by KUBOA
The thing is, when you are in motion, away from the grips of the world, travelling if one may call it, there is that peace of escape afforded to the traveller which cannot be found when made to stand in the midst of what constitutes our universe of cares and duties. When you consider that lone ride, when you are made an object of pure motion, disallowing the world to net you into its manifold schedules, perhaps then, for at least a mere moment, we truly do live in a peace that only the wind knows of...
Why does Rachana love to travel? What is it about those words that were just said and its expression that has Jaliya thinking that it was that very line in all its simple wording which perhaps defines the most inner being of his travel companion?
What are you trying to escape Rachana? What belies that beautiful smile you enchant me with? Half hidden in this patched darkness gliding over us… Jaliya’s thoughts take him on a silent search of his own. Such a search too can be some form of travel…
“I can be myself, in a way… Not being in a routine of work…”
You don’t like entrapment. The kind caused when you are motionless. Made motionless.
“…There is that niceness of the scenery passing too…”
The newness keeps your mind fresh. Fresh and alive. And to know that you are in motion, yes it is a comfort…Because the world passing outside can’t trap you…
“…And the world outside, with its worries won’t bother you…”
You are merely passing through. Taking nothing but the beauty of the sights that run past you.
Every traveller who ever gazed at the world passing outside the window is a voyeur. Observing a world that is unconscious to your gaze, drinking in the relays of motion; people, places, expressions of faces whose words if ever had been audibly spoken, are muted by the power of the traveller’s flight. The traveller. A position that defies being clasped by the chaos of the world. And in each of us there is a strand that thrills at the hope of escape offered by travelling.
But when the journey stops…? What awaits you Rachana?
Will she tell him? Will she tell him of her approaching nuptials? As they move along through this bus journey crossing borders of villages, towns, and states, and meant to finally cross that fluid border of –‘night’ to ‘day’. On the other side of the world is a man to whom Rachana is betrothed. In a few months he will come to India for their wedding and take her on a journey across oceans, to Germany, where he is employed as an accountant at a marine engineering company. The parental choice. The paternally approved.
“...Both my sisters are still studying...”
She now tells him of her role in the family. The trials of being the eldest sister and the endearing burdens she will carry, in being many persons to them in the course of her life– playmate, teacher, confidante, guide, and ‘stand in mother’ when needed so. She tells him of her maternal grandparents, to whom she professes absolute devotion. A devotion she has declared as surpassing the filial bond.
“... ‘Amma–amma’ that’s how we say grandmother.”
“Mother’s mother? Is that what it means? Because in Sri Lanka Amma means mother...”
She tells him how Amma–amma who dotes on her, had packed her a couple of roti for her dinner. And as the bus comes to a stop in some small provincial station with its little night bazaar, a considerable number of the passengers disgorge from the bus to get something to eat. Rachana unwraps her small parcel and invites her companion to partake in a typically Indian meal. It is nearly a month since Jaliya last tasted home cooked food. The taste and texture of the simple roti with masala carries in it a sense of the endearing homeliness that one does not find in food cooked for the buyer. He thanks her for this generosity. She has become a strength to his waning spirits in more than one way.
As the bus resumes its motion along the path of its journey the lights inside get switched off. Except for one blue light located just above the board fitted behind the driver’s seat. Its dull light spreads a weak glow. The intermittent flashes of light coming through windows when passing by lampposts ends as they exit the little township and get onto a stretch of outland. Now in this darkness, the figures that were once so very livingly pronounced have become tracings of sounds, vague outlines, hazed between certainties and suspicions.
Jaliya tells Rachana how the air-conditioned sleeper coach he took from Hyderabad to Kurnool had a movie shown during the night journey. A Telegu film which had a central hero in his mid twenties who at the opening scene itself singlehandedly fights off more than a dozen villains, executing some of the most physiologically extraordinary acrobatics with an ease as though it was child’s play. Amidst the giggling laughs she tells him though however much she adores movies, how she abhors the thought of going to a cinema hall. Jaliya is stunned to say the least. After all, he thinks, who doesn’t like to go to the movies? Considering how back in Colombo, the dens of young love in many instances are in fact the ‘picture halls’. In such an enclosing, the world is generally made to vanish. The darkness and the magic of the moving image on screen create havens. Escapes.
“...Not even with a group of friends? That is usually quite a lot of fun...”
No. Rachana is not amenable in her disposition when it comes to this matter. She has a very fixed idea about going to the movies. And it is rooted in her world of experience.
“Only once Jaliya, and I hated it...”
He can almost see in full view her face grimace. Yes, his mind is now well attuned to what her expressions are when she speaks. These rhythms of gestures and words of hers have now taken abode in his mind as mental pictures.
“...Absolutely hated it, and I said to my mother I never want to go again!” Jaliya simply has to know what made this wonderful young lady harbour such resentfulness.
“Why? What was so terrible about it? Was it a frightening story?”
No, it was nothing to do with the movie that was screened. In fact Rachana today doesn’t even remember what it was about. Not a trace of the plot, nor the silver screen idols can be found if she scanned her memory of that evening, going with her family to the very first movie theatre opened in Nandyal, when she was just six.
“It was not the kind of movie theatre you get nowadays. Not like what you would find in Chennai or Mumbai. Even the ones in Nandyal now aren’t like that one, this was some time ago...”
A time when she was a child and the world around her was bursting with new experiences that would invariably, as with most children, leave impressions that shape our perceptions and attitudes towards the world. It is in childhood after all that we believe the revelations of the world may have in them some magic only known to children. Yes, the impressionable age of childhood affords us a freedom of subjective thinking that allows us to judge and label the world as we wish. Unbound in potentials for discoveries even in the most mundane; the world is always such a large place, in childhood...
“...One thing was the seating. There were no chairs. It was like steps. Tiers, and people took mats with them to sit on. The ground was so dirty...” She shirks; he sees it marginally visible, an outline of a living person blanketed by night, seated next to him. “...from that moment itself I didn’t like it Jaliya. And the people, the men sitting around us...” There is a pause and Jaliya tries to catch onto the tone of those last words spoken before she withheld herself. What was it?
“Did anyone try to harm you in some way?” He spoke with an intended calmness. Hoping to calm the incipient anxiety in her, betrayed by her voice. Her face not fully readable in the dark.
“No, not like that.” She grows relaxed. Her words more of an assurance. “It was... well don’t get me wrong. Very...how shall I say, the provincial, kind?...The typical masses types.”
In Jaliya’s silence, there is a certain manner that tells her his ear is devoted to her words.
“I felt nauseous. They were all chewing pan. And the smell became unbearable...it was horrible. I still feel disturbed when I thi
nk about it. When I make myself go back to that moment, that place. In the darkness. Surrounded by those people, and that smell taking over everything my senses could grasp. It almost makes my head spin to even think about it.”
“Did you wait till the show ended?”
“No.” Her response is immediate, as if though trying to slip out of some oppressiveness. “I began crying actually. And we left even before the intermission.”
“What was the movie about?” He senses in this dark that covers her face, a smile has come upon her. This simple question has taken her out of the tenseness her memory had coiled around her.
“I can’t remember actually. Not a thing about the movie.”
“You were too busy getting annoyed with the smell of the pan.” He makes her laugh quietly.
How sad, thinks Jaliya. It is a shame that such an incident had forced her to divorce the movie theatre altogether from her life.
“What about with your sweetheart?...” He hopes he isn’t being too brash. But Jaliya simply has to know. “...didn’t you want to go to the movies even with him?”
“He thought it was very strange of me. That I was objecting so much about going to see a movie. And when I told him about it, he laughed and said it was very childish of me. But I kept saying I don’t want to go inside a movie theatre again. He knew it was useless. I felt sorry in a way for not being able to have a movie date with him. He wanted to take me very much.”
In the time before digitalisation took over the world’s youth and the realms of telephony and cyber space merged, there were certain rhythms that coursed the paths of young lovers. There was a gentleness, as of flower petals blooming to the sunlit world, that shaped the propinquities between young people who were discovering love, and their own entry into newer maturities. Both Rachana and Jaliya knew of such times. Smiles and shy waves of departure. To hold hands in public would be a bold venture, and that first time would usually find a place in a diary page. This was the age when they as schoolchildren would write love letters during classes. Partly thrilled by the adventure of concealment from the teacher. Yes, Rachana and Jaliya knew of such times in their lives. And in such an era going to a movie, its proposal and confirmation wasn’t a simple text message away. Making a movie date, progressing to that stage of comfort, was a sublime development. It was symbolic. A token of propinquity. She has missed out a great part of her young romance, he thinks. And Jaliya feels he would like to share a certain mesmeric moment he had in a cinema hall. A moment that has now slowly flown into his mind. Softly it rekindles that feeling he felt. How he solitarily romanced the beauty of that moment.
“Rachana?”
“Yes, Jaliya?”
“Do you really dislike watching movies that much?”
“I love movies, I buy a lot of DVDs.”
“Sorry, I meant going to the cinema.”
“Hmm, you seem to be a great fan of the cinema...” It’s almost as if she invited him to open to her a part of his world, that he seems to say is bound with a love for the silver screen and the magic of being in that gentle darkness that gives life to the movie.
“It’s just that there is a certain experience I’d like to tell you.”
“With your sweetheart?”
“No. Much more recently. Not long before I set off to come on this trip here. It wasn’t a movie date. I was by myself.”
The darkness within the bus is not brushed aside even occasionally from a sweep of light. Outside the windows is uninhabited outland. And most of the passengers, the good fellow travellers of Rachana and Jaliya now seem to have drifted to sleep.
“It was not at a movie theatre...” His words, she senses, are contemplative as if becoming seduced into dreaminess. “...It was the auditorium of the Russian Cultural Centre in Colombo...” Above a whisper yet somehow touched by a lulling serenity “...But of course it functioned very much as a movie theatre with the big screen and the lights all switched off, and the hall itself being rather large...” A serenity that seems to be coming from a distance “...You see Rachana, the Russian Cultural Centre has film screenings free of charge. And it’s such a film screening I remembered just now...” A distance from Jaliya’s own world, a serenity he wants to regain, and to do so he reaches inwards, his eyes closing, drifting back to that moment sitting by himself watching The Barber of Siberia...
“I was sitting in my favourite seat. Middle area, the last one by the pillar on the right side entering the hall...”
He tells her of the character Tolstoy, the Russian cadet of the imperial army and the antics of his clique while riding the train on which they chance upon Jane, played by Julie Ormond. He tells her how endearing their sense of innocent mischief was. How it reminded something of his own days of the spiritedness of a schoolboy. He describes to her the cinematic beauty of the scenery shown of rural Siberia that mesmerised him...
“...It gave the kind of feeling that makes you settle more comfortably into your seat and be allowed to be swept into the romance of the moment, its sheer beauty...”
...The smile of Julie Ormond with its enchanting allure he found sublimely bewitching...
“...Rachana, the grandness of tsarist Russia with all its splendour, its sweepingly impressive ceremonial pomp and pageantry...the artistry, cultural magnificence was truly a treat for the visual senses...”
...He tells her of the numerous characters, how their paths intersect, coalesce and collide as universes unfold...
“...The pageant of emotions the film presented, unfolding in the melodiousness of cinematic beauty seeped into me Rachana, showing a landscape painted in the colours of the human heart...”
...In front of his eyes those lyrical images move once again, in the soft darkness.
“...Loves, nostalgias, sensual desires, grief... how moments of propinquity as fleeting as the flutter of a bird’s wings become blooms of serendipity of the larger flow of destinies...truly enchanting Rachana. It was beguiling...”
The words of Tolstoy the young cadet of the tsar’s army come back to him, those words which gripped him, spoken as Julie Ormond prepares to offer herself...
“ ‘How can I?...You don’t love me’ Says Tolstoy. His words leaving his lips that turn pale. Dumbfound, his heart has been made to feel numbed by the words of the stupefying prospect, made by Jane...But then, that naïveté Rachana is the beauty of youth, and its young love. Born pristine and true to the heart and not driven by the carnal senses of biology...No, Tolstoy’s desire was not to court Jane and profess his love to her so that he may qualify to taste the lushness of her fruit..”
...No Jane, it was not to taste your body’s suppleness that Tolstoy toiled as a hapless young lover. It was his innocence that made him magnetised to you. The innocence of a boy bordering manhood, in love. Love. True and sincere.
“...I believe Rachana that Tolstoy’s love to Jane was the kind that believes its very being will make it turn immortal, as it transpires in the human heart to pour out beauties that will live long past the mortalities of the lovers themselves...”
Jaliya is unravelling in his words what he believes are the silent sentiments of those arrays of cinematic images going beyond what was spoken. To an audience whose only recourse to that story right now are the words spoken by him. His rendition of the beauty of that work of cinema, which beheld him in its enchantment.
“Love, and the grief of its loss... And the beauty of such silent emotions remaining as secret tenants of the heart, who will never breathe a word, but remain in eternal secrecy, in the sanctities of memories of a past that is unspoken yet yearned for... That is one way feelings can take form, as visions of living pictures. The magic of cinema.”
And from that moment he lived of his past, he opens his eyes to a darkness that engulfs his sights into blindness. The gentle fabric of darkness inside the auditorium drizzled with light coming off the screen, evaporates. But through this thick blanket covering him now, comes the
voice of Rachana.
“Jaliya, that was beautiful.”
He has arrived at his present. The feeling of that moment from the past lingers, having dwelt into the repository of memories within him to evoke that moment to life again. Whenever we allow such moments to relive through our words, we renew the past with life into the present. And when such life is breathed into the past through the words spoken in the present, the past walks amongst us. What Jaliya did was to gaze back at that moment, at himself sitting quietly in a tranquil moment of serene joy, solitarily, and entered that world of emotions birthing within him. A moment not spoken of with anyone, until now. As much as the past sometimes is full of emotional turbulences, at times the past sits in an unspoken joy of the heart, in a tranquil quiet, in a supple darkness of a film show, marginally visible under the glow that falls off the screen, watching peacefully, absorbed in an endearing solitariness, a film that marks an experience of beauty. And as Jaliya reflects on that moment from his past, it kindles in the gentleness of a firefly’s glow ‘a moment of poetry’.
“It was almost like listening to poetry.” Rachana speaks softly as if careful not to rupture the tranquillity she feels in the air between them. And she senses Jaliya’s smile, it is understood in the way he says “Thank you. A lovely compliment.”
But Jaliya didn’t tell her what had been playing in his mind that evening at the Russian Cultural Centre in Colombo as he immersed himself in the charm of the movie. He didn’t tell her of how he thought up of how the story being played on the big screen could have had a different turn. In a way, a different story, altogether. In his mind, he thought of Tolstoy and his band of friends as being bound as tightly as brothers, sharing a common past of childhood. After Tolstoy becomes enamoured with Jane, they embark on missions of their own to help him win her heart. But alas, as possibilities develop for Tolstoy and Jane, the young cadets become embroiled in the chaos of an approaching Marxist insurgency as per events in history brought on in those times. They would be despatched to various posts in St. Petersburg. The imminent collapse of the tsar’s government forces non-nationals to leave Russia. Jane finds herself in difficulty to make it to a boat leaving with foreign nationals. Her only exit out of a Russia engulfed in flames. The carnage wracking the city is too hostile for a woman of her delicateness. Tolstoy comes to her aid, abandoning his assignment. He begs his friends to let him go to her aid and to wait for him before leaving for their next post. He takes her safely to the dock and they walk up the gangplank. She steps inside. Her hand tightly holding his. She turns to him, and their eyes hold each other. There is a moment of confusion. She assumed he would come with her. Tolstoy is stilled of all expressions. He can only hold the sight of her face as though they were in their moment of eternity. As the horn blows signalling departure, Tolstoy’s hand leaves Jane’s. He steps down the gangplank, her voice wails his name. For one last glimpse of her, he turns around. He sees her being drifted away to a distance of safety. Unable to tear his eyes from her, he gazes out his farewell. He finally turns away, slowly, to leave. He is felled lifeless by an insurgent’s gunshot.