The Packing of Small Things

PURULIA, WEST BENGAL, INDIA (MPI) — We spend the first quarter-hour winding up the Ajodhya Hill Road quibbling over assorted brands of what is essentially the same biscuit packaged differently and fighting not to spill puffed rice in the rented car.

This year has proved to be one of tours, after our decade-long drought. The relevant muscles must have atrophied a bit. I don’t quite manage to appreciate the sal trees flanking the pitch-paved road, dark with last night’s rain. I do keep my camcorder aimed outside the window as I grope around in my bag for rubber bands to tie up all those packets.

I think about our older trips, when I must have been young enough to be unbothered by the logistics. Instead of buying these local snacks, we used to pack all sorts of food for our lesser meals, some of which would ultimately survive until the very end of the tour. Pieces of home tagging along, ensconced in plastic, polystyrene, and aluminium. Now, our luggage is fuller with personal essentials and knick-knacks.

The Google Maps lady directs my attention back to the road with her painful attempts to not sound monotone, and oh, the sal trees—they are magnificent. I rotate my camcorder into portrait out of framing concerns, find it unnatural, and switch to my mobile instead. It’s less of a risk now with both my hands free, and the sky is a lovely blue I wouldn’t want to miss seeing again. None of this will be going online, but I like to do things well, if I can.

The sal trees do not quite tower over us. They stay farther from the road, rising straight up, disinclined to look down. Indifferent, aloof deities.

The landscape changes after some time of relative silence interspersed with the Google Maps voice and the clicks of my mother’s mobile camera. The sal trees retreat, and I bid them a wistful farewell.

“We’ve reached Marble Lake,” the driver tells us.

Two little shacks selling beverages and souvenirs nestle in the makeshift parking lot. There may be more in peak tourist season. We peruse the dismal collection and grudgingly buy two bundles of sweets the shopkeeper assures us are good. Later, I’d know him to be right and wish there was a way to order them online, have them dropped at our doorstep. Later, I’d also decide it is fine, really, to not amass and adopt every distant like.

The Marble Lake itself stuns, and stays my camera. It has a sombre, hushed beauty, and I can’t imagine any angle for capture.

My father explains that this used to be an open-pit mine; rocks were quarried from here to build dams, and power arid Purulia.

Down below, the rocks skimming the dark, still waters seem bone white, untouched by the rain, by the lake. Higher up, the hillsides are red-brown, as though the earth regained colour with time. Nature finding ways to fill the holes we blast in her, pouring the gentlest and most giving of her elements in a basin to fuel our undertakings.

Two thin blue pipes descend from a structure at the edge of the lake, disappearing into the placid water. Us, reaching back out with both hands, with all the hands.

It is a quicker drive to the Upper Dam. Taking a photo of the side opposite to the large reservoir, I wonder at the geometry of the rock-fill dam: how the stones meet in two diagonal lines, forming a triangle with the tree line.

I imagine the sun setting upon the red railing running the length of the long lakeside road atop the pale packed stones.

My musings are interrupted by a rather plaintive-looking placard with the words: Please Keep Clean. As if out of spite, plastic and paper bags litter the foot of the railing. I click my second picture of the dam, pointedly not thinking of the mounting unease about civic sense in our country and beyond. Almost reflexively, I glance back at the car and my bag in it, and imagine I can see the empty rolled-up food packets stuffed at the very bottom, held in place by my three-fold umbrella.

The road is deserted but for us and two men with bikes. One of them sweeps the rubbish aside with a stiff-bristled coconut broom, while the other sets about unpacking stacks of wide-brimmed hats from a jute-polyester bag. The sun is dozing; the clouds have rendered the waters a darker, greener blue.

It is early in the day still. I look away before I can meet any hopeful eyes, and hope myself that they aren’t weary and dutiful instead.

We drive past the Lower Dam. I love the wind on my face too much to get out of the car, and I don’t want to confront again all the things I feel too tired to solve.

Craning my neck from the car window, I hear the Turga Falls before I see it, that great forceful pouring-down. It takes my father pointing it out for me to locate it: to our left and below, small and fierce. A tiny, teasing thing.

“It’s a tough trek to there,” the driver says, following us out of the car to light up a cigarette. The Ajodhya Hills are often used by aspiring mountaineers to test their mettle. Feeling playful and light, I climb up a few rocks to reach a clearing in the roadside forest and cajole my parents up with me to take some pictures.

An old man with a walking stick peers over at us, wearing a faded purple t-shirt, a chequered gamcha tied around his waist and another slung over his shoulder. I wonder if he’s a local guide. There’s a shack here offering lemonade—some hilly variant I would’ve wanted to try on a hotter day—and other cooling beverages. Under the shade of a large multicoloured umbrella, a boy is diligently setting up other food items with the extra protection of a blue tarpaulin.

I take a video of the Turga Falls. Then, just for the variation in sound, I take another in slow-mo, and listen to the grave rumble of this feisty little waterfall. Somehow, the slowed video feels right, unveiling an undercurrent that always was.

Looking at it, I cannot help but think time must move differently for water.

As with the Turga Falls, we see the Turga Dam from a distance. In the foreground, a lone brick-red bench stands against an unknown tree with variegated leaves. It is dusty, which fills me with an inexplicable relief. I don’t sit. I don’t take photos. I don’t stand there for too long.

The waters are quiet again.

That night on the train berth, I curl up to sleep, small under the railway bedding, listening to the low rumbling of the Turga Falls.

Someday, I will be content. I will sit up in a berth all night, ignore my fellow passengers’ snores, and scribble small things about rocks and quarries and waterfalls in my travel journal. Some other day. Today, let me just wrap up all my packets and tuck them deep in my bag.