The Traveler
Yesterday was my uncle’s funeral. It was a somber affair as funerals are in this or any part of the world. All who knew him from kinsmen to the ‘paper guy’ showed up as they do only in this part of the world. They were there to console a family that they only knew too well would be inconsolable and they would not have expected or tolerated anything less. The family (read as uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, distant cousins, cousins of distant cousins and their ‘paper guy’ who is some how related to them through the bloodline) on the other hand, had high expectations to live up to. How would it reflect on them if they did not mourn the death of their dear one with raving hysterics of pain and with flowing tears? Tears, whose flow could have only been sustained by unrelenting resolve driven by the pressure to conform and the river Ganges. This was necessary as any deficiency of the fan fare could be construed as anything from a lack of love for the deceased to a bitter hateful rivalry and everything that lies in between. And by today the various interpretations would be out on the street traveling at the speed of light as only vituperating news can and that too without the aid of the ‘paper guy’. The lone mother, the widow and the children were lying in shambles to one side gripped by grief as only mothers, wives and children of the loved one could have been. They tried to come to terms with the loss aided in no part by the contrived wailing of kith and kin. Through all this my uncle lay in dead silence, for if he did not there would have been more than a few dead people in the crowd itself. He was not an old man as being old goes, he was just 52. Yet no one could have spied the fact by looking at the lines on his face that seemed to have endured the worries of two lifetimes. They betrayed the truly comfortable life he led, in which hardship never reared its ugly head.
All his life he had been a walking contradiction. He was a rare specimen of an endangered sub-species of man. I surmise as much because there was no other way to explain his nature unless he was genetically predisposed to be that way. All through, his greatest passions had simultaneously been his bitterest source of despair, none more so than his dream to travel. My uncle had always dreamt of traveling the world since he was eight. The only problem was there was nothing more he dreaded on gods green earth than traveling.
It seems silly that a man so obsessed with traveling dreaded it and it should rightly seem that way to any sane being. But to my uncle this was as serious a matter as serious matters go. From the time he was eight he had amassed a great wealth of information about the places he wanted to travel and the people he wanted to meet there. But it wasn’t until he was thirty that he had means enough to live his dreams, and it was then he realized that he was terrified of the traveling. Terrified of the part where the actual movement of the human body would occur from point A to Point B, source to destination, Hyderabad to banana republic or any of the million places he wanted to be. So much so that by the dusk of his life the mere thought of travel conjured up images of immutable grief and death.
It all started when he was thirty. He had planned a trip around India traversing a period of two months from April to July. I was ten then and the way he described the wondrous places almost made me want to go with him. Almost, because at ten, I had much bigger things to attend to than go on stupid trips around the country. Like the four hours of cricket I had to play everyday of which 2 were spent searching for the ball in the bushes, or play eye spy with that cute girl who had just moved in next-door. My uncle though had been researching and planning this trip since many years now and was so well informed about every aspect of the journey that he could have written a book about it himself. He knew all the roads and all the routes to all the places he was going to visit. He had snapshots of the maps, stowed away somewhere in that head of his. He knew all the modes of transport that could take any mortal being into or out of that place. He knew all the arrival and departure times, the fares of travel at each place, all the best places to visit, all the best places to stay, all the best places to eat, all the best places to not mess with the locals and even the day to day weather in all the different places he wanted to travel. So when the time finally came to depart by the train he was supposed to take on his first leg of his journey, he was pretty excited. Excited that is until the train started, once it did and began to pick up speed his excitement was slowly but surely replaced by fear. Fear for his life that is. A million bad things started tumbling through his head, he started to recollect in vivid detail all those horrid train crashes he had heard and read about. With every grunt and groan of the car he was sitting in, he grew ever paler with fear of the predicament he was in. As the train picked up speed, the rickety movement brought new horror to the already frail heart in seat number 32 of compartment number 6. “What a wretched way to travel this business of trains is.” He thought “It looks more like claustrophobic cage in which a kid might place mice and shake them around violently.” And as it dawned on him that they were as fragile as rats in a box, he had simultaneously realized that this was a card board box traveling at a 100km per hour (or so it seemed to him) and on two slippery metal pieces that were 3 inches across. As he realized this, at once he saw all the faces of all the victims of all the train crashes there ever were, and all of them were shrieking at him to save himself. My uncle tried his best to take his mind off his mind but everything he saw made him go back to the same vicious line of thought. Once he tried to take his mind off of it and looked out the window only to see the passing wires interspersed by the periodic pole. Even they seemed to make him think of death, every time they tried to rise they were suddenly struck down in their prime by the pole and they started all over again only to be struck down again. He was too distraught looking at them and looked down only to see all the adjacent tracks suddenly cut down in their prime and joining the track they were on. And so he started thinking about his death that now seemed inevitable in this noisy, rickety, smelly god forsaken box from hell. And at that very moment the worst possible thing, at least for him came to pass. The train started to go over a long bridge over the river. The annoying noise was suddenly replaced by a thunderous roar that reverberated from the depths of the river. My uncle almost had a cardiac arrest right then and there. The noise was so loud and terrifying that it seemed liked the grim reaper laughing right in my uncle’s ear. He could not hear his own voice and wondered if he was dead already but he was traumatized back into existence at the sight that lay before him. He looked like a rat traveling at 100km per hour on a great precipice over the abysmal depths below towards certain death. He wanted to scream but he was so distressed that he was cowed into silence. And midway through the bridge he heard something. At first he thought it was “yama dharma raja’s” (the Indian grim reaper) battle horn but it turned out to be even worse, he realized now that the plunge into the depths seemed much more inviting than what he knew was certainly coming his way. It was the fog horn of another train coming in the opposite direction. No matter how hard he tried to see it he couldn’t. He was trapped a 1000 ft up in the air in a cardboard box moving at a 100km per hr over a fragile bridge and his death was hurtling towards him at a 100km per hr (which added up to 200kmph worth of impact, funny he could calculate at that time) with horns blaring and for all he knew the train engineers of either train could be asleep or worse still both could have been out cold. My uncle started praying for all his loved ones and prayed to all his gods to get him out of this one. And in sudden burst of metal crunching noise and flurry of motion the other trained screeched by so hellish in its demeanor that my uncle wasn’t sure if he was being crushed by it or seeing it go past, what ever it might be he started to scream with all that was left in his lungs. A minute later the other train was long gone and they had passed the bridge but the scream did not abate, not for another 5 minutes at which time my uncle, finally convinced he was through the plane of mortal existence or dead in other words, opened his eyes to see every man, woman and child in his compartment looking at him in a pallid hue of horror. He got down at the next stop and he wouldn’t have the rest would have kicked him off the next bridge. That was the last time he ever saw a train from the inside.
It was a couple of years before he thought of attempting the trip again but only this time he was much wiser or so he thought. It was a mistake to have attempted a trip by train it seemed to him. “It was clearly a road trip i should have planned all along.” he concluded. And in a stroke of brilliance he ascribed all his maladies to the Indian railways. I was 15 then and was hopelessly in love with a square bombshell called a television set, and was planning to investigate fully all her intricacies that summer through the one channel she could show. My uncle on the other hand was prepared and rearing to go for his trip only this time he hired a driver who would drive him around India in his car. And as the day of reckoning came my uncle was as ready to get under way as the opening batsmen in the world cup finals that year. His jaw dropped open when the driver drove up to the house in an old and once again rickety buggy of a car. Yet he did not see much danger in it at the time, which was until they were out of the city and on the highway. His usually over strained brain was placidly coasting along for a while in the wobbly wretch of a vehicle. Then he saw the guts of a dog spread all over the highway and once again the gruesome thought ticker in my uncle’s head was set into motion. A collage of all the people that died in road mishaps crowded his mind. He imagined himself lying there in the middle of the road like road kill. And he thought “what a wretched way of traveling this business of cars is” he speculated in terror, “It looks more like a match box in which a kid would place a bug an shake violently” and it dawned on him that he was the bug that was waiting to be squashed by the millions of other bigger and stronger match boxes that were hurtling towards him at bug squashing speed. And then he saw a sight that one could only see in India. 500 yards down the narrow 2 lane road 3 Lorries (read as giant matchboxes) were abreast each trying to overtake one another and none of them relenting by slowing down. The result, a 10X21 foot wall traveling at a 100 miles per hour towards an old, dingy, shaky excuse for a car without seat belts, air bags or breakaway glass on a road only 15 feet across. My uncle’s heart stopped beating, yet his mind worked at a hyperactive pace. He once again calculated the impact force and was even in worse shape than before as the relative momentum of the buggy seemed to be overwhelmed by the three bullies running towards it. If only the driver could swerve to avoid them, but he couldn’t because there was no where to swerve. Trees were on either side. He was still wondering in terrified silence why either the car driver or the Lorries would not stop to prevent the inevitable crash. He then realized that either one of the 4 drivers might be asleep, or 2 of the 4 drivers might be asleep, or 3 of the 4 drivers must be asleep, or all of the 4 drivers might be asleep. And finally amidst the blasting cacophony of horns he resigned to his fate of ending up as bug soup. At the last moment one of the bully’s relented space enough for the buggy to barely go past without incident. And that was the last time my uncle ever saw a highway with the exception of maps and aerial photographs.
A couple of years later I was 20 and that summer I was busy courting the cute girl next door that I had known for 10 years. My uncle though was waiting at the baggage check in at the airport. He was waiting to get on the flight of his dreams. He would no longer have to travel in crude rickety land based forms of transport, he was going to soar like an eagle to the place of his dreams, finally free from the shackles of gravity and the rat cages and match boxes it implies. A couple of hours later the flight finally took off, bound for its destination. My uncle was peacefully looking at the ground that seemed to be getting ever farther and was relieved he was leaving all his troubles behind. Then he saw or thought he saw a bird blow just above the wing and the phantom feathered fowl ushered in breakdown number 3. And in a flash he saw all the victims of all the plane crashes sitting on the wing and staring at him through his window in portentous gaze of death. He realized at once how insignificant he was in the vast expanse of the sky. Then it hit him like a boulder that he and the plane he was on was merely a blip on some air traffic controller's monitor that was sitting a thousand miles away, An air traffic controller who was certainly not aware of the large flock of birds, of which the bird he had seen was a member of, a large flock of birds that no one knew was there, the same large flock of birds they were undoubtedly flying into. As soon as he saw the scenario he saw what could go wrong, the pilot could be asleep he thought, or the air traffic controller could be asleep or worse still all the birds in the looming cloud of death could be all on medication that made them sleepy. And so he looked at all the permutations of pilot asleep, air traffic controller awake, birds awake will mean inevitable crash, ................., and so on until he concluded that none of them resulted in a safe landing. And just when they were about to enter the cloud in which my uncle was certain the flock was waiting with murderous intentions, he pictured the crash only this time it was a lot worse than the ones before. This time he was traveling at 600mph with a few thousand gallons of fuel that would explode on impact. This time he was neither a mouse nor a bug he was a mere blip on a monochrome screen that no one would even miss. If he survived crashing into the ground face first at 600mph he would be burned to death by the engulfing flames. With this thought looming just as the plane hit the cloud and simultaneously a bit of turbulence, he finally cracked an let out a blood curdling cry of fear and agony that made all the kids in the airplane cry. And like the scream 10 years ago it lasted 5 minutes. The captain in the cockpit noticing all the commotion from passenger area immediately turned the plane back to hyderabad fearing a terrorist ploy to hijack the plane. And 15 minutes after the plane took off it made an emergency landing. My uncle would have been severely censured by the authorities had he been conscious. After the 5 minutes he had swooned out of his seat. And so he was taken home sleeping like a baby as if nothing had happened. And that was the last time my uncle was ever higher than 30ft in the air.
It took a long time for him to recover from his last bout with fear and many hours in the shrink's couch. All this time me now along with my wife(the cute girl next door) constantly teased him on his issue always snickering and poking fun at his ordeals. Finally he got the courage to try again this time he would try a cruise on an ocean liner. He planned and collected money for his cruise all through 1996 while i was once again engulfed in the world cup. And then the following year his dreams were shattered once again. WHY? Apparently a Mr. James Cameron made a motion picture called the “Titanic” and unfortunately my uncle happened to see the movie. And as soon as rose threw the heart of the ocean into the ocean(no pun intended) my uncle did the same with his cruise. “You know why all the people on the titanic died in their icy cold bobbing grave of an ocean? Because their captain was sleeping that's why.” he observed later as if at once all his fears for all those years were validated. And he stood there vindicated as a psychosomatic pile of pride. In his final years he had all but given up the hope of traveling but by now he knew all the places in more intricate detail than the people who actually went there. And one cold august night he succumbed to his weak heart a million times more peacefully than one of his manufactured scenarios of death. He had lived a good life and was a good son, husband, father and uncle. Now though everyone believes he's gone to heaven but i know better. No god or angel can ever get him to goto heaven, first he would give them a hard time saying he would not travel above the earth without proper astronaut attire. And then he would terrify himself silly by thinking about everything from solar flares to space junk, from meteor showers to proper escape velocity and would never leave. So in his death as in his life we can rest assured that my uncle the traveler would never travel more than a 100kms from the place he was born and raised.
