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 ..."
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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.
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