The magic of travelMoving on from Calcutta

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

There is something about travel that is, put simply, quite magical. The very act of moving seems to cast a spell, plucking at the weft of reality, pulling it apart. I was already weary of the teem and tumult of Calcutta's streets, and with an incantation no more elaborate than the blare of its horn and the rattle of wheels on the tracks, the train spirits them away, replacing crowds and noise with stillness, wide spaces, open skies. It is an enchanting enchantment, an alchemy of motion, the transmuting of bricks and mortar, tarmac and steel, into paddies, palm-fringed waterways, newly-shorn wheat-fields and outcrops of habitation - wattle-and-daub huts, thatch-roofed - threaded through by laterite roads. Pond herons and little egrets stalk through the shallows of rivers and ponds, poking at hyacinths, snatching at frogs. Workers in the fields stretch their backs to watch the train go by. I know their pain: my travel-raddled body, tattooed with bruises from the wooden-slat seats and backing boards, seems to ache in sympathy with those toiling outside.

As a chai wallah totters down the aisle, a large kettle slung between his legs, I fumble for change and sip at the super-sweet brew, a much needed tonic, enjoying, despite my various discomforts, the subtleties wrought by a setting sun, that is laying filigrees of gold into the clouds and fringing the swaying treetops with colour, a dusky red like the laterite roads. I make notes in a pocket book, so that I can remember the finer details later. But my writing is a scrawl, illegible even to myself at times. The notes are these:

      trees fringed with colour, a dusky red

      palm trees/egrets/[something illegible - crane? aroma?]

      goats/[something illegible]

      wattle and daub houses

      white shrines

      buildings freckling the land, the black spots of towns

      shaven/shorn wheatfields (stubble of)

      lilies in flower (whites and pinks and [something illegible - reds?])

But the magic of travel cannot last forever. The spell, finally, is broken, as the train slows and the wheels falter in their incantation, allowing buildings to hove into view, and a crush of people, and frantic faces. Because at last there it is, my destination: temple city, Bhubaneswar.