I travel, therefore I am. Maybe not

“Open your eyes and learn to hear between the silences.” I got this one minute into conversation with a Yoko Ono lookalike at the sparse overground in Berlin, a broken beer bottle by her feet. Yoko made this outstandingly deliberate pronouncement about her city I was restless to own. Restless because I had just three weeks to write for a local daily whatever I could sheeroff a city obsessed with reinvention. But what was all that to her. She continued working the rollie slowly, meditatively. Then, she looked up and smiled like she’d had me. To be true, she really had. I am sure she meant another thing, I read into it what already had me engaged — why do I travel. But of course, not until she’d said it did I spot a pattern. Like when I’d moved to Mumbai a year ago. Exchanges with migrant cab drivers would invariably get personal and philosophical: “Don’t expect to take anything away from the city. What it gives you, it takes back.” Or like I was informed one perfect evening, “but no one looks up at trees in Mumbai.” [caption id=“attachment_21184” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“I have this idea that delights in re-living details over and over. Getty Images”]  [/caption] What was she telling me? What was I interpreting? What had I really come to find? It came down to what the Zen master reportedly said: you find at the top of the mountain what you bring there. That there was nothing new to discover. That I was not the writer and she, the subject. That she could push any version on to me, depending on her mood today. I, the fellow itinerant, was a recorder, her story the script and the city a footnote. This was how life looked today, Berlin and I, both were accidental, tube balloons she could create an experience out of. I was doing just the same, only I was telling myself it was the city’s ‘soul’ I was after. But I have this idea that delights in re-living details over and over. Details like finding a friend who went all the way to the fourth Berliner Pilsner with me.  Like the nervousness I felt at being alone at the underground at 1am with beer-wielding, loud punks lounging around. Like joining a protest with car-burning left radicals the next day. Like catching the first ‘Mumbai rain’ at the Juhu beach. Like boarding a local at the crazy crowded Dadar station. Like losing our way in jungle at night. Like having our car stuck in the middle of the river. And here she was, telling me I was chasing shadows. That I wasn’t looking, between silences. Instead,  relying on a travel imagery, the urban mythos, the eternal pursuit of happiness, the Lonely Planet guide, tempered expectations — that were leading me on to dead repetitions. There really was nothing new to experience. It all came down to a handful of moods that no one can claim as exclusive. And certainly nothing personal. Yet, with all this, I’d hoped to add to pages of conversations and conversations in between monologues and monologues. There really was nothing new to experience. That’s why I travelled, not to ‘see the world’ but to feel significant in the rich annotated denseness of my journal. I could be doing it in Mumbai, I could be doing it anywhere. But the lady with the rollie completely ruined it for me.