The platform began to resound beneath his feet, lightly at first and then more heavily, and looking to the right Krishan saw that their train was approaching the platform slowly from the distance. The exterior was a dull red that had been stained over the years by rust, smoke, and grease, not one of the sleek new models bought recently with loans from China but one of the older, heavier, boxier trains purchased decades before from India. Everyone who’d been sitting and standing as if half-asleep immediately clutched their bags and began hurrying in search of their carriages, roused by the thick smell of diesel, but Krishan remained where he was, watching as the family from abroad began making its way through the crowd, the three children listlessly following their parents toward the front of the train. He waited till they disappeared into the crowd, then standing up heavily and throwing his backpack over his shoulder, proceeded to the second-class carriage where his own seat had been booked. He climbed the vertical steps up to the carriage, and squinting in the harsh fluorescent light of the compartment made his way to his seat, which, he discovered to his satisfaction, was by the window. The boy in his early twenties sitting next to him smiled and stood up to let him into his seat, probably Sinhalese from the look of him, which meant, Krishan noted happily, that he would probably be getting off somewhere in the south, that there was a chance the seat beside his would be empty for the remaining portion of the journey. Resting his bag on his lap he sat down and looked out at the now much emptier platform, listened to the calls of the men who went up and down the platform selling tea, coffee, and peanuts to passengers through the windows. He wondered whether he should try to sleep, since he’d only gotten three or four hours that night, but decided he would try to stay up despite his fatigue, to preserve for as long as possible the calm focus that had held his mind since waking. He took out of his bag the book he’d brought, a book about Indian militarism and the occupation of Kashmir that he’d wanted to read for some time but had been struggling to make progress with in the previous few weeks. He flicked through the pages thoughtlessly, more to hear the sound of the flicking than to find the place he had stopped, till a heavy clanging sounded from deep inside the train and caused the carriage to shake—the familiar yet always surprising sound that signified the train’s imminent departure and came, he liked to assume, from the massive pressure of the brakes being released. The train jerked forward a little bit, hesitated for a few seconds, then began to stagger forward. The fluorescent lights in the carriage went off, shrouding everything in the blue darkness of dawn, and grateful that reading was no longer a possibility Krishan put the book down and leaned back as the train made its way out of the station. The thin floor reverberated beneath his feet and the glass windows trembled against their frames, the clanging of the wheels against the tracks growing heavier and more rhythmic as the train picked up speed. It was his first time traveling all the way north by train, and looking out at the abandoned carriages and cluttered workshops just outside the station, at the shanty settlements strung out along both sides of the tracks, strangely desolate in the small, bright circles of light cast by occasional lamps, he began to feel, despite his fatigue and the somber purpose of his journey, a mood of anticipation rising gently inside him, the same sense of possibility he’d always felt when embarking on long train journeys, the sense that he was leaving behind everything that limited and constrained him, moving toward some vast and unspecifiable future.
It had been some years since he’d felt this mood of optimism while traveling, for though Krishan had traveled frequently between north and south during his time in the northeast, he’d always traveled by bus on these journeys. The train hadn’t been functional till the previous year, the northern section of the line having been completely destroyed during the war, and bus in any case was the more utilitarian option, faster, cheaper, and more easily arranged at the last minute than train. There was something much more stressful about traveling by bus, Krishan felt, for traveling out of Colombo by road you were constantly blocked or impeded by traffic, especially in buses because of their unwieldy size and the narrowness of the roads. Bus drivers were so often in a state of physical tension, their hands tightly clutching the steering wheel and the gearstick, their feet constantly pushing down on the pedals, suddenly accelerating and breaking in the pointless attempt to overtake slower vehicles, attempts borne out of a deep anxiety to finish their routes as soon as possible despite the fact that it was impossible, no matter how quickly they went, to speed up even the longest journey by a meaningful amount of time. The constant frustration of the drivers, which invariably communicated itself to the passengers too, seemed only to make them tenser, to spur them on more recklessly, pushing them to overtake on bends and when vehicles were approaching on the opposite lane, a frustration that was no doubt one of the major causes of the road accidents that took place around the country each day. They spent the majority of their lives in such a state, Krishan knew, and imagining these drivers as they lay awake in their beds at night, their bodies still caught up in the tension and strain of the day’s driving, he wondered sometimes what their dreams were like when they were finally able to fall asleep, whether they saw visions of broad, empty, smoothly tarred roads unlike the ones they came across in real life, roads that stretched out into the horizon and down which they could accelerate into infinity, endlessly and without obstacle, as long as they pleased.
Traveling by train was different, for even if there were occasional delays and breakdowns there was never any traffic on train rides, no effort or strain required as you were borne smoothly and inexorably toward your goal. Looking out at the silhouettes of the city passing by in the darkness, Krishan thought of all the hours he’d spent on trains during his time in India, when he was on holiday from university and had the chance to leave Delhi, to see other parts of that vast, seemingly endless country. He’d spent most of those journeys sitting or lying on his seat or berth, reading, listening to music, or simply looking out at the small, unpeopled rural stations, the hot wind rushing into the carriage through the open doors and windows, allowing him to breathe in the air of the places they passed and absorb their smells, as if he were in some kind of communion with these small towns and villages as they flitted by. The constant movement of wind through the carriage would feel like a calling to him from outside, and leaving his seat he would go down every so often to the linking section between carriages, where standing in a corner he would look to make sure nobody was watching, light himself a cigarette, and pull open one of the heavy train doors, one hand tightly clasping the grip on the door frame so he didn’t fall into the passing landscape, the other holding the cigarette in front of his body so that no one passing behind would see that he was smoking. The warm, fragrant air of the countryside buffeting his face, he would look out at the wide expanses of farmland, brush, and forest, at the plains that went by for sometimes hours at a stretch without stopping, and he felt, at such moments, something close to a sense of liberation, if not quite liberation then the sense at least of being on the verge of liberation. It was as if, at such times, he was permanently suspended in the blissful but always vanishing space between desire and satisfaction, in that region of the self where one is no longer anguished by the absence of something one feels to be necessary for one’s salvation, but not yet saddened by the disappointment that attainment of desire always seemed to bring, for strong desire, desire that radiates outward through all the regions of the body, always seemed to involve the hope or belief that attainment of the object of desire, whether a person, place, or situation, will change everything completely, will end all absence and yearning, all effort and struggle, that it will stem, somehow, the slow, sad passage of time. We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have
known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire’s completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.
His thoughts had often returned to The Cloud Messenger during those long journeys, the famous Sanskrit poem of yearning that he’d read in translation early on during his time in India, before he’d begun to understand how intimately the Sanskrit language was tied to the mythology of Hindu nationalism, before he’d begun to understand the everyday racism of North Indians toward people of darker skin like himself, a racism that hadn’t affected him greatly but had, nevertheless, played its own small part in his desire to leave. The language and imagery of the poem had moved him so much all those years ago, and looking out now as the darkness of early morning gently let up, he found himself thinking, once more, about the painful longing so elegantly expressed in its verses. The unnamed main character of the poem was a yaksha, a kind of divine or semidivine spirit who served the god of wealth, and the poem began with an account of how, as punishment for neglecting his duties, the yaksha had been exiled by the god of wealth from Alaka, his beautiful native city in the foothills of the Himalayas. He’d been compelled to wander far south to the plains of central India, thousands of miles away from the cool climes of his birthplace, a parched, arid wilderness that to the author and his audience of elites must have signified the outer limits of civilization, an area of total darkness. The yaksha had already been wandering alone in this wasteland for many months at the start of the poem, unable to stop thinking about the city he’d been exiled from and above all the wife he loved so much, losing so much weight from the sadness of separation, according to the poem’s narrator, that even the bracelets on his thinning arms had slipped off. It was late July or August, the time of year when the annual monsoon rains finally began to reach the plains of central India on their northward journey from the southern coast, and climbing up to the top of a mountain in his dazed, hopeless state the yaksha had noticed a single dense, dark cloud heading in his direction from the south, descending so low it almost touched the peak of the mountain before pausing there as if for rest. Gazing at this cloud the yaksha was lost for a long time in thought, hardly able to hold back his tears, until realizing at length that the cloud was a forerunner of the imminent monsoon, that it would, in all likelihood, continue traveling north till it reached the Himalayas, it occurred to him that he could ask the cloud to carry a message for him to his wife. Although most rational beings know, the narrator remarks in the fifth stanza, that a cloud was nothing but a conglomeration of vapor, light, water, and wind, an object incapable of being rationally addressed, individuals consumed by love were unable to distinguish between the sentient and the insentient, as though to the individual overcome by passion the whole world was populated by beings whose sole purpose was either to support or thwart their love. So taken up was the desperate yaksha by the possibility of communication with his wife, the narrator goes on, that looking up he began to address the cloud out loud, praising its beauty and auspiciousness before asking it whether it would be willing to bear a message from him to his wife on its way north.
All this took place within the first six stanzas, and the large substance of the poem that followed, one hundred and fifteen stanzas in all, consisted of the detailed set of directions that the yaksha gives to the cloud in order to find his city and wife, directions, the yaksha assures the cloud, that will lead it through all the grandest, most opulent cities of the subcontinent, allowing it to stop, on the way, at wide-flowing rivers and dense jungles so it could gather itself and rest, absorbing water into its body and rejuvenating itself so it could maintain its bodily integrity as it continued the long journey north. It should begin, the yaksha tells the cloud, by heading north from their present location and then a little west toward the Vindhya mountain range, whose flanks are covered with wild mango trees and kutaja flowers, where welcomed by the cries of watery-eyed peacocks it would be able to drink to its heart’s content at the source of the Narmada River. Though it might want to dwell there in the mountains for some time, the yaksha goes on, it should try not to tarry too much and should continue quickly on its journey, which would as it knew take several weeks to complete. Heading north from the Vindhyas the cloud would reach the country of Dasharna, its garden hedges white with the buds of ketaki flowers and its trees busy with the nest-building of crows, flocks of flamingos dwelling on the forests of rose apple at its outskirts. At its capital, Vidisha, the cloud would be able to drink from the waters of Vetravati, the yaksha says, after which it should continue north, going a little out of its way in order to see the famous city of Ujjain with its terraced mansions, where the morning breezes carried the drunken warble of cranes and were fragrant with the scent of blooming lotuses, a city so beautiful it looked like a fragment of heaven on earth. The cloud should visit the famous shrine to Siva in Ujjain and then spend the night there, asking its wife, lightning, to descend in silence every now and then to give light to the women who were making their way secretly to their lovers. From Ujjain the cloud should head farther north, past the Gambhir River in Rajasthan toward Devagiri, where it could worship at the temple to Siva’s son Skanda. It should then proceed toward the Chambal River, where again it could rest and take up water, and from there it should travel northeast past Kurukshetra, the battleground of the famous ancient war depicted in the Mahābhārata. The cloud should afterward make its way east toward the city of Kanakhala, the yaksha says, where it could drink from the great Ganges, continuing its journey north till it reached the source of the Yamuna River, a mountain white with snow where the rocks were fragrant with the musk of deer and bamboo swayed softly in the wind. On the last leg of its journey it would have to travel north around the flanks of the Himalayas till it reached Mount Kailasa, home of Siva, the snow on its slopes white as freshly cut ivory, and once there it should head toward the waters of Lake Manasa, full of golden lotuses, where the gossamer on the wish-fulfilling trees by its banks was fanned continually by the misty breeze.
It was from the banks of Lake Manasa, the yaksha says, that the cloud would finally be able to see his much-longed-for city Alaka, which it would recognize at once by the enormous mansions with bejeweled floors and the soaring palaces with turrets that kissed the sky. The city itself was located in the lap of the mountain and contained enormous parks and gardens where the flowers of winter, spring, summer, and autumn were all in simultaneous bloom, a detail that had struck Krishan when he first came across the poem, as though the narrator was suggesting that all seasons were collapsed there into a single season, that time itself stood still or that all times were contained in a single time—as though, the narrator was suggesting, in ordinary life we are pulled in different directions by our contradictory desires, so that what we imagine as heaven is a place where these conflicting longings are somehow reconciled, in which the separate and seemingly incompatible times of their fulfillment are brought together, uniting our otherwise divided souls. The citizens of Alaka, according to the description the yaksha gives to the cloud, consist of male and female yakshas obsessed with love and sex, the male yakshas constantly drinking aphrodisiacs, carrying flowers in their hair that looked like the reflections of stars, while up in their private chambers the female yakshas, torn between embarrassment and desire in the company of their lovers, threw fistfuls of powder at the tall-flamed lamps while their lovers untied their robes. His own home, the yaksha tells the cloud, was to the north of the god of wealth’s own house, recognizable by its arched gate and the young mandara tree beside it. There was a tank with emerald-paved steps, its waters crisscrossed by golden lotuse
s, and to the side of the tank was a rockery with a girdle of golden plantains where his wife often spent time, in the center of which was a golden perch where a peacock came to roost at day’s end. By these signs the cloud would recognize his home, and if it went down discreetly to the house and cast a glance inside, it would finally be able to see his wife. The intense longing of separation would be weighing her down, her once beautiful appearance having changed like a lotus laid waste by frost. Her face will have become swollen from crying, her lower lip discolored from the heat of many sighs, and when the cloud saw her she would probably be painting pictures of him, the yaksha went on, or speaking to the caged mynah about him, or perhaps trying to play a song on her lute to remind herself of him, wetting its strings with her tears. She might be marking out the days and weeks left for his exile to end, or perhaps lying there on her bed fantasizing about the two of them in the throes of passion, for these, he explains, were the many ways that lovers whiled away their time when separated. The cloud should wait until nighttime before alerting his wife to his presence, since it was at night that loneliness would most affect her, when she would be most in need of his words. It should go down to the window of his wife’s chambers, and if she was sleeping the cloud should let her sleep on for the first watch of night, just in case she was dreaming of him. When the first watch was over, he goes on, it should wake her up by sending in a cool breeze through the window, and it is only at this point in the poem, after addressing the cloud for an entire eighty-nine stanzas, that the yaksha finally shares the message he wants to send.
A Passage North Page 8