Near Gower Street

The old camera was simpler and therefore better. The old way of looking at the world was simpler...

Yesterday, a glorious early morning drive, past small plots of land (wheat, mustard). The light is golden, gentle. Everything's at peace with itself. The ploughed soil, dark brown and firm at this time of the year. All the ancient ways surviving. Cows grazing..later on a group of camels (with their multi-coloured saddles) passed by you. The trucks with their dazzling, ornate designs, quiet and determined on their long haul. At the service station, deep in the heart of Punjab, they're serving espresso! (not half bad as well).

On the way back you stop on the roadside to see some people making lumps of golden, raw sugar from sugarcane. You wonder how long the process has been around. A thousand years? It's boiled in a huge metal pot under a wood fire. The aroma of the sugarcane is sweet and comforting. A man in wellington boots tells us that no chemicals whatsoever are used in the process. 

By the road an old man sells it by the kilo. He seems remarkably content in life and smiles at us warmly. How long has he been doing this kind of work? What is there to say to strangers? If he asked us what we do we would not be able to explain anything to him in any great detail. I ask D, "What, exactly, is the point of our knowledge?". "Not much," he replies, but lets it go, since this question is too close to home. New York, London, tens of thousands of pounds, so many hours of intense devotion to trying to understand fairly frivolous things; a life given over to asking the wrong questions, abstractions, theories. All that has led to this inexorable moment at dusk in an unfamiliar land; we stand at the roadside, bewildered, as limited as the man selling the sugar that has been made to crystallize and then harden under the winter sun.
   
It is night now. The lights come on at the service station as we swill down cups of hot milky tea. The mood lightens, as some people contemplate that the day is done. We look past palm trees to the dying sun. "If there weren't these damned kids on the trampoline we could be in California," says D. That time has gone, like much else.

We drive back in the enfolding dark, with less to say to one another. D wants to listen to the Pet Shop Boys. By the side there are the controlled fires (rice?). Each pile burns brilliantly, separately, deep into the fields, in a time-worn ritual. The fire, pure and clean, seems to burn with very little smoke rising into the night sky.

At the toll plaza entry and exit is noted with some seriousness. The journeys you've made over the years.

You stand over the basin and wash your face with a handful of water. Don't look in the mirror in case you see yourself. Make preparations, as best you can. Another early morning departure, another journey into the unfamiliar. Who is it that goes, who is it that returns?