After a lifelong acquaintance with long vehicular commutes, I have spent the last year or so walking to work. Despite this being the shortest daily commute of my life, there's a certain slowness in taking it one foot at a time, putting to work an otherwise unexercised sinew and stability.
Making a step is not one step. It didn't occur to me with such clarity before, but taking a step involves 3 steps:
Step 1: Lift foot
Step 2: Place foot forward
Step 3: Subtly shift balance forward
I take one step at a time, which is actually three steps, to fulfill the contract of transporting myself. The laws of physics ensure that this transportation of my being occurs only in synchronicity with my mechanical repetition of a step, over and over, over and over, again. I keep walking, and I keep walking, for if I don't, I am stuck. The bottleneck is within. This feels different to vehicular transport in Bangalore traffic, where the bottleneck to self-transport is the very environmental traffic situation.
There's a hypnotic quality to walking across the same road. It is so utterly repetitive. On most days, I'd see the same road, tar paint, signs, potholes, street hawkers, cats, traffic signals and trees in the same kind of shifting pattern in my field of view. Yet, every day is a subtle mutation of the previous. Some road signs get knocked down at a junction, and then disappear the next day. The street vendors shift in location and behaviour, like the old man who was calm one day, and calling every passer-by a haraam khor the next day. The people change, but the expressions they wear are the same few variations of smiles, frowns and unfeeling poker faces. The seasons change the mood of the commute, and yet it is structurally the same. The cars change, and so do the drivers, but they honk and drive the same.
There are two large signals to cross. I know to wait a couple of seconds after the yellow signal turns to red so that the mini-stream of desperate vehicles jumping them at the transition don't run me over. I almost feel their desperation. I remember a time where it felt like I was constantly running away from something and towards something, with both somethings being ever-receding ill-defined event horizons. But now I only keep walking, one 3-step at a time, a mechanical motion that happens unthinkingly, with no sloth and no desperation.
Between the two signals is a 300 meter straight road with a generous footpath. It up against a mossy maroon and ochre wall that partitions away a publicly-inaccessible ecological memorial park, maintained by the Army. This means the road is under the embrace of a vast canopy of the old rain trees that reach over from behind the shaggily strewn concertina wires atop the wall. This stretch of road can only offer a brief journey of either serene contemplation or a vein-popping din, depending on whether the cars are piled up against the signal or not. African tulips fall on to the footpath, scattered along with the square stone tiles against which they are pulped by the footsteps of pedestrians who need to be somewhere.
This road is so transitionary that it has no name. It's only purpose is to make people running away from MG Road get to Cubbon Road and vice-versa. It rarely serves as a place of spectacle, except that one time, where I could hear an old voice singing from a place of deep wistfulness, his voice almost riding on the near-orchestral arrangements of desperate car horns near the signal transition.
He lay on the footpath, feet bare, singing through a loudspeaker, with a sign next to him.
MAN, AGED 73
B.Sc, WITH B.E. / M.E.
IN MECH. ENGG.
FREE COUNCILING
8088xxxxxxx
GOD BLESS U
It sounded like gospel.
The other interesting scene on this road happened right at one end of it. The wall was smashed through and knocked down, exposing a hole into the inaccessible army property, revealing only dense foliage. Broken glass belonging to a windshield lay across the footpath, along with snapped bits of the concertina wire. It seemed as though a truck smashed into the wall to create this feature, but no angle of entry would permit a hole of that specific shape.
My return commute is also through this road. It's unlit, and only the car headlights and the distant glow from the busy MG Road junction on the other end gives mild definition to the pulped tulips, fallen leaves and other kinds of detritus.
This road is an in-between space encountered daily, and whose sole purpose is only to facilitate my self-transport that goes one step at a time. This focus puts me in a state where I'm quite aware of whether I'm feeling light or weighty, whether my pace betrays an anxiety or a resistance to get somewhere. It's a tunnel that attempts to correct my mood to an equilibrium by the time I get to the other end of it.
A violent hailstorm pummelled Bangalore. I knew something was up when the lights at my office went out. It always happens when it rains. After the storm subsided, I skipped through and skirted around the puddles and grimy overflowing rivulets, to get to the junction before that road. Traffic signals were no longer functioning and the desperate motorists deadlocked themselves and were honking at each other while the traffic police furiously whistled at them.
I walked through this deadlock of cars, with a tentative attentiveness reserved for modern art installations that are not quite understood yet, and made it to the unnamed road again, rendered empty due to the aforementioned deadlock.
The road took on a new form. The rain trees looked naked, with nearly all of its thousands of leaves ripped apart my the storm. The tires of the many vehicles that drove through this road pulped the leaves and the tulips that carpeted the wet tarmac into a fine layer of desaturated pesto that completely hid the surface beneath. Its textural variation was accentuated by the distant raking light. The fine ruptures of the leaves and flowers released a faint grassy perfume that blended into the earthly scents of the wet mud and moist ether.
The pesto road, as I'll forever call it, offered me serene contemplation that day.