Malinda Words

I took a slow road in another lifetime, in another century and a different continent. When I started, there were things I knew or thought I did. I carried with me notions of roads. I kept notes.

I knew that roads, however long or short, can be made as slow as I wished. I had no reason to regret having made roads slow down on account of whim and fancy and I didn’t envisage regrets in the centuries and lifetimes to come or in continents I might visit. I knew there would be stops.

I knew there could be ‘stops’ even between two bus stops and that stop-capture is possible without getting off a vehicle. I knew there are stops at railway stations and between them too. There is a stop when a vendor cries out what’s being offered, there’s a stop in the silence between words, peals of laughter, one tear and the next, and between drops of rain. These things I knew.

I anticipated these with a certain breathlessness, for I knew that journey-interruption is made of and for fascinating conversations, with travel companions and strangers and, even if I was absolutely alone, with the world around me and with myself.

For me, a stop was a two-way mirror, one face to re-examine self and the other opening to a world ready for re-definition. Slow roads have many mirrors, I knew this too.

Since I started, yes in another lifetime, in another century and in a different continent, I’ve stopped and have been stopped. I’ve stopped in wonderment at the world around me. The world in turn has stopped me with a command, ‘thus far and no further.’

I was stopped by words. They poured out of books I came across or which someone gave me. I was stopped by friends and strangers. Sunshine and snow flurries, autumn leaves and wind, dismal skies and a sparrow, a wind chime and dream catcher, they came in and out of sequence; they made me stop.

Family and friends, planned events and chance gatherings, a daughter’s smile and a young man supplanting her father, sisterhood and motherhood, household chores and the conspiracy of flavours; they too stopped me.

News from home made me stop. News from places I’ve never visited shocked me. An encyclopaedia and a dictionary took turns to keep me company. The manipulation of the word by manufacturers of news spoke to me. There were wine evenings and coffee nights, acknowledgement and admonishment.

A pen ran out of ink. The heart said ‘you can write without words.’ A house was filled with playlists, a young girl playing the piano while singing favourite songs and a cacophonous kitchen. The animated architectures would quietly distil from gone-days the better wines of conversation and bottle them as pages in books with appropriate titles for quiet consumption in an hour yet unknown.

I hadn’t planned to visit battlegrounds, but I was dragged across the rubble-remnant of indescribable cruelty. I stopped. It was not that I wanted to flee to places where flowers exploded with summertime assurances, but there were moments when I did find myself a few continents and centuries away from death, destruction, dismemberment, displacement and devastation. I was frequently airlifted to the land of immeasurable deprivation. The dust, the stench of horror and the perfumes of resolve wrapped me in sheets made of the finest gauze. They were bloodstained. I stopped. I wrote.

Was it in another lifetime? Was it on another continent? Did the designs of the universe cause a fissure in my sense of time and place?

I remember that month of December when I took to the road. It was a Friday. The 22nd. In the year 2022, apparently. I heard a voice softly informing me that there are stops and signs and that these have ways of revealing truths that are desperately sought to be concealed. Something of the eternal verities could also be obtained, I was told. The allegory of the slow word would unfold, I concluded. And it came as a stop-sign and a two-way mirror.

I stopped. A thousand times. I took notes. Three hundred journal entries there were and I shared each and every one of them. With love.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 300th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

23 December 2023

Three hundred two-way mirrors