For the last six months, I traveled to 13 states with a friend and visited over 26 cities and towns in an attempt to fully grasp the vastness of this nation I’ve lived in and called home since birth.
We were constantly on the move and the only way we could afford traveling long distances without it really burning a hole in our pocket was taking trains.
This sort of constant traveling affects you in many ways than one, and one visceral way is that of it leaving you with a deep sense of flux - almost limbo-like and un-anchored. People and places with their own riveting stories come and go constantly, only intensifying the feeling of everyone being on a journey, crossing paths with you momentarily, as they enter into and leave from the edges of your reality, carrying on with their own travels. You begin to detach, as your world becomes a hazy echo of a past drowning in nostalgia, a present that seems to be real, now and yet slipping away constantly and a future that is forever approaching, full of surprises in all their certainty.
Sandeep.
My shadow cast on the ground as it slips by fast into darkness.
Stranger.
Home to uncountable people with their own stories, their lives only having intersected each others through the sharing of a common space even if at different times.
Traveling to Benares, Uttar Pradesh.
Carrying on with their own journeys, as I watch them from mine.
Looking at homes, theirs only a little less temporary than mine.
To somewhere. And from.
Some city bids us goodbye.
They fly over as we go under.
