There are two placeson the Chennai-Dindivanam highway where the road curves alongside a wall of sheer rock, the side of a hillock cut down to make room for traffic. Once, a long time ago, driving during a thunderstorm at night, I rested my arm on the windowsill and woke from my sleepjust enough to notice the jagged rock, painted with graffiti, and the lightning that illuminated it. I smiled, just then, that night, for the day we had just enjoyed in a town to the south. My oldest friend, her cousin and I. The memory came back to me again a few days ago, driving down that highway and back by daylight. And in the way that memory sieves and keeps the oddest things: I remembered how in years past, the radio signal would turn to static along that wall of stone, and noticed how it did not this time.
Why did some part of me wait to see that rock face as though it was someone I knew? I realised this only as we passed by it, and I felt for some strange reason something resembling joy. How is it that the memory of joy becomes joy itself?
We shared another highway and several long roads together a few months ago, my oldest friend and I, this time with her child.Another adventure, short butintense, sealed permanently in the heart. We weren’t even sure if we would go until we were already gone, the three of us squeezed into a single overnight train berth because not all our seats had been confirmed.I told her I was chasing a vision, and she indulged me. We hired a car and put more miles of roads into our memories. What will we remember when we talk or think of that trip, further into the future? A scattering of sacred places, a grove we drove into without entering the mountains it lay beneath, confidences exchanged, reasons for laughter, a meal, a moment which contained tears, a strange choice?
Not even a fortnight later, I found myself on the other side of that mountain range, on a completely different journey. What will come back to me from that trip, years from now? Ensconced in that travelling was a brush – not unlike driving past that stony hillock on another road – with a place in which I had once sat and watched the rain drip from the eaves of a cottage in a forest and knew with certainty that I had not finished missing someone who had long left me behind. Why did I remember that moment, so much later, in the same way I remember smiling through slumber on a storm-drenched highway, driving back from a reprieve on some distant Sunday? And what will I come to remember of what has just come to pass?
The spaces between journeys are long, for me, but I carry them far and further. Not to keep their memories alive, but to give myself life – so I am nourished always by the knowledge of what I’ve felt, what I’ve wagered, what I’ve been given, and what I’ve made with it.
Sharanya Manivannan
@ranyamanivannan
The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fiction and more