On the train to Chennai, as I sat looking out the window at the swathes of brown, green, and pale blue ribboning along, there was a moment when the lines between the land and sky began to blur, and I blinked. The image resolved itself as the sounds of an elevator ad in Hindi, a woman screaming at her captor to let her go in Tamil, and a one-sided conversation in Marwari jumbled up, slapped me awake. For a few seconds after that, I remained still, inhabiting that moment on that seat, on that train, where nothing that happened before or after seemed to exist. If it sounds like a state of philosophical fugue, it was; I felt unmoored, untethered from what had happened before, and what was to happen after -- will we get auto, will we take the route by the sea, will the summer warm the night air -- nothing intruded. It was as if everything that came into contact with this pool of stillness dissolved within it.
Dissolution
Dissolution
Dissolution
On the train to Chennai, as I sat looking out the window at the swathes of brown, green, and pale blue ribboning along, there was a moment when the lines between the land and sky began to blur, and I blinked. The image resolved itself as the sounds of an elevator ad in Hindi, a woman screaming at her captor to let her go in Tamil, and a one-sided conversation in Marwari jumbled up, slapped me awake. For a few seconds after that, I remained still, inhabiting that moment on that seat, on that train, where nothing that happened before or after seemed to exist. If it sounds like a state of philosophical fugue, it was; I felt unmoored, untethered from what had happened before, and what was to happen after -- will we get auto, will we take the route by the sea, will the summer warm the night air -- nothing intruded. It was as if everything that came into contact with this pool of stillness dissolved within it.