Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

“Be a tourist in your own town”, the board proclaims. It is stained and dirty; it also looks weather beaten and has the look of someone that has bid numerous goodbyes without actually going anywhere. And yet every time I see it, a small defiant voice in me laughs and I shake my head at the board. It doesn’t work that way, you cannot be a tourist in your town anymore than you can be a guest in your own home, no matter what the circumstances. The difference between a tourist and a local is that the local carries his baggage of memories; the tourist looks at the meandering streets with a pristine slate.

On a dusty sunlit evening, I walk the cobbled streets and realize that after a while the paths chart themselves out for you because you have walked them before. I no longer need to know where I am going, there is a set of hazy footprints to go by, sometimes I see it, sometimes I don’t but I have been here before and my feet will follow the marks. It is a slow journey, punctuated by sentiments that hang heavily around old reminisces. There is the side path just near the over bridge, you have to make way through the overgrown brambles, forge through the ankle high grass till the road opens out into a clearing. A small jump over an old unused drain and you are back on the main road again. A tourist wouldn’t find this; it is not on the map, not at least on the one that takes you somewhere. And yet, the path exists as a testament to the fact that there are no straight roads, there are the side walks you traverse before you get somewhere. There are the pauses you take before merging in with the flow. This side path is just that, to me and to many a local, it is our bridge between destinations and unlike the tourists it is not the destinations, it is these journeys that are of consequence. We have been there before and we will do so again, how we get there this time is what counts.

Behind the old walking trail from across the main park is a tiny road that meanders, hums to itself and disappears behind a thicket. It does not matter that no one walks this road anymore, it is only the tourist that needs to live in the now, the local has his stories from the past. A long time ago, I walked that road, there used to be a stream that flowed past the surrounds after a particularly rainy monsoon. I had paper boats made of old grocery bills and I would watch them disappear on their journey in this seasonal streams. There was the thrill of not knowing when they would vamoose out of sight and even though I didn’t know it then, it was the closest I could get to understanding that at the best you know where you are going, no one will ever be able to tell you if you will make it or how you will get there. Or even whether you will really want to be there after the journey and tired feet. The boats would disappear, the monsoons would become a memory and the stream bed would hide under thick grass and brave new shoots. I never went back after a few monsoons, I never saw the boats again either. We both learnt that a goodbye is the first thing to pack for a journey.

I walked past the old Hanuman temple everyday on my way back from school, some days there was a heavy load of work, on other days there were songs to be sung under the crazy gul-mohars. Sometimes there was the walking down side alleys to see if we could get home faster, other days the old stolid road showed us new sights as early summer in all its glory painted bright hues on the long suffering tar.
Year later, I walk those roads again, those that once matched steps with me are far away, and yet if I strain to hear them, I can hear a stifled giggle and the slurp of an ice-cream on a hot day. I turn around in a trice and almost expect to find a best friend from that age asking me to wait as she catches up. The roads are empty, a road full of strangers is always an empty street to some walking down memory lane.
I sigh and keep walking, no I cannot be a tourist here, there are too alive, those memories and those sounds of another era.

Some more walking brings me to a road I have studiously avoided in the last decade. There are broken promises and there are unshared dreams here. Another time and another place, it led to a happy place. And yet as I walk down this path, the pain doesn’t come rushing out of the sidewalks like it normally does. The promises, even the broken ones, for we tend to magnify all that is incomplete, are hazy, the dreams are strangely harmless and incapable of hurting anymore. I notice the road for the first time, like it were a new thing. Time has dulled the intensity and age has given me a newness that feels like a beginning. The exorcism of the reminisces is complete, at least right here, right now on this street. I scan the road ahead with new eyes, I am tourist here now, and there is nothing that binds me to this place.

I am ready to be seduced by the journey again, a new chapter awaits.