7th June 2021, 16:31
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| BHPian  Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Hyderabad
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| If I were a buffalo, I would chew my travels…  Photo by chandra sekhar on Unsplash This is a river in Mahbubnagar district of Telangana state in India. It is not a breathtaking picture by any means but here is the thing. There is a story I was told as a child that stayed with me. I must have been about ten years old. This was the summertime - school holidays with frequent power cuts in the evenings. All the women would start cooking early to stay ahead of power-cuts, always keeping a few candles at arm’s reach in the kitchen. Our house was small with two rooms and a kitchen – each of the rooms had a wooden stool or something similar with a large candle on it, its stump furrowed with molten wax along the length. My mother put one matchbox near the gas stove in the kitchen and the other one on the TV. She was into knitting those days as was everyone else in the neighbourhood, all the women sitting together on ledges outside the houses, arguing over the varieties of knitting methods and so forth… A power-cut usually started with stuttered wails as the children shot out of their homes, the adults still coming to terms, sighing with their heads cast down, fumbling for the matchboxes. No one knew where it started but the women were chewing the tails of their saris, their heads keeling closer as they gave wings to the supernatural tale. It was said a woman of unknown origins roamed the nights, her white sari made of gauze fabric that perhaps choked moonlight because when she came out the moon, it was said, went behind the clouds where he lay until she caught her prey. She only came at night, surveyed the surroundings in one quick sweep for she pivoted like no other, for her feet were like none you had seen, turned inward, levitating above the ground, toes pale and webbed, nails curving inwards. She had a frigid temper, kept to herself, dissolving into the night and burrowing into the earth or climbing a banyan tree where she let her hair down alongside the new roots, for she was reticent, timid but always observant. But if she was spotted by anyone things took on a very different turn – she did not like it, being seen. And this ensued a patrol of sorts, with the woman going from house to house, her hand balled into a fist as she knocked on the doors. Some doors had chains that fitted over a loop of metal through which the door’s lock was secured. It was said the woman stroke those chains with her cold hands. She knocked on each of the doors three times before moving on to the next one. What happened to those who opened the door was difficult to say, for they packed up and left as far from the town as possible. Some said she had bulbous eyes with fervent energy, those pupils butting into the sides of eyeballs like mad prisoners, but the lips were a contrast, thin and elongated. And this is when the scrawling on the doors began. ‘O Stree repu ra,’ as if placating a baby, a false promise to give her the following day whatever it was she was after. Almost all the houses volunteered with the note on their doors, falsely, that if only the woman could turnaround and come back the next day… At school my friend Rohit told me he was immune from the woman who patrolled at nights. His argument was that he had taken three dips in the river. He had a protective coat that lingered on him, unseen but potent enough to dissuade devils with a penchant for knocking on doors. Rohit was a neighbour as well as my classmate. We had studied in the same school from kindergarten till class tenth. Our parents were close too, the neighbourhood itself so small with families who knew each other quite well. When I had put my finger in the hand-pump and injured myself, Rohit was there. He had rummaged through my school bag and found the tattered, old school tie, the spare one I had kept with me under the books as a token, and wrapped it unevenly around my index finger. I still have the scar on my finger which I am presently looking at as I type these words. When I fell from the auto rickshaw from where I was sitting next to the driver with one hand holding the horn, Rohit was there sitting in the back on the railing. The rickshaw driver was admonishing me for letting my hand loose, but Rohit argued on my behalf, that the seat in the front was not sufficient for driver and two boys on each side. When Rohit threw himself into a ditch to avoid cycling into the wall, I was there. I helped him back to his feet. He could not walk very well for almost a week after that, his right knee chipped, and skin reddened like enraged eye of a storm. --------------------------------------------  By (WT-en) Eh.yeoh at English Wikivoyage - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=23844285 This was in the ferry near Penang, Malaysia. It was around ten in the morning when we boarded. Satish was fiddling with his camera, changing the batteries, his face resolute in taking as many pictures as possible. I stood with my hand resting on the thick ropes they had dangled on one side. The men and women who had driven with their cars stayed inside not seeming too interested in the voyage, only in the utility of it. The ferry picked up speed, slicing the still surface of water like a manic surgeon with a blunt knife, spilling whitened blood in its wake. The sky was clear, and the sun was harsh, prompting us to take regular sips of water. Satish was ready with the camera now, taking pictures of water, the bridge, the ferry, and everything else that tickled his fancy… It had been about thirty minutes and the steady speed of the ferry now produced a rumble like an old fridge, the beginnings of a morning doze invading me in response to the ambience. Some of the men stepped out of their cars, stretching, yawning, and surveying the surroundings. Satish was telling me our plan was to get off the ferry on the other side, catch a bus to Kuala Kedah or Kuala Perlis and take another ferry to reach Langkawi. We did not have any bookings, neither for the bus nor the accommodation. But Satish had been to Langkawi before, and he believed we could just walk in, and it won’t be an issue. We were at different stages in our lives- he was recently married, and I was on the way to get married. We had met in Singapore where he was living with his wife in a Condo which he had sublet to four other guys. His wife was currently visiting her parents in India while he had to stay back for work. And there was a three-day weekend. So, we combined our mutual interests – his photography and my travel – to set off on this trip. When we started from Singapore it was around ten in the night. We had our dinner just outside Johore Strait and took the bus to Penang. The ferry came to a stop, men in uniform taking their positions to fling the rope over the row of tires encrusted with moss and weeds, pillars on the platform haggard and slippery, wearing the ropes from countless other ferries like garlands, messiahs of some forgotten religion… Before getting on the bus for our next leg of the journey to Kuala Kedah we stopped to get some food. We ate chicken with some roti, Satish taking a few pics while we ate. We were both working for IT companies near NOL building on Alexandra Road in Singapore. We rarely ever spoke of work, mostly just casting the net of chatter over a sea of life, sometimes catching a capsule of scientific discussions, sometimes a bottle of family drama, and other times another net itself – oh! What a fantastic recursive loop life is, an onion layered with mystifying tales… This was back in 2013, social media was not all-consuming like it is today. We had our smart phones but were keen to pass time talking – after all, we were on a trip to explore Malaysia… He told me about his childhood, the farm he grew up in. This was near Salem in Tamil Nadu. His father had passed away when he was a child, and he grew up being worried for his mother who had episodes of frantic energy as he called them. It started when he was about eighteen, getting up one morning he found her missing. With the help of neighbours, he found her near the local temple where she was sitting outside with some silver cutlery and gold ornaments, calling priests and devotees, to pick up anything they fancied for free. His mother did not respond to his calls, insisting she was married to a man wearing checked shirt who was sitting across her just a moment ago. That man turned out to be a milkman who knew everyone in the area, had been overcome with concern for the woman when he spotted her dishing out gold and silver to strangers… In the weeks that followed she rested for days together at times skipping meals even. But she sailed through, finding herself on the other side. The doctor thought it was stress related and nothing to be concerned over with. His mother was not the worrying type anyway, so she picked up from where she left as though nothing had happened that needed explaining. Satish was the only child and they lived in a small house with one room in the front with a few chairs and a TV. This room led to two other rooms one of which was the kitchen and the other bedroom where his mother slept. Satish slept in the front room where he had managed to cobble up a rickety table, its broken leg secured with tape. He did most of his reading on this table littering it with academic books and notebooks, two folded chairs leaned against its side. On the wall he had the calendar stapled with few dates crossed out, pencilled with relevant information. For instance, the seventh of every month was for withdrawing pension money from bank, and the last Saturday of the month for depositing money in the fixed deposit fund based on what was left. He always came straight back home, minded his own business at college, kept his friendships to a minimum, and stayed frugal of course… The ferry ride to Langkawi was delightful – we got to sit next to the window in the lower deck, water lolling and eddying outside, an occasional grunt from the turbines under us as the engine revved. There were some families with children, some college students, and some guys like us, visitors from elsewhere. I looked about me noticing most of them looked as if they did not care they were surrounded by water, encased in a box of metal, chrome and plastic. They were either playing video games on their phones, or reading newspapers, or just eating chips. Even the ones sitting near the windows did not seem like they cared, very businesslike, and it struck me that this last leg was exactly that – these were people hopping on the ferry from nearby towns for a two hours’ ride to the famous island. Visitors usually flew straight to the island, not stretching it out into multiple legs like we did. But of course, we felt compelled to explore more for less – frugal, you remember. After we alighted, I went straight to the tea stall to nurse an impending headache, while Satish sauntered off to the information centre. It was around five in the evening when we reached – we had spent almost a full day getting here from Singapore. On the way, my mind laboured with a brilliant duality - the excitement of exploring a new country alongside the casual manner in which the local communities went about their daily chores. Having finished the tea, I pressed the still-hot cup to my temple, abating the throbs of pain. Satish pulled a chair to my side and spread the map on the table, pointing to the hotels where we were going to go- budget ones where he had gone last year with friends from his office.  By This is Alif Laila opening montage - https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SrFJlxU9nhU/hqdefault.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=93195512 We hired a bike for two days, took our bags, and set off on what turned out to be a humid ride, the road much like any other road once you left the shore. The hot wind was really the only reminder that we were on an island, not very far from the sea wherever we went. It reminded me of Alif Laila, a TV series based on One Thousand and One Nights. Growing up, I was fascinated with these stories, always recounting them with friends and family members. In it, Sinbad the Sailor, exhausted from his voyages, reaches a nondescript island one evening just before sunset. He drags his boat ashore, anchors it firmly with a tight knot of the rope around a scabby tree trunk. He then proceeds to survey the beach for any stragglers, the sun sinking behind him, a hue of orange now spreading across the sky. He washes himself clean near a stream of running water where he eventually lays his mat and rests his back. The moon climbs up into the sky, stars serenading like backstage dancers around it. In his dreams he is visited by a prisoner, feral mannered with festering wounds, grimy nails and chipped teeth. The prisoner claims the world is nothing but an illusion and he, Sindbad, must see through it, face the demon hiding behind the veneer of a lascivious woman who had taken hostage in his heart. Sindbad protests, unwilling, his fists clenched, like a child.  By Ramanand Sagar - http://www.salaambollywood.com.au/st...anandsagar.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37943532 But the prisoner is no ordinary man – he is dishevelled but he was a wealthy man once, in the city of Ararat where the land was fecund and the purest of water poured out from a spring in the forest. One day while he was hunting, his fingers poised around the arrow, the bow bent on precipice of a release, he heard a cry, shrill and helpless. He found the source of the cry, a woman, sobbing with her knees clutched to her chest, her hair falling around her like vines encircling a tree. She was not wounded but had lost something, a medallion perhaps, for she held her palms open as she wailed, tears rolling down her cheeks. She spoke in a tongue foreign to his, but he saw in her eyes sorrow that needed no expression, only a beating heart. He took her with him, gave her clothes and fed her sumptuous food. At first, she did not trust him but as days went by she grew closer to him, enamoured by his humour and heart. But as she grew healthier, and as she learnt his tongue his health gave away – he lost his hair in clumps, his teeth decayed, and his skin turned pale, blood pooling on its way to his heart, giving his veins the sheen of blue and purple… you see, she was poisoning him every night in his sleep, as she turned into a snake, her legs twitching together as she lay on the floor, her body convalescing, the length of her neck rising, eyelids withdrawing, a raft of scales rippling out of her. By the morning she shed her skin, turning once again into the woman with longing eyes, delicate hands, her touch a mist of fine feathers, her voice a low-lying fruit of rhapsody…  By Author: AnonymousIllustrator: Milo Winter - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19860...0-h.htm#anch_2, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=19150087 Sindbad wakes up sometime in the early hours of the morning, cracks a few twigs and starts a fire. He brings a pale of water from the stream to make a soup with spices he had brought from home, and potatoes he peeled just the morning. As the water comes to boil the birds rise up into the sky, a net of tattered wings, swinging sideways into the sea, as if cast by a great hand. Sindbad crouches, alert at once, his hand resting on the hilt of the sword the blade of which was sharpened by volcanic embers. He kicks some sand into the fire as the ground beneath him heaves, a welter of angry grunts escaping into the dome of air above. The rocks on the beach roll over into the sea, plunging as the land rises, sand and pebbles rustling, the crest of the hill hitching itself over as it rose, the twin banks of trees behind him lodging deeper into the sea, as the whole island heaved up, a harrowing cry emanating from the lumbering giant that the island had now become…    As we drove around Langkawi on a moped this transmogrification of Sindbad’s Island came to my mind which I found interesting. Langkawi was a modern island of course, peopled with entrepreneurs who had set up everything from restaurants to hotels for visitors who flocked from every corner of the world. The wind was humid and even the slanted rays of the evening sun quite hot. We spent the next two days visiting the beaches, mangrove forests, and caves on the island, all the while wondering, petulantly I must add, why the island was not turning into a giant… -------------------------------------------- The next time we met was in Sydney, almost three years after our last trip. I was thirty-four years old by then, married with a child on the way. We were still working for IT companies, travelled on work-visas for projects that took anywhere between six months to a year to complete. The year was 2015 – social media had become more invasive than before, also more useful as it turned out. He found out I was in Parramatta, Sydney through my Facebook updates and reached out. We spoke on phone and set aside a weekend to reminisce.   We met in Circular quay. He had grown a little bit pudgy, complained about his knee which sent sharp, tingling pain sometimes depending on which leg he was hoisting himself on, or which leg he was doing most of the climbing with. He looked older than his age, thirty-six, with some hair greying on the sides just behind the ears. We took our coffee and lounged on a park bench near the opera house, the magnificent sails shielding the sun, sending elongated shadows toward us. In the evening, the place was bustling. We stepped into the underground parlour where slices of pizzas and bottles of wine sat imperially on tables of all kinds – round, square, long, short, and even make-do ones such as the rim of the fountain, lip of the balcony, cradle of a sofa. Physically-fit men and women looking like gods and goddesses from the Greek mythologies wandered about, talking and laughing, each table seated to the brim, their voices all enmeshed, a steady stream of syllables, indistinct and uproarious… The cold, evening breeze almost knocked us back as we climbed over the escalator.  I looked over to the west and the sun had sunk under water, its face reddening as if smothered from above, resisting the push. The sails of Opera House were lit by the time we finished our beers and pizza which we had consumed sitting alongside the Greek gods earlier. On the train back to Parramatta Satish told me his mother had passed away recently. It was a tumour in the head that ruptured. He looked out the window, as if to assuage the pain in recalling her final days. He sat wordless for a while, looking at his hands. I said I was sorry for his loss, knowing his past struggles. Next day we did the Spit Bridge to Manly Walk. --------------------------------------------   This was in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. My roommate Kiran and I travelled here by train. On the way the train passes over some of the most beautiful lakes and rivers, boats and kayaks caught up in their serenity. It was over two hours’ journey and we had sat in one of the quiet carriages – I was reading a novel and Kiran was sitting near the window with his camera, taking a few shots once in a while. The novel was Angela Carter’s Passion of the New Eve with colourful imagery on the book cover, of diaphanous simulacrums of women looking to the heavens. It had invited some eyeballs to pivot, some eyes to squint, and some pupils to dilate, as the passengers of the quiet carriage noticed the book’s cover. It had that effect on people. The book itself was nothing short of acid to the brain – I can see myself now, sitting on that train reading the book, the rhythmic sound of train a backdrop to the post-apocalyptic world where the women set up ghettos and roamed the desert plains, sand in their eyes and machine guns strapped on their backs, like hyenas drawn to the smell of decay…  By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20450919 Her novel, Nights at the circus, comes to my mind now, in which a trapeze artist with wings, is hatched out of an egg. The artist travels around the world, is loved and laughed at, imprisoned and subjected to ludicrous experiments, is chased by hounds… But all of this comes later, what happens at the very beginning is most endearing. They sit and talk, the artist, and the journalist who comes to interview her – this is the first chapter. It opens with the artist being bawdy, loudmouthed, and chivalrous, as she documents her life in disorienting detail, jumping the timeline at her will, leaving the poor journalist to piece together what best he could of her life, wondering all the time if this was fact or fiction, for how can a woman be born of an egg? And are those wings real? The artist talks about her childhood, the menagerie where she spent time close to animals, how the travelling circus came to be, how one fine morning she felt the pink bruises on her back swelling, letting out baby fluff initially which she tried to wash, only later noticing them grow into fine wings… Initially she tries to hide her wings in tight clothing which does not go as well as she plans. Eventually she learns to hoist herself up, falling many times from the trapeze, pirouetting in the air, her clothes in a disarray, as she lands on the net below. Occasionally I would pause the reading, and look out the window, the brilliant, hallucinating imagery of the novel still simmering in my head and find a lonely boat sailing in a massive lake surrounded by thick forest, encroaching from all sides while the clouds soared away, letting in a few shafts of the most exquisite rays of sun. It was such as contrast, a disarming one… When we reached New Castle, it was after noon, the station empty with just a few people near the Opal machines. It was a contrast to Sydney where most of the stations were crowded all the time, people hastily flitting past you like sparrows from branch to branch. --------------------------------------------  By C.Chandra Kanth Rao - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=18165323 In the ninth standard, when I was about fifteen years old, the school had arranged a seven-day trip. This was to start from Mahbubnagar, a district in Andhra Pradesh, to explore the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, all the way to the southernmost tip of India, Kanyakumari. The price was 1200 rupees per student – it included everything of course, the food, accommodation, travel, tickets, etc. A bus was hired, few coconuts broken, and prayers offered, before setting off from our school, a modest double-storeyed building with flaky, dull-green walls. I was sitting in the middle with my social teacher, Pavan, who had instructed us all to get diaries and pens to jot things down. Way in the back someone flicked a laser torch on, a small device that you could close in your fist, with a beam so sharp that its tip bounced off the walls of the bus like an insect caught. The bus had come equipped with two speakers – unseen beneath the piled bags and satchels, they blared like couped chicken, the music tinny like thin strings beating on cracked metal. Some cassettes were offered to the driver for playing the latest songs, ‘Dil se,’ being the biggest musical hit in those days. Some danced without prompting and others needed persuading – it was a demanding task to move about between the bars of the bus, framed by the seats on both the sides, a narrow stage that rose and fell with speed-breakers on the road. The move of the hip or curl of the foot was sure to land your feet in a twist, the bus occasionally rolling to the side of the road to let the oncoming traffic pass through. A medley of horns signalled welcome to every town, district, or city as the bus picked its way along the itinerary, stopping briefly for food. On the way to Ooty, hill station in Tamil Nadu, the bus broke down. We were made to sit on the side of the road in a single file while the social teacher and the principal took turns in serving food. The serving plates, Vistarakus, made out of broad leaves stitched together, were light in weight and kept fluttering in the wind, requiring us to put a slab of rice or a small stone on the windy side, temporarily arresting the flutter. And it was cold, being a hill station, gauzy clouds sailed overhead like nets cast in the open sky, fishing for something underneath... The whole experience was surreal – we ate our food and went into the woods picking wild fruits and tossing them over the cliffs, watching aghast as they disappeared into the misty forest, soundless, as if in a dream, as if all of this was happening in someone’s head, perhaps mine, but again who knows… Pavan Sir, as we addressed him, married next year and left the school, his wife finding a teaching position herself in a school nearby. He was a short man, a thin moustache slumped on his upper lip like a worm, eyes looking through the rimmed glasses, sometimes agitated but mostly patient with students. When I was down with typhoid and been absent from the school for over two weeks he came to our home, to reassure me I had not missed any important classes and could easily keep up with notes borrowed from others in the class. On my birthday he had gifted an alarm clock, a small square block that could be closed shut into a case, a cocoon of sorts, ticking inside, forever keeping time even when I was not looking, a faithful friend… I kept it in the shelf near my study table, at the level of my eyes, hands of the clock keeping watch over me as they swept in circles in their perfect, flat disc of roman numbers. I was obsessed with the clock, so I tried to time everything with it, and in the process dropped it one fine morning, cracking its shell open so now it lay like a fish with its mouth open, a bizarre contraption of metal and plastic with tiny knobs and a slot for batteries laid bare. Here is the thing – it was summer holidays, and I was alone at home. We lived in the outskirts of the town, just on the rim where the town ended and the amorphous villages began, like gelatinous blobs stuck to a solid, central mass. The first few days I was racked with guilt for breaking something precious, a gift from a teacher who cared. But I got over it, and in a dizzying spell of brilliance I figured out it could be put to use as a calling bell. Our house had a decently sized compound enclosed by brick walls and a black metal gate in one corner. The gate closed with a half-moon shaped disc of metal that sat like a cherry on the top of the two sides of the gate. And to open, one had to lift that half-moon disc and put it away. So, I managed to secure several meters of white wire which my father bought home on my request one evening without much argument. He was good that way… I connected this wire to the half-moon disc and the gate, bringing it all the way back to the front room, plastering it just inside the lip of the compound wall along the length. In the front room I connected the wire to the alarm clock so that the circuit essentially closed when someone opened the gate. This was my idea of a calling bell, a schoolboy’s experiment in physics… It worked quite well, the person who most benefitted from it was my mother who absolutely loved it, vouching for the scientific bent of my mind with everyone she met in social gatherings… one day a neighbour brought her alarm clock to our home – she wanted it fixed, she had apparently heard I fix clocks… --------------------------------------------  I showed this picture to my three-year-old son and told him I was the boy in this, with my father, mother and sister. He could not fathom it, that I and that boy were the same person. I invoked mathematics to explain this, and it seemed that I had just made matters worse. ‘You were wearing a nappy and your dad cleaned your poop?’ he inquired, squinting his eyes at the photo. In his world it seemed this was the relationship between a child and its father. Later in the day when I was alone by myself, I brought that memory back, and chewed on it, like those buffalos did under the banyan tree of my childhood. They must have been going through the same phase of life as I am at present. I rang my father’s number and my mother picked up which was usually the case. My father would stand in the background and talk but very rarely picked up the call himself – if it was an important conversation, sure, he was always available. For instance, I would ask for a copy of my car insurance, or a copy of my service certificate with my last company, or I needed to talk about investing my savings in land. My father was always ready for these – he would put on his spectacles, a pen and diary handy, and more than happy to talk… He was all about utility of things –growing up he always said to me ‘you lose this time now; you can’t get it back.’ When I was unsure of switching my job, he rang me up every day to talk to me. When I had applied for citizenship in Australia he and I had long, uninterrupted calls to play out scenarios from our future – how do we handle a misfortune such as debilitating health of one or both of my parents? He would inquire, reinforcing that I need not worry for the time-being, and focus on my career, my children, my life, my health… When I was six or seven years old my father owned a cycle with a child seat on the horizontal rod in the front – most of the families owned cycles in those days. I remember one day in particular when we were riding home and my school progress report wasn’t as inspiring as he would have liked. I remember lying to him that I had scored better grades, but the teacher had run out of ink in his pen or something along those lines. It had just started drizzling a bit, and he was getting upset, so much so that he took his handkerchief out, snapped it open only to spread on the progress report leaving me drenching in the rain. He wanted to get his children over a line, a line behind which he had found himself. In all the pictures of my childhood my father has never once smiled, perhaps considering a trip to the photo booth itself a necessary mayhem. After I graduated and landed a job, he was the first person I told. I remember going to his office near Tank Bund in Hyderabad – it was on the eight floor of an old building right across the new flyover. All the floors in that building were leased for Government offices including the one my father was working in as an Assistant Hydrologist. Outside, the building was covered with hoardings of political parties, men and women in pink and yellow shawls, some torsos with hands waving and others with hands clasped. Inside, the long corridors were flanked with wooden stools and benches, paperweights sitting atop a sheath of files here, a slip of papers there… Narrow stairs to one end of the corridor rose like the trunk of an elephant – no one had thought it was important to put a light there. I looked around me and found the lift, men and women exiting and entering without dawdling. Once on the eight floor it did not take me much longer to find where my father was seated. In his office room which he shared with three others, I met him casually before sitting down to tell him I had landed my first job. His face lit up and I think he was overcome with emotion. He was still standing when I told him the news - we shook hands, my dad as happy as a salesman who had finally sold that cycle, he had been trying to sell for last twenty years… Behind him, the wall was plastered with a calendar, its dates crossed out in red and blue. I had gone with him on his last day at the office, on the day of his retirement. Ten years on, that wall behind him had accumulated more calendars over time, taped one over the other, like a charmed palimpsest with many hidden layers of manuscripts…   |
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9th June 2021, 06:20
| #2 |
| Senior - BHPian  Join Date: Feb 2017 Location: Cynical City
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| Re: If I were a buffalo, I would chew my travels… The write up will need some time to sink in fully. Meanwhile, I am waiting to gobble more of what may appear like garble to the lay reader but is actually turning out to be a gifted offspring of Marquez and Rushdie's pens; from a marriage set up and ministered by Naipaul. Really admire the ease with which you move across places, people, timelines and truths  . |
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9th June 2021, 09:27
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| BHPian  Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Patiala
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| Re: If I were a buffalo, I would chew my travels… This write up was just like reading a great novel. I could literally visualise and feel every single word just as one does with novels by Enid Blyton or Sidney Sheldon! Read slowly and enjoyed  Such was your writing, I really loved it  |
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9th June 2021, 13:32
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| BHPian Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Bangalore
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10th June 2021, 01:18
| #5 |
| BHPian Join Date: Sep 2017 Location: Mumbai
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