Cities, Stories, Strangers

Sometimes, to realise that nothing matters, we need to be at 38500 ft.

Chennai, warm and traffic-clogged, was an archive. And Singapore, weepy-weathered, rainwater tearing in white flames on the tarmac behind a 747's thrust, was lost beneath an ocean's breath of spume. And Tokyo, cloudy, sniffing like a geisha with a great white handkerchief, its lights too frail, its megalopolis spike too small on the heaving blue and green of the great Pacific, shrank to a point, and dwindled away.

Like eerie tanks in a fallen town, captured ghostly white in a negative, clouds gleamed in the twilight, the thousand miles of them. Below them were more clouds: armies, scattered, shredded, flimsy, mountainous, all still, absolutely still. And like fireflies winking by wildebeest herds at night, the aircraft's winglights blinked by the dark sihouettes. And the world's great cities were too small to be seen.

What plays in my mind? A voice from thirty years ago, dipping smooth as whiskey, sad and beautiful, the bare and outstretched arms of a face with curly hair, a body assumed by needle-marks.

Where the little girls in the hollywood bungalows....

Los Angeles came, warm with the Californian sun, its days as long as its distances, its freeways ripping the air. My cab swerves right, and we're shooting past the world on the Interstate 405 at ninety miles an hour. Orange County, here it lies, spread out like a board game, automobiles moving in assembly.

Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light
Or just another lost angel...City of Night

It's eerie to be the only person walking the streets. Cars cascade. For company, I have the pedestrian icon that appears on the traffic lights, when I push the button to cross.

At the corner, sometimes, near a colony of planted ducks at a pool stands a ragged black man, twice my height, in mouldy clothes, carrying a cardboard banner: HOMELESS JOBLESS HUNGRY. No, but he's not a black man, you can't say that here. A man, just a man, bespectacled, balding, like a maimed dog on an Indian street, we don't know what colour or race. But he's of the same colour as others who wait like that, and they wait at corners, hunched with heavy stares.

I walk past him. California, fertile and booming, accelerates.

I shift. Costa Mesa, where an anglo-Indian hotel manager holds forth on Calcutta, on Bengali friends who sneaked into his place for a bottle, on fussy shrewd American customers who need to be shown their place. Garden Grove, with mommies pushing prams where babies inspect the world, chins up, little heads still as the wheels go over the pavement.

Mexicans everywhere, old men in straw hats getting on the wrong bus, young men who remove boxes from vans, stern-faced, stone-faced aunties who sit glumly on buses, and curly-haired morning women in slim cotton skirts, chubby as tomatoes, ready for the day.

What accent is this, this cab driver's? Some tucked-away European country? Then a mist envelops me in the cab. The music, sarangi, tanpura trailing behind, the tabla cantering with it. He couldn't be Indian. Ah. Afghanistan. He's Afghan, over six feet tall, built like a warrior horse. Of Kashmiri ancestry, Farsi-speaking. He's been to Delhi. But your music, he says. His companion on the streets of Orange County, in the lengths and turns of that repetitive board game. Your music, he says again, is so beautiful...

He fumbles with his cassette-collection. Lata Mangeshkar. Guide. Mughal-e-Azam. Ustad Vilayat Khan. Pandit Jasraj. When he speaks of Ustad Bismillah Khan, the cab slows down, his voice lowers, and he looks behind at us. The shehnai, once you've acquired a taste for it, is very like the human voice, it sings for us in lines that need no lyrics. The sarangi too. I tell him that. He nods. And he knows about Benares.

I pause on my way to work, to pick up maple leaves. What a beautiful tree, its droppings like plums, deep and taut maroon. Above the avenues, the instant food and smart retail, little swifts burst in flight, exploding and closing in, their hearts faster than mine, their bellies the size of my toe, their wings like little black sickles.

City of Night,
City of Night, City of Night, woo, c'mon

Beatles pause at intersections, waiting for the lights to change. It's summer. At the feet, at the ankles of pines, pansies wait like schoolgirls, their velvet faces scrubbed by mother pansies, their costumes blue and yellow.

On the weekend, Americans are buying things, filling up bins with packaged goods, with beasts converted to cubes and strips, and trees converted to branded sprays, their calories on count, their bellies filled with esters, their crude oil turned to gasoline, to gas, to be burned and filled at stations. If it ran out of fuel, what would this country do? If you took their shelves away, where would they go?

Never saw a woman... So alone, so alone
So alone, so alone

Raag Bageshree plays in my hotel room. I twist the blinds open. A girl in tight shorts is taking something out of a car's rear. Time to plan workflows, application modules, documentation of deviations and user-shadowing.

Drivin' down your freeways
Midnite alleys roam

Another Afghan cabbie tells me that if America carries on like this, there will be more trouble. He slows down, looks back and tells me that Karzai is a puppet. Are you a Pashtun, I ask. Yes, he's a Pashtun. From Kabul. You people say Pathan for that, right, in India? Yes, we say Pathan. When was the last time everything was peaceful and people lived their lives, in his country? Till 1970, he says. Before the Russian invasion, then? Yes. You could walk anywhere, it was totally safe, even with money, anything, and people trusted people, and it was a beautiful country.

As I worry about having read or written nothing meaningful in the last few months, and about my project's service-level agreements, and about what I'm going to say when Monday comes, I think of little lives all over the world, someone in Moscow on a park bench, vodka on his breath and something on his mind, some farmer in Telengana worrying about rains, some tortoise in Sicily slipping while trying to mate, some bespectacled ragged man where MacArthur meets Fairview in Santa Ana, watching the world go by, everthing unreal except himself, the pangs within, the soggy lettered cardboard, everything else like walls in a video game, moving as the cursor moves.

We move on, little eddies in larger winds, each with pangs, each with a story.