like a kind of velvety syrup on the skin.

We hoped to beat the rains by moving north to Goa, around a 12 hour train trip (or so we were told). But we would soon find that trying to been the monsoon is like running away from the dark an hour after sunset.

The station was all a commotion. Lines and 'Q's (as the signage indicated) wound through crowds that shuffled and shook in pursuit of their many directions. There was that sound in the air that is unique to hubs of travel; the crackle of loudspeakers before various announcements of numbers and locations repeated in dialects unknown and languages indistinguishable. The rattle and ramble of locomotion drawing in and out of this single link of chain webbing with a hiss and a grunt as they surge and creak like lumbering metal snakes that just dined on a crowd full of humans.

A tap on the shoulder and a French 'Allo' made us turn to see a couple we had met the day prior on our floating voyage. Our destinations the same we made our formal introductions as we had failed to mention our names on the chariot of cane. Sandra and Michael had been in India for the last month and as they entered their final week they, like us, desired the taste of warm sunlight and a brief reprieve from the sticky saturation of the monsoon.

With a textured hiss that envelopes outwards the station rolls away from us and within minutes the picture in the window morphs into a rich garden of exploding foliage and mirrored puddles. The air is so moist, the land so low and heaven's barrage so constant that nothing dries and soon every depression becomes a pool that fills and then rolls over itself aching to spread, divide and conquer the space next to it.

Just like the jungles of yesterday the frame presents an untamed land peppered with basic human development. Mud bricks, demented tin, recycled signage and royal blue plastic tarps are reflected through my eyes as they dance in their window near and far. The clothing of the local people is laid out on piles of rocks in an attempt to bake them into dry submission.

Flashes of people move through the brisk scenery like characters under a strobe light. What they are doing, where they are going and what is moving them inside their own hearts is a mystery to me, but I ponder it anyway with no need for answers, just the vibrating pleasure of curiosity itself.

As I delve deeper into such curious thoughts I see a dark hand waving to my left. I shift my attention and look towards the hand which is now outstretched and begging for a contribution. I follow the hand to its source where a crippled man sits on the floor. He lo0oks into me. He looks at me like I am naked before him. His eyes are black holes in which resides echoes of a painful life, the likes of which I should never know. I want to help the man but I shake my head. I don't think I can help the man beyond a meal but maybe that idea is just a facade to hide my own selfishness from me. I look away but hear his aching tongue follow me with words I cannot grasp. After a moment I hear him move on and my eyes return to see him shuffle off on his hands. It is only that that I see that he does not exist below the waist and that he drags himself by his hands, his deformed torso separated from the ground by a piece of newspaper that scrapes and scrunches across the sandy train floor. I shut my eyes. No tear appears and no tear falls, but my heart weeps silently in its cage.