Time travel

from 2010-06 Sydney (2)

A Celebration of Love

A trip down memory lane becomes a lingering journey of vivid experiences and gentle nostalgia

BY APARNA JACOB

How is it that in just a few hours you can make the crossing from one world to the

At 3:30 pm the plane lifts from Sydney airport into the ice blue sky. It is 19 degrees and the air is sharp in our lungs.

At 2:30 am we disembark in Mumbai. We emerge from the airport and walk into the city’s large sweaty embrace. It is 35 degrees and the heat swathes us like a steamy towel.

At 5 am, I am in my mother’s kitchen, eating a plate of lamb biryani that has been cooking in a giant cauldron most of the night. The meat so readily slipping off the bone, the fried onions so crisp and sweet in my mouth and the long grained basmati so fragrant from the spices.

It makes my head spin.

I sleep in my old room, surrounded by my dusty books, desk and mirror. I sleep the sleep of the dead and dream dreams of Sydney. Dreams know nothing about time travel and often get left behind.

***

The next week we fly to the land of my childhood. We fly to Kerala where I’d spent so many summers growing brown from swimming in the river, rough footed from walking barefoot in the red dirt.

From the plane we see a land so vast and so verdant that it makes you stare. Paddy fields quilt the landscape interspersed by mighty rivers. Palm trees waving their fronds, jackfruits and pendant green mangoes.

The air is abuzz with the hum of cicadas. Rising, rising, then falling.

***

My brother is getting married.

We stand steaming gently in the still heat of a small church with low ceilings. Sweat pours from every pore. The women have wrapped themselves in expensive silks which wilt in the heat. Hairdos collapse, makeup slides off faces.

My brother wears a very pale and very expensive suit. He is sweating through his suit. Sweat seeps out in large roaming patterns on his shoulders, back and under his arms. But his face stays calm and as he stands at the altar, he smiles all around, a dimple appearing and disappearing. Beyond his head, in the corner, is the stone basin in which he was baptised. In this church. 27 years ago. I was 3 then and the church had seemed enormous.

We had grown. The church had not.

I try to catch my brother’s eye but he has his arm around his new bride and is smiling into the camera, the strange dimple high on his right cheek.

Everyone sees the heft of his shoulders, how he is taller than his father. I see a boy in navy shorts whom I taught to ride a bicycle, who never did his homework. ***

The next day we pile into a cousin’s car and drive to the river. More cousins are waiting in the water with their husbands, wives and children. We leap off the embankment into the cool depths of the river. The tug of its current feels familiar. I still remember how to open my eyes underwater and see the shimmering sand bed. I catch the waterweeds floating past.

A cousin kisses me on the cheek and says in my ear, “Remember?”

This river has always flowed past these houses. Only the last time we came here we were thin limbed children with no husbands or wives or children. ***

We fly back into Mumbai, the city fringed by a muddy sea, its grey slums like scales on a great sea creature.

Our taxi plunges into the cacophony of other yellow hooded taxis, rickshaws and red buses. We are driving through Dharavi, past sagging buildings full of people, people sleeping on the pavements, people perched on top of trucks, people spilling out of trains. Through Ghatkopar, Chembur, BARC, over various bridges.

Nothing changes. New and old constantly negate each other here, to maintain an unchanging equilibrium.

The next day I take the Harbour Line to Victoria Terminus. Every station has a story. Kurla, Tilak Nagar, Guru Tej Bahadur Nagar, Wadala, Sandhurst Road (Sandas Road), Masjid.

I get off at VT, the heart of maximum city. I go to the Museum, Jehangir Art Gallery, NGMA, the Gateway of India, Taj, the Queen’s Necklace. I ask a cab driver to drive me around my old haunts: Colaba, St. Xavier’s College, past the Press Club, Flora Fountain, Oval Maidan, Churchgate. I thank him in Hindi.

“Aap ki Hindi unki jaise ho gayee hai,” he says gesturing to foreigners standing nearby.

***

In my last week in Mumbai, I go in search of my favourite chaatwaala. He’s standing in his old spot, his familiar trim frame in white pyjamas and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up. His hands are a blur as he mixes enormous quantities of bhel and sev and crushes papadis onto plates. I’d interviewed him once long ago for a feature story. But now, I stand on the fringes of the crowd uncertain, rehearsing my line in Hindi in my head. Madanlaal looks in my direction and under his thick white moustache is a shy smile.

“Madanlaalji, aapko yaad hai maine aapka interview kiya tha?”

“Haanji, aath saal pehle.”

I introduce my Australian husband and my friend and we eat paani puris, and he throws in a few complimentary puris It doesn’t feel like eight years.

***

On my last day at home, I smell the hot morning chappatis one last time. I open the fridge armed with a spoon and eat a bit of everything I can find. Mango chutney, chole, cabbage toran, beans, one idli, sambhar, a golden mango, one gulab jamun, one laddoo, one last jalebi and one samosa

My stomach feels heavy and so does my heart. My mother clicks her tongue in portal, Mumbai Airport, ready to fly to the other world and leave behind everything I’ve grown up on, all that is most familiar to me, all that has made me, me.

Once again we fly through time; Bombay, Singapore, Perth, Sydney. We set and reset clocks. We fast forward through a day and are served lunch for breakfast and dinner for lunch. And in that womb 35,000 feet high, in limbo, where nothing is of any consequence except your next meal, we watch grainy movies and grin at the blue screens in the dark, wearing ill-fitting headsets, wrapped in inadequate blankets, all the while hurtling through space and time. ***

We arrive in Sydney. It’s late and the city is a ghost town. We are attired in 40 degree Mumbai clothes unprepared for the 15 degrees that meets us outside the airport.

We wait an hour for a taxi, we come home. When we walk in the door, the clock says it’s 1:30 am. We are wide awake. I call my mother and tell her I’m not sleepy and she says, “It’s only 6:30 pm.”

The house feels cold, empty, unfamiliar. We put on clothes still smelling of Mumbai and climb into bed.

I dream time lagged dreams of crowds and vada paav and garlic chutney I dream in Hindi.

Dreams know nothing about time travel. They always get left behind.

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