Good Meat

‘You insulate me,’ Ramanathan said, lying underneath, warm and taut like baked bread.

I melted like mozzarella on a pizza. Oh, the pleasures of biting into hot crisp dough overwhelmed with steaming salty goo.

We were huddled four thousand feet above sea-level inside a tent during a hailstorm. Food rations had ran out three days ago. It was the perfect time to line the sleeping bag with our bodies.

‘Remember, we roll the dice in the morning,’ I said, recapping our covenant, ‘though I’d much rather have you alive than dead.’

I sighed.

‘Hey!’ He was offended, ‘I am good meat.’

*

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The old man and child

He turned his head around in suspended surprise. Sure, he had seen it in the pictures and heard so much about it. But this was beyond all vicarious hearing and seeing. This was it. The real seeing, with one's own eyes.

***

The city is overwhelming. A thick conglomeration of concrete, metal, glass, plastic and... and escalators!

Armed with maps of roads, buses and tube lines. His head in a dizzy. He takes ride after ride in the tube.

'For the joy of traveling on four stories of escalators' he tells his excited self with a hint of a smile.

***

The river meanders unheeding. Hemmed in with different sizes, molds and shapes of metal and glass. Bridges, so many of them - all of them built around stories or stories built around them. He couldn't tell.

The asphalt has a distinctly silver sheen to it. As if scrubbed clean. People walk about with a hurried pace. All serious, pre-occupied, plugged into more plastic and metal with mechanically recorded voices screaming from around them.

***

At the square he sits for sometime. A hungry stomach demands attention. A glazed packet of peanuts crinkles in his hands. And pigeons.

'The pigeons here seem fatter than the ones at home' silently wonders his still awed self. 'And they aren't scared of me either!'

In ten minutes, he has twenty pigeons flapping around him. 'Peanuts are their favorite too, it seems!' he smiles with delight.

***

Sitting on the steps of the Cathedral, he counted the years it took him to save the money - every precious rupee by rupee - to be where he was right now.

It was a dream - this coming here. And looking about the expanse of clean, spacious concrete and crisp blue sky, he felt a sharp pang in his heart. He shifted uncomfortably for a while, got up and sat down again. Suddenly at a loss.

***

He wanted to bring her along too. They had always talked about it. About coming together. About having one holiday to surpass all holidays. About saving for this one time of abandoned, unthinking happiness.

He sighed. It was too late by the time they had managed the money. She was bed-ridden for a month. And before she passed over to the other side, she extracted a promise from him to go visit the city. And take her along in his heart.

The day he agreed, she crept into her eternal sleep.

***

Finally, he was here. A wizened man of crisp, silver hair smiling at the blue of the sky knowing his time on earth was running out.

Finally, he was here. A child, with eyes full of wonder and awe, climbing up the Cathedral floors to drink in a little of the infinite beauty time affords man.

Blue mountains

Breathtaking.

That's what they were. From the long window of an empty train.

Crooked peaks, drinking the blue of the sky. Becoming big stationary inky blots on a sheet of shifting grey paper. Window screening and revealing the expanse of silent eternity beyond the embrace of love. Mist floated about the peaks sporadically. Merging with the low grey sky. They were the centre around which the train seemed to move.

It was quiet in the train. Not a sound. Only the warm stale smell of plastic and glass. New velvet seats. A silent cream colored snake on wheels going a hundred and forty miles an hour. Glistening windows framed by seats facing each other. Just the thing for snuggling couples in the midst of blue mountains.

Mountains that a dark lake isolated from civilization. A thick sheet of water slithering gently in walking distance of the rail track. Small waves lapping in the wind. Seeming to swim toward and away from the train in the same instant.

***

He is trembling.
Sweat breaking on his brow.
His body heavy as a boulder.
He does not have any control over this boulder.
Cannot move from the bed.
Getting up, in itself, has become a miracle.

***

It was a miracle. Sunny hills on one side, misty lake on the other. A metallic sliver traveling on sharp tracks in the middle, lining either side of beauty. Wafting fragrance of fragile flowers sauntering in with a stop at a deserted station. Fresh dewy color splashed on either side of the train. Yellow and violet playing truant in the breeze over flapping lush green stems.

Mountains far away, fragile flowers lining the rail track. Daisies blurring into a rainbow of fluttering color. Navy sheet of a lake cutting across the solid beauty of mountains and that slipping fragility along the track.

***

He cannot speak.
Cannot understand what is being said.
Squirming eyes do not focus on her face.
She hands him a medicine he does not desire to take.
There are tsunamis in the palm of his hand.
That glass does not stop shaking.

***

It was the reflection on the glass. In the train. Of the vineyards on the other side that caught attention. Rows of shrubs, growing grapes by the millions. Sloping hills divided into neat rows of delicious green and graceful brown. Sun blinking in abrupt surprise of its own creation. In the midst of pristine water and blue mountains, there was wine in the making. Hair shook slightly with a cozy private smile.

Of things to be.

***

She cannot stop speaking.
Anxious about his being ill.
She is looking at him furtively.
At a man grown too old.
A skeleton of tired flesh and wasted bone.
She cannot stop speaking.
Not knowing what she is speaking.
She feels like giving up on him.

***

It was the photograph. Of blue mountains and a lake. A long window of an empty train. A cozy private smile. Of reflected vineyards.

He looks at it for hours now.
She has given up on herself.