I am in Bangalore now. I've been here since 8 AM on Monday. Sunday was a mad rush with me packing all the bags in a hurry and dropping them off at the cargo transportation service at 8 PM. I was supposed to leave at 4 AM in the morning after sleeping for a little bit but this politician got arrested by the CBI on a multitude of charges and as all perfidious people seem to nowadays, he had his throngs of followers ready to instigate disaster. Paramilitary forces were deployed in the city and the borders were quickly being manned. I figured that I had a few hours before all of this would come together and if I needed to circumvent all this, I had to leave straight away. So I hastily put on my riding jacket, knee guards and armored gloves, slung my guitar on one shoulder and the laptop on another and started riding towards Bangalore.
The first fifty or hundred kilometers went smoothly. The weather was almost perfect. I was riding on smooth tarmac and there were vast expanses of lush green fields on either side. I could not perceive color quite obviously but the breeze blowing through them suggested to me a scene of utter fecundity and tranquility. The baggage that I was carrying was hurting my shoulders so I had to stop after 70 kilometers. My usual policy is to stop after every 200 kilometers but these were extenuating circumstances I told myself and I stopped to rest for a while. This continued through the ride with me stopping every 100 kilometers on average. Sometimes it was 114, sometimes it was 90 but every time I stopped to rest it felt like a 'Sweet Jesus' moment. The bike's seat is rather uncomfortable and when you get off it, you feel rather saddle sore and step around gingerly hoping that nobody notices that you've been a victim of sodomy. Towards the latter half of the ride I started feeling quite sleepy and the fatigue coupled with the sleep deprivation of the night before acted in a synergistic manner on me and brought a crippling sense of fear to my heart. I was more than halfway away from home in pitch dark on a highway that was eerily empty. I had no option but to persist and this led to quite an interesting first. I experienced my first hallucinations.
I don't know, first of all, if they can be called those. Whatever they were, they contributed to a harrowing experience. They were imperceptions I suppose, illusions caused by the darkness playing tricks on my weary mind. Oh the images, the images. I was riding at 95 kmph and to suddenly witness a woman holding a child on the side of a road in the darkness of the empty highway is nothing if not terrifying. When I rode on I discovered that it was just a pair of lights, evenly spaced out from each other, on an emergency call box. This continued for a long time and I saw many inexplicable images, having the process contributed to by my disordered imagination. I saw a man on a scooter with a female child looking blankly at me, I saw a house that had suddenly manifested in the middle of the road, and I saw innumerable carcasses. After a while I learned the ropes of it and merely let the initial shock of the image pass and rode through it. This proved to be an effective way of dealing with it but I was still very aware of the fact that in my wanton abandon I might fail to recognize the tangibility of something real and run straight into it. I managed, however.
During all this I started getting very very drowsy as well. My eyes were fast closing and the monotony of the darkness was proving to be lethal. Once or twice, my eyes shut for a second and I almost drifted across lanes causing me to rouse with a start and focus doggedly on the road ahead of me. I did so many things to try and keep myself awake. Things that I would be mortified to reenact even under the most inebriated of circumstances. I sang continuously for two hours till my voice went hoarse. I exhausted my musical vocabulary and sung out every single song that I knew in some entirety. Key, tone, timbre and pitch were lost to the wind and all that mattered was that I was screaming out those syllables to the rushing wind as if to conjure up around me a miasmic imperative cloud dictating the homily of focus. When I was out of songs to sing, I began conversing with myself. What began as an affable introspection soon become a heated dialectic about why it was not, per se, wrong, or insane, of me to have a dialectic with myself. Both sides of me made excellent points and this sustained me for quite a while as well. Towards the later end of the ride I also became my worst task master barking out orders and simultaneously delivering moving inspirational speeches designed to keep my eyes on the road and keep me going.
Despite all this, at about 5 AM, when I was close to 131 kilometers away from Bangalore, I started breaking down and seriously considered stopping at the side of the road somewhere and falling asleep. Just then, I spotted a petrol pump and I hastily pulled in to fill the tank up. I reasoned that this would give me some time to settle my nerves and rest my body and mind. I had failed to take into account the first light of dawn being a few minutes away and when I pulled my bike out of the pump it felt like the curtain had been drawn and the world lay before me in all her splendor. The first rays of light seemed to obliterate my fatigue and put the soporific effect of the kilometers behind me and I was a new man. Not bound by the restraints of encumbered vision, I proceeded to accelerate to 125 kmph and I was screaming my head off in the cool wind, my eyes darting to take in all the visions of the landscapes I was passing. I came to this place called Chikballapur which is about 50 km from Bangalore. It is a hilly area and viewing it in the morning light was a splendid sight. I could not describe to you what the vision entailed but I will try and do so without adulterating any of it. There were several hills on the horizon full of greenery on their slopes. And to each summit a dense cumulous cloud of mist seemed to be married. The clouds were of all shapes and sizes but the consistency of the clouds aligning themselves to the subtle contours made for a profound ocular spectacle. The clouds had descended onto the mountain in a very gentle manner, not overbearing in the least. One cloud was shaped in the form of a slug resting it's head on the summit of the mountain. They seemed to be in their twilight years of a relationship when reciprocity has been a certainty for an epoch and the promise of the togetherness is taken for granted. It made for quite a moving sight.
The rest of the trip was rather uneventful. The weather was cool, breezy and just slightly humid. There wasn't too much traffic on the roads and I managed to reach the place that I needed to get to at about 7:30 in the morning. As I stepped off the bike, I groaned, ravaged, but very happy at having finished my first over night long distance ride. I moved to Bangalore to reclaim my independence and freedom and in many many ways the ride was quite a fitting symbolic beginning to all of it. In the space of 10 hours I experienced the entire spectrum of emotions and emerged weary but triumphant. I'm hoping the ride becomes a metaphor for life itself. Since then, I have been busying myself with setting up a household and getting my affairs in order. I drank quite a few times enjoying the weather of Bangalore. It feels good to be back on my feet again. I am in the company of friends and in the arms of a very gracious and warm city. My love is on her way here and life could not be better.
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