Walking

By Nachiket Joshi

The strangeness derived from a quiet stroll along a city’s streets is not what you think it is. It doesn’t come from muttering prophetic syllables under your breath, or from the incantatory habits of the mind. If you are walking towards your lunch, or reaching for a packet of smokes, the whole journey gets wiped out once you reach your destination. Forgotten journeys return in involuntary flashes, appear as projections of the mind on itself, confusing experience for reminiscences. No, the strangeness of a quiet city stroll is something else altogether. It transforms every neighbourhood into a foreign land, that’s opened its borders magically for you. The people are strangers, you can no longer read the signs, all laws stand suspended and you look up to find the sun in your eyes. A baby cries out somewhere, a man furrows his brow, a woman walks one way, changes her mind and turns around. How did you get here? Doesn’t matter, keep walking, or slip into an alley and examine the detritus of last night.

Look closely at the shattered green bottles, sheets of cardboard, empty canisters, old newspapers, cigarette butts, pizza boxes, an half-eaten apple, a broken chair and the two roaches that scurried out and parted ways between your legs. The other side of the alley, according to the unscrupulous cartographer, is also a different hemisphere. You discover that here people walk with purpose and no uncertainty, they are the urban planner’s dream. Stone arches loop over arcades, department stores shout out their wares to your face, and black suits emerge out of revolving doors only to be swallowed in again. You don’t speak the language here either, you are a tourist hoping to find fierce Griffiths, exotic meals and everything that’s buried deep beneath the dust of a century’s long sleep. The afternoon sun has now become intolerable, or the cold is too overbearing, so it might be time to duck into a café. Now that your feet are resting, and your eyes haven’t given up their wandering habits, consider whether what you just experienced was a city, or a dream?