Do you see what I see?

Leaving at 3 in the morning to catch a flight is not something you usually look forward to, but this time I couldn’t wait for the clock to strike 3. As much as I wanted to catch up on sleep before the long journey, I couldn’t. so when finally the time did come for us to leave, I was practically running with one bag in each hand and a trolley suitcase getting dragged behind me. The number of times I stumbled on my own feet is embarrassing. The entire process of getting into the traveller and boarding the flight is sort of blurred in my memory but I do remember the sheer exhaustion and fatal feeling I was having when I finally got out from the gates of Varanasi airport. Frankly, all my excitement from last night about this divine city had shrunk to the size of a peanut and at that point of time, all I wanted was a bed to stretch myself and just sleep.

And then something very strange happened. I got into the car and I was finally on my way to the beloved bed but suddenly I didn’t want to reach it anymore. Sitting on the window seat, I couldn’t stop looking out and taking in the city. I could feel something very tangible inside me, something like a bright shiny ball of light that entered me as soon as I started looking around the city from the backseat of the car. There was something about the city, like a gravitational pull that kept me awake even in the long ride to the BHU campus.  I wanted to take in the city as much as I could. At that point of time, all I wished for was a panoramic view of the entire surroundings. When I looked left, I was missing what was on the right and when I turned to look on the right, I was missing the cityscape on the left! I was in constant turmoil, there was a deep alien thirst in me that I knew couldn’t get quenched just by looking, I had to get out and walk on the streets, I had to talk to the women in beautiful silk saris walking with pooja thalis in their henna decorated hands, I had to listen to stories from the old men smoking bidis in the front porch of their houses.

It was then that I knew that traveling fascinated me. I always considered beauty to be a very subjective matter to discuss but this belief further firmed in my head as I looked out of the window with warm Varanasi wind blowing through my hair. Beauty existed in everything I saw, from the hands of a carpenter to the braid of a fisherwoman’s hair, from the curves of our hands to the lines on the face of an old man. Maybe this is why, I felt liberated when I finally went to visit a temple inside the BHU campus. I felt like I could fully appreciate the colour, the texture and the carving on every single pillar, wall and flooring pattern. Friends and families, parents with little children who had so much faith in the sanctity of the halls of this temple, all crowded in one place and the conviction in their faces was so apparent that you could feel it in the air.