On Solitude：Varanasi
The woman passing through told me I can come to them if I need anything.
The aisle was narrow and filled with luggage and shoes. I almost wasn’t sure if she was talking to me. It took me a few milliseconds to grasp her words in my mind but I immediately knew what she was talking about. I was by myself on an overnight bus to Varanasi and she was travelling with her male partner. I couldn’t tell her origins from her accent. I guessed it’s somewhere Scandinavian or Poland. I thanked her and went into my sleeper. My sleeper wasn’t particularly clean but it was too late to worry about that. One of the benefits of being tiny is I can easily fit into anywhere; trains, planes or bus seats. But I don’t seem to fit into anywhere either. Sometimes I’m too Asian, too non-Asian, too girly, too un-girly, too foreign, too short, too emotional, too cold-hearted, too stubborn.
I didn’t have my knife with me. It wasn’t allowed in carry-on luggage. I made sure no one could bother me.
I met an Indian girl who was too young to seek spirituality but she did. We always walked along the Ganga river and talked. And she seemed to bump into someone she knew every time we walked. She asked me a series of questions as if she was interviewing me not for a position but as a person. She asked me what am I looking for in travelling, what is my lesson after this trip, what are the most irritating stereotypes for me, what are the taboos in my country, was I in a serious relationship, what are the things that attract me the most in Indian streets. She was very pretty; skinny and has beautiful dark eyes. She held my half-eaten food. She said she wanted to feed me so I bought whatever that looked interesting to me. And she did feed me. With her hands. Sometimes you cannot ask for more — a person who wants to know your thoughts and feed you at the same time.
The way she talked fascinates me. Not because of her look but because she wanted to know what I was thinking. And also because it has been a long while since the last time somebody talked to me like that. She told me she wanted stability and she wanted to stay in this place but she couldn’t. I told her that she’s lucky to feel a sense of belonging to a certain place. We didn’t say goodbye the last time we saw each other as if along the river you just meet up with someone and then drop them just like in life. People come and go. I saw bodies being bundled up neatly and put into the Ganga. There are dead birds, sick stray dogs and chained up cows; a line of people sitting on the street asking for money. It helps. It helps you to think about what do you want to get out of life if in the end, we’re all turning into dust. Time is all we have.
A song was played that reminded me of those times that I wasn’t, if not at all, feeling too anything. I was just me.
— First written in Jan 2020
