Dis tance

Distance is

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

something you understand 

only when

you

          cross

it.

How far

          have you gone?

How much

          have you done?

You only know when you truly

 

 

go

 

 

the

 

 

length,

step

          across

the

line

                and

         look

back.

 

 

You have to 

step

          across

the

line.

 

 

Distance isn’t so much

a fancy thing 

until it

draws lines in itself. 

Lines

and

borders 

to tell of different rules.

Lines

and

borders

that disallow you to return.

 

 

               You don’t easily

          go

back.

 

 

Now.

Step.

          Across.  

The.

Line.

 

 

Head

                       forth!

 

 

Do you fear

the line?

Do you fear

what comes after that?

 

 

Then

          cross

it.

 

 

Because knowing is better

than fearing the unknown.

Dealing is better

than asking, “what if?”

 

 

                 For there are

            no                    “what ifs” –
     it’s an                       unqualified    
    question,                a rhetoric,
      already                an 
                                 answer you
                              don’t have the
                          courage
                        for, or 
                        just
                       dared
                       yourself
                       not to
                       find
 

                       out.
  

“Welcome to Vibration Road!”

“Will burning the haystack find you the needle?”
- Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice

It’s been seven years since the new animal was unleashed into the aquatic zoo. The Giant Squid rose to 13 metres of glorious red, and often its tentacles pelted against the glass wall so that the sheen of its claws would send sharp, boisterous reflections across the waters and into the eyes of the watching children. Uncle Sam, the zookeeper, would feed deep-sea fishes to the Giant Squid, keeping the living creature alive so that the children could enjoy the magnificent view before them. The novelty of the animal left them mystified. The little ones would stand still. And all time and other movement also seemed to have stopped, sacrificing and transferring themselves through the glass wall and into the animal which would stir on hysterically, splendidly.

* * *

Tonight, we stay at a hotel that stands a mere 800m before the immigration checkpoint. The China border ceases all activity when dusk breaks, but Mr. Pakistan has his own theory, “the Chinese government wants tourists to contribute to the economy of Tashgurkan,” he says.
I call him Mr. Pakistan because he calls me Ms. Singapore. He calls me Ms. Singapore because he’s too lazy to remember my name.
“Why were you in Kashgar?” I ask.
Gathered in the room this evening, a motley crew of 3 Pakistanis, 1 Korean and 1 Singaporean have traveled by a bus that departed from the city of Xinjiang. In this much forgotten part of China, race and culture are generous in variety, though not always generous in tolerance towards each other.
“I’m trying to import some hardware equipment,” he says. Put a Pakistani and a Chinaman together and they will talk business.
“The visa was such a horror to get. Olympics, you know? Anyway these days, Olympics or not, when I try to apply for visas I have to hand up a whole thick folder of documents,” he pushes his thumb and index finger two inches apart in demonstration, yet perhaps more out of protestation.
“Have to prove my money, prove my business and most of all, prove that I’m not terrorist!”
As if to acknowledge the fact and the absurdity of it, we chuckle. Sometimes, so much absurdity exists in this world to the point of humour. You laugh as you realise human beings are never sane. You laugh to relieve some of that insanity.
“In Pakistan, money doesn’t go to building roads, it goes to defence. Half of my bread, I give to the army. That’s why I admire the Chinese,” the enterprising man in his thirties lets out. “They put their bread to making smooth highways. They give most of their bread to the people.”
I finally understand what he meant when, the next morning, we cross the border of China into Pakistan. An abrupt bump on the road sends the bus, and all of us, jerking forward. Mr Pakistan laughs that I’ve fallen over and cries out: “It’s the end of the Silk Road! Welcome to Vibration Road! Start of the terrorists’ land!” The bumps on the roads would continue for four hours and across the next 200km.

* * *

The Giant Squid moved, bellowed. Awestruck, the visitors would see, but they could not touch. They would hear, but they couldn’t feel. Safety and oblivion stood behind the glass wall. With its two large tentacles, the animal turned into an animation before those naive eyes, grabbing its appetite of fishes mercilessly. It made crashing waves in the artificial sea, its eight other arms swaying to the beat of the roaring vibrations. It would never understand its own monstrosity except that to survive, it would have to devour – a simple mathematic of animal instinct.

* * *

“They say Osama bin Laden is hiding in the mountains, in K2 or here somewhere,” Jamil tells me. “Do you really think bin Laden is still alive?” he earnestly questions.
Earnestly, I shrug.
“The Americans are smart, they have satellites, they have technology. If they want to catch bin Laden, they can. They already have!” the guide is making wide gesticulations with his hands.
“You know, they make these rumours of him so that they are justified to watch us.”
When you lose everything, when you have nothing else to hold on to, you can only cling onto thin air – a breeding ground for the belief in conspiracies. When America and its media become a robber of your money, your livelihood, your potential, you believe everything else but what it says. How can you trust a thief?
“Ah, politicians…” Jamil lies back onto the grass hill and breathes in the air of the north. “Pakistan – rich people, poor government.”
“Has the government no money?”
“Yes, has money but has no brains. That’s being poor.”
As his eyes wander up to meet the sky, he feels overwhelmingly small and powerless.

* * *

There is something hard to believe about the painting before me. Even with the mountains rising higher, the hills do not lose out in artistry. Landslides, entrenched into the hills quite cruelly, are like veins swelling from a tightly clenched fist. The tremors carve themselves all the way up the hills, as if wanting to grab the boulders of sharp earth and to thrust them into the sky. Suddenly there are too many shades of brown, just as they speak about the greys. Nature has a huge, hungry propensity for variations in tints and tones – we humans translate all that great colour of the earth into hues of black and white.

* * *

“Nobody comes here anymore,” says Mr Baig. The weathered man owns a humble inn at Passu, though sitting amongst lavish mountains and glaciers at the northern areas of Pakistan, the surroundings are anything but modest.
The inn is the oldest one here, perhaps even along the Karakoram Highway. Birthed in 1974, Mr Baig’s guesthouse used to be a shelter for officials that supervised the highway. In 1986 when the roads were opened for travellers after the gateway to China was completed, 20 to 30 groups of tourists would arrive.
This evening, only Marc, a Holland traveller and I are sitting in the empty, worn-out dining area. It is still cosy, somewhat like an abandoned shelter full of lives once lived and that have left their histories behind for others to tread upon – on the counter: a random French novel of retired pages, Japanese maps and a guestbook lurid with drawings and written experiences.
“After September 11, virtually no tourists!” Mr Baig is bewildered rather than angry or sad. This man, he barely knows his age – says he’s 64 to 70. “Back then we weren’t educated, no papers or information about our birthdates… I never know when I was born.”
We have been famished after six hours of riding; I was a pillion rider while Marc captained the off-road KTM bike. Often, the vehicle hollered loud. Hollered till it drowned the voices of the village people. I could hear the engine but barely the shrieks of excitement of the children who ran out to the road to wave. While their cries were engulfed, their smiles persisted.
It is this evening too that Marc’s bike has found its way into Mr Baig’s inn. Backaches are starting to eat into us quite unforgivably. The man who greets us knows immediately that we have been on the road for a period beyond our intended capacity. “No menu, I do dinner,” he gives a sly smile. There is no choice. He’s confident we’ll find his meal a winning one however it turns out. But for a long time too, Mr Baig hasn’t had the opportunity to offer surprises to strangers - strangers whom he had left space in his heart to love and whom would love him back.

* * *

Providing the platter, Uncle Sam feeds on the animal’s innate impulse for a good spectacle to roll out against the children’s visions. After all, where else could anyone view such an opulence of a sea creature right before their very eyes? And so it is that seven years ago, on a no-less extraordinary morning of the 11th of September, the Giant Squid was born into the aquatic zoo. Seven years ago, the wilderness lost its reins, its beauty indignantly displaced and forever tarred by the terror behind the great glass display. The children watched - amazed, absorbed, afraid.

I wonder for how long more would we be these children who just watch - much too absorbed and afraid. We forsake the beauteous cries of the open sea choosing instead to swim in the confines of our television sets. For how long more would we be these children who, wrapped around and blinded by the tentacles of fear, have little choice but to forgo the better truth and freedom of the wilderness?

Trainspotting

When bullets fly about, what is the point of sticking out your head and getting shot? The bullet is neutral. It hits the good and the bad, the important and the insignificant, without distinction. If there were people to see the act of self-immolation, as on a cinema screen, the sacrifice might be worth while: a moral lesson might be conveyed. If all that was likely to happen was that next morning your corpse would be found among thousands of others, looking just like them — cropped hair, shaven chin… even circumcised — who would know you were not a Muslim victim of massacre? Who would know that you were a Sikh who, with full knowledge of the consequences, had walked into the face of a firing squad to prove that it was important that good should triumph over evil?

- Khushwant Singh; Train to Pakistan

Draw the line

a] Pakistan is deeply Islamic. It’s so much a part of their lives that after asking for your name and country, they’ll next enquire about your religion. “Why don’t you learn about Islam?” they’ll usually ask. There’re a handful of catherals and churches here though, and magnificent ones at that.

b] A common theme in South Asian countries are beggars. From Nepal to India to Pakistan, they throng the pavements and seem so much a part of street culture.

c] In the buses, men and women are separated by a metal gate.

We’ve just reached Lahore after a tiring 24-hour train ride. I’m definitely in a mode of fatigue right now, so hopefully tomorrow will be better and then I’ll write some.

The head of the Arabian Sea

Yesterday evening we were supposed to try out a Pakistani buffet at Sea View beach, an ocean which spreads out to form the Arabian Sea. But we slept in! The desert of a weather has made me extremely tired. This afternoon, it’s a train up North to Lahore. Will be missing the cheap fastfood here.

Asalaam Aleikum

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.

- Rumi

Pakistan exists in pastel colours. There, on the black tar roads that line themselves neatly, are walking bedsheets — men wrap themselves in all their uniformity of a pale-coloured salwar kameez. On a cooler moment, they are like curtains being set alive. Gracefully and quietly, the winds tease the tails of their fabric. Where each man looks no different from the other, varying only in the sandals that he wears, there is little room for materialism. The ladies are few, the foreigners are none. But in the city of Karachi where the torrid sun only shys away when it’s past 8.30 at night, the bustling doesn’t stop till a Cinderella hour. That’s when the colours are a little less humble — a stark red in the buses, an electric blue in the cabs, the alien green of building lights… Things are alive, but the heat of the sun burns me down a little each time. I want so much the energy of these men who shuffle themselves busily between the lights and the colours. They pause only for tea or to look on with curiosity at the presence of a foreign woman or to crack a smile from their weathered faces. It’s an energy of Business here – jewellery shops, petrol cooperations, fastfood chains and international banks. On the other side — modest tea shops, fabric sellers and meat markets. Something old and something new and still so much to discover about the things in between.

Fields of gold

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in the fields of gold

So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in the fields of gold

See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold
I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I’ve broken
But I swear in the days still left
We’ll walk in the fields of gold
We’ll walk in the fields of gold

Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in the fields of gold

- Sting; Fields of gold

* * *

Last evening mum called to tell me she forgot to settle her India visa, that’s less than 12 hours before I board the train to Delhi. She’s rarely careless (unlike me) so that was a shocker and some major disappointment… Almost cancelled the trip, but like the superwoman she always is, she’s managed it nicely now.

It’s been 3 hours on the road of India that lies between vast sheets of gold wheat. These plains stretch themselves like a never-ending tale and I was pretty much amazed for half an hour, after which I slept the last hour through.

Prior to these plains, stepping across the border was an experience in itself, also because the Nepali people have been so affectionate in seeing that I got through it well. More about that later… In an hour or so a train here at Gorkakhpur beckons where it’ll be my first railway experience. Hopefully it”ll be good enough to not be my last ;).

This time, I’m going to be complete tourist material!

Heterotopia

“Right in the middle of a contradiction, that’s the place to be.”
- Bono quotes playwright Sam Shepard; U2 At the End of the World

Less than 48 hours before Yanik performs on stage, a piece of paper that apparently carries his rhyme holds more white than the black of a pen. “I’m so not ready,” he says.

Cupping a smile that bends much more than the arc of his brows, he’s half concentrating, which shows he’s worried. And then he’s half trying to concentrate, laughing and digressing to other things, which reveal how he’d rather have fun being laid-back with the creative process. It’s going to be the 25-year-old’s first experience rapping live, and when he drags the time to materialise his verses, it seems that he not only wants the moment to be perfect, he wants it to last forever as well.

Yanik is a rebel that way – he defies the clock, trying to stop it and running away from the responsibility to keep up with it. His room brings you back to the ’60s: There is Bob Marley hanging from the wall, looking grand and authoritative like religion. There are colourful scrapes of cloth and beads draping from the top, imitating the collection of some rag-and-bone man. There are mismatched carpets and strange assembles, akin to the insides of a nomad’s bus, one who picks up everything and anything that comes his way.

Yanik begins to rap, which throws me into the present of black music that has possessed a large part of the airwaves of modern life. The childlike personality lives in the ’60s, but he breathes the ’90s. “I love underground rap and I love it when rap is spontaneous,” he says. There is little outlet for it in Nepal, so a lot of Yanik’s rapping influence had come from his friends overseas where he briefly worked in London, and also from his previous job as a radio DJ.

The audiophile meddles with his make-shift stereo, a Creative Zen player wired into speakers that camouflage themselves in his bedroom, so that when they play, a sexy jazz bursts out like hidden dynamites of a battleground.

“Where did that come from,” I ask in a spirit of awe and surprise more than curiosity. The magnitude of his DIY surround-sound system is amplifying his mother’s indulgent vocals. She had previously been a jazz singer in Nepal, and in a way this carved Yanik’s dreams of rapping and doing music for a living. Finance, having to attain stability and the heavy duty of caring for his cancer-stricken mother have all put his visions on hold. “Responsibility will make you a man,” I tell him in an attempt of encouragement. He agrees and says he’s changed a lot since his mother became unwell.

Long before her illness, Yanik’s mum lived as a hippie, and finding it hard to resist the trickles of influence, he is now caught between the era of the free-lovin’ people and the contemporary rule of rappers. Yanik refuses to choose either side, so he’d rather live with and in the transition, even if it means being in a motion of unrest. Pulling together past and present, he exists in both and goes against the reason of time.

That’s how he’s turned out – a little confused and very much a contradiction. In the name of diagnosis, these are perhaps symptoms of people in a flux – minds that have transited and progressed faster than the surroundings in their own country. Yanik enlightens me about revolution, women’s rights and education while we’re maneuvering the unruly, congested road of zero traffic lights and broken-down street lamps. “This is Nepal,” he says, apologetic about the slow and almost dangerous passage which we are passing through. Then paradoxically, he proudly adds: “The country is in a slow revolution,” a referrence to the downfall of the king, the recent war and the impending elections.

“That’s what we need. Look at how much creativity has taken place since all these happened. People are speaking up, artists are coming out.” Not yet resigned, his positivity is a fresh savoring of utopia in the land of dystopic development.

Yanik is now shouting over his shoulder above the wind: “Everytime something bad happens, something good takes place. We just have to notice!” I hold on tight to the backseat handle of the trembling bike while his words are providing better strength – it’s a tough balance, this ride, and maybe that’s how it is to live in a contradiction. No perfect right, no absolute wrong, just constantly being thrown about trying to locate and believe in an equilibrium.

I yell back in earnest agreement, but it gets engulfed by the noisy traffic. Looking at the way he expertly controls his vehicle, I’d like to think he hadn’t needed my assurance. These roads of Nepal, they bear little rules and logic with pedestrians haphazardly crossing and buses appearing without warning. But Yanik’s bike makes good sense of it all and finds its way through with an unsteady equilibrium. There’s safety inspite of the danger — that too, is a contradiction worth living.