The Road: A Space Between Spaces

(Written January 2, 2012)

Written while sitting on a six-hour bus ride from Delhi to Jaipur. Expect to write a number of posts here and then spam them when I find wi-fi. Saumya is in the backseat explaining the intricacies of Indian familial naming conventions. Auntie is reading a novel in the front seat. Everyone else is basically watching the foggy world of Delhi in winter whip by.

We’re “back", in a sense. We landed in Delhi two weeks ago and flew out the next morning to Chennai, in southern India. We spent a week touring in the south and then took a flight up to northeastern India to Saumya’s grandparents house in Patna, the capital of the state of Bihar. We spent a week there with her family and then took a fourteen hour overnight train ride to Delhi over new years (we left in the evening on Dec. 31, slept through the new year and arrived yesterday in Delhi). We did some touristy stuff in Delhi yesterday (Red Fort, Gate of India, Parliament, President’s house, Humayun’s Tomb, etc). We had a delightfully carnivorous meal last night at a place called Kharim’s, a middle eastern tandoori place in a crowded and dirty but somehow quaint Muslim neighborhood in Delhi. After a week of mostly vegetable dishes (of unbelievable quality and quantity) at Dadi and Dadaji’s house (Saumya’s grandparents), the transition to so much meat has our collective stomachs doing the mambo.

I think it was appropriate that I was traveling in India during Advent, the season of waiting (not just “for Christmas” as most believe, but also for the eschaton, the end of time, the second coming of Christ). I have spent a lot of time waiting. I thought the other day that we have become so used to long times traveling and waiting that now most any other travel we could eat for breakfast. Fourteen hour flight. Six hour bus ride. Fifteen hour train ride. The concept of time almost changes. I have realized how much I really enjoy when the passage of time is synced to the passage of space. Our flight was fourteen hours long, but we went 8,000 miles. It was a long flight. But we were going a long way. In the States, a two hour flight to Chicago takes five hours with getting to the airport, security, waiting, delays, arrival, deplaning, baggage claim, etc. The travel doesn’t seem slow enough. You’re always moving, except for those two brief (relaxing?) hours in the air. Here these long journeys give you time to really mentally settle into the waiting. To the passage of time. And look out the window: the passage of space. There is a more serious contact with reality on the ground instead of in the air. Cars. People. Men peeing by the side of the road (O, if I had a nickel!). Hotels. Road signs. Power lines. Motorcycles.

But mostly I’m enjoying the time required in travel. Touring can be an intense experience. So much to see and to do in so little time. To “take advantage of being here.” And then we make choices to get to the next place as fast as possible. The flight instead of the train, train instead of the bus, etc. Then the time “between places,” on the road, between spaces, in itself becomes a new space. The space of the road.