Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Flying

Too lethargic to post something. So - partly inspired by Dilip D's road journals - more from a flying laptop, three weeks late.

Mosul. Tabriz. Qazvin. Mehrshahr. Karaj. Esfahan. Kirovakan. Yerevan. Azerbaijan. Qom. South of the Caspian Sea, Amol, Babol, Sari, Qaemshahr. Ashkkabad. Mashhad. Far to the north-west, Rostad la Danu. Baku, a name hovering in the north. From 7 miles in the air, the lights of Tehran. Amid all the still lights, one glimmers, like a flare at sea or a lighthouse waxing and waning. The city grid outlined in lights, a smudge of cloud or smog floating above the western part. Outlying clusters of lights mark the suburbs, dwindling into hamlets, between them the occasional single pinpoint of light, the “good deed in a naughty world”. Farther east the darkness swallows the scattered lights. It is easy to imagine life in the wastes, miles from any other human settlement. Easy to imagine the dragons of isolation, of solitude, that eat into the mind and start the cancers of fear and exclusion, fuel the winter dark and fill it with the terrible unknown.

Sevastopol. That last line from Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustam - the new-bathed stars / Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea ..."


…”

Nearly midnight in India, "In dinon" from Life in a Metro in the earphones as the plane starts the descent towards Chennai. Four hours in the airport before my connecting flight to Calcutta. Back after nine days, three countries, three cities. Ahead of me, two days of bloodshed in office, but that no longer matters when compared with the prospect of a Small Welcome and a Familiar Teddy Grumble.

****

11 comments:

satanbug21 said...

Details please...

for the not-so-fortunates who travel to Dhule and Joda...

D said...

What do you do to travel so much? I am inquisitive)

Tabula Rasa said...

he's a Pinball Wizard

J. Alfred Prufrock said...

SBug, you KNOW the details.

D, tha's a question I ask myself.

Prof, I may be dumb, but deaf and blind? Tie me up and call me Daltrey!

J.A.P.

30in2005 said...

How do you do that. Make what is clerly a tough life of travel around the WORLD seem like something so EVERYDAY and Mundane!?

30in2005 said...

clearly!

Phantasmagoria said...

One of these days there will be a REAL post and I will have a REAL comment for you. *glare*

iz said...

Hmm, good point phantasmagoria. But I kind of liked the soft ending.

Rimi said...

I'm tempted to point out that a certain P Daltrey, not suffering as some do from the grammatical proclivity of prefacing pronouns with articles, once led a band called Fairfield Parlours. But I shan't.

Because you shall be nice and post soon, won't you, Uncle J?

Unknown said...

hey nice blog how do you that as written in your postMake what is clerly a tough life of travel around the WORLD seem like something so EVERYDAY and Mundane

Renovatio said...

Best I've done in two years, went to Sohna from Delhi. Heh.