Confession of a Hobo

Just before leaving to new places, I have felt a strange calm and have sung to myself many times the CCR chartbuster, “Someone told me long ago/There’s a calm before the storm” It is a calm that has some practical uses too. This calm draws my attention to details; like, have I taken the ticket for my journey? , how much money do I have with me, have taken my toothbrush etc.

It is a heavy calm that  also. It weighs down on me so much that I would have preferred a little disorderliness and haste to this meticulousness. It is a terrible calm that calls to be torn apart.

            I have used both trains and buses equally for traveling and flights sparingly. Buses and trains were the ones I enjoy travelling by. Flights bore me. There is nothing in flying. Travelling by land makes me see the familiar move past the window, to give way to the unfamiliar. Though bus makes me feel claustrophobic, it helps to reflect. I remember once as I travelled from Chennai to Bangalore in a late-night bus, my thoughts ran like train. Sitting in that bus with constant flashes of neon lights on my face through the glass window, I thought and I thought. I don’t remember what I thought; but I treasure those sensations. And I know that those sensations have gone into making me. That night I readied my self for the hypothetical question, that when I travel or if marooned in an island whom would I like to have as company? I would prefer no one.

            Train on the other hand, in my opinion is travelling and destination combined. As I see the world move past, I also have an option to pretend what I am not to the co-passengers. This is a freedom that I can hope for only after arriving at the destination.  This may be the freedom for which I find excuses to move from place to place. But to make this excuse is  very essential too.  To quote Gibran: “For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould. Fain would I take with me all that is here. But how shall l? A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.”

            To pretend, not to be judged by your past, a new-identity are actually way afar. The moment I step out of the bus or train, I suddenly become like a whiff of smoke or wind—unidentifiable, formless. Looking for an address, or sitting in a bus-stop, I become nobody. But soon I realize that, it was also for this I traveled. The calmness that hanged so heavily on me has imploded into this nameless thing.