Today I'm at it - quite unwillingly - for I've to be at Kathgodam to catch a train. My sympathies boomerang to hit me on the face and I pocket them without fuss. The journey has just started; I'm in a shared taxi, but at least it would be less of a discomfort now that I managed to occupy the front seat. The hill folk have already considered retiring and markets seem empty, though it hasn't been long since the last of the sunrays retreated. Or maybe they quit early to catch the Ramlila, Dussehra is only a few days away; I'd like to see a Kumaoni version of the Ramlila sometime again; it is amusing. The taxi groans along the gentler hills whose shapes can be traced by connecting the household lights scattered all across; only that one would have difficulty in considering them in order. The taxi driver is on his last round for the day. It is comforting that he's driving slow, but it suddenly grows that it's too slow to be normal. Turns out that he is repentant over an incident earlier in the day, when he was forced to make a mad dash in the lure of money and cover the 32km distance in about half an hour (which translates to 'suicide' had I tried to do the same). I'm still split if he was genuine or drunk.
Past Bhimtal, and the unfriendly stretch begins. Once beyond the hills that cradle the lake, the climate changes course. There is dense fog which is rather surprising in October; my irritation doesn't measure upto that of the taxi driver's who will have to swipe off the fog precipitate from his windshield from the outside at regular intervals. Broken roads and detritus consuming half of those roads at places reinforce the verity of my earlier description and invites more cussing from the driver. But even in the moment of communal irritation we remain divergent entities. The fog that is supposed to clip vision gives me more to see tonight. I give a hard stare to the hills on my left and fail to decipher any contours. It is as if the entire chain of hills merges together into a monolith that has no boundaries. It might be possible tonight. Then it comes to realisation that it is the fog that subdues all definition. The fog thins out higher up in the sky and I can see the crescent shape of the moon partially shielded by the fog. The moon borrows light from a star, and the fog borrows this light from the moon to veil it tonight. I think it can read into this surreal streak of mine and makes an effort to keep me away from reading more into the beauty of the goddess that dwells up there in that crescent. Anyways, the moon feels so close tonight, like I can take a detour to land there. And then the feeling that one is floating through space in a tin can; the wheels rolling on an imaginary strip that extends as far as the headlights can reach. Stars, planets, moon. Tiny village settlements arrive, discretely, to the right, like tiny isolated islands floating in space. Here the life and flora came into being by some magic - there might be another space traveler alike me responsible. My spaceship leaves them behind. And then, past these isolated islands, one can spot the bowl of a mighty civilization identified as a collective of thousands of flickering lightbulbs. These are the lights of Ranibagh, or Kathgodam, or a night vista of the entire piedmont plains, I'm not too sure which one. I will switch my spaceships - to a much more spacious and oblong one - under one of these lights down there.
Besides the repentant driver and dreamy me, there are those in a hurry to reach back to their homes and families. They tell the driver that his speed was too slow for comfort and ask him to pick it up. He obliges and gets back to being the same maniac on road - as all in his fraternity are - to everybody's relief. Any more dreamy stuff that materialises hereon gets splashed and scattered around owing to the hard bumps, sweeping bends and the abrupt breaking.
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