Travel is an experience of going back in time. It is an attempt to try and reach out to the older shapes and sizes of moment, as they had been experienced by many a generation before in their own space. Those were the spaces that they thought had been made very personal and intimate and probably just their own through constant interaction and occupation.
Going to kadampanad during the vacations (dad’s village in Kollam) meant a lot to me probably due to this fact that, I experienced the place and its moments not just as the one present, but as the continuity of many others that needed to be read together. Probably due to this, Kadampanad remained my favourite destination during the 90s, especially during the summer vacations when I spent days on the trees and inside the granary that smelt special due to its antiquity. Like Neruda said, it was my favourite old coin, one that had its edges smoothened by age and use.
In fact, travelling to kadampanad from Thrissur is also an act of travelling across a multiplicity of rivers. Those that in no way are friendly or inviting like the ponds you find in Kadampanad. Ponds that have a half shade of the tall trees falling across them, those that teach the tadpoles to be singers; those surrounded by creepers not growing, but eating time. While roaming around them in the afternoons, time is a resonance of so many silences that lived and died around them without anyone ever seeing them.
Kadampanad was also an experience of drastic changes and contrasts in the 90s where the washing machines and the TV, Fridges and the cable started attacking the interiors of the houses when the mud road stood estranged outside as an old grandfather who had came to visit the wrong house. The cows started finding themselves seriously stupid and useless as inefficient milk producing machines; they moved around with the face of an IT guy serving his notice period.
Some old workers who looked as old as time itself, stood and watched the rice fields with a gasp when harvesting crops became a rare instance. The country dogs were fired from their jobs and they were simultaneously replaced by their foreign counterparts. Shack like shops that sold tobacco and chocolates started giving way to bigger shops. Plastic bags replaced the old jute bags. Some of the old men started to wear shirts. They left the base of trees and sat at homes in the evening, glued to their TV sets. Grandfather sat at the verandah or in his room with his coveted set of wireless transistor. With the advent of all these technological gadgets, his instrument of entertainment started to look a bit outdated.
The bus COMOS that somehow held itself together and managed to keep running from Adoor to Kollam, started to have tight competition from younger stronger and faster buses. But distance was still an issue more or less, with travel and movement mostly restricted within the neighbouring plots. It was once when I got bitten by the dog and fell ill that I suddenly realized that time in Kadampanad is not yet in sync to the speed of the small towns and cities.
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*The meter gauge trains of Chavara*
Adithya Shanker
The abandoned meter gauge tracks in Chavara
are insensitive like a forgotten dream
The rusted and broken ends of its iron rails
does not seem to remember a time,
like my father does,
when the pebbles amidst the tracks
listened to the vibration of approaching trains
with the surprise and jubilation of a villager
when the naïve soul of rare earth metals
hidden in the night black sand beaches
started imagining the interiors of distant ships
and their epical journey in windswept nights
The children slid down inclined branches
and ran through shorter routes along
coconut groves and school compounds
to see the magic of moving trains
The 120 heavy axles in their giant muscular wheels
working impromptu as in a symphonic music
in this land of straight lines
Unused ponds embraced itself with the
solitude of station masters waiting for the night trains
The fish in them rambled day and night,
imagining tracks beneath their paths
2
While sitting lazily on the beach
Nostalgia is just a broken sea bridge:
Hiding both its ends in wilderness,
A meter gauge train can steam across us any moment
The abandoned meter gauge tracks in Chavara
are insensitive like a forgotten dream
Along the rusted and broken ends of its iron rails,
A row of unnoticed ants
*An ode to homecoming*
Buses that take you home
have a strange smell
They remind the dogs
which go hunting with men into forests
and come back with the satisfied look
of a successful guide
The sun interferes once in a while,
with a beautiful line or word
We share with them,
A solitude sharp and innocent like pine straws,
their smell big enough to remind the village night
I imagined walking from tree to tree.
If you take one more turn,
lamps from home will start touching you
But,
even before the changing shapes of red mud roads
before the smell of glue on film posters
the music of water on the wounds of soil
The metallic messages of Morse code from
the dark corner of the house where my brother sits. **
* *
* *
*November*
**
* **For Karun*
* *
Standing beneath
the dense and dark bamboo bunches in Kadampanad
where rain water flows like a soul,
I remember time as an enormous standstill;
There must have been a time
before all time
when walls did not know about clocks
clocks about hands,
hands about the trap set by circles that
makes them redo fate to perfect history.
when mind could unfold itself like a parachute
and float through the never ending expanse of hope
when the night could go on unending
for lovers hand in hand
Long after the play was over,
The seats in a theatre would have
shared jokes and burst into laughter then
Letter from a friend in Kuwait that read:
'The desert now looks only into it's own days and nights
Send me the smell of stones, the colour of basements,
the feel of rice grains…send me Kerala'
would have been read even without sending.
Standing beneath
the dense and dark bamboo bunches in Kadampanad
where rain water flows like a soul,
I remember myself as the remains of a childhood
Probably,
There must have been a mind
before all minds
Aditya,
i stumbled on your poem in Google search...!There must have been a mind
before all minds..!!
regards and admiration...!
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