restless wor(l)ds

As I reached Heathrow airport, I was excited. After running around arranging visas for about a month, I finally reached the destination that awaited me. London, The place we had vaguely known from the novels, movies, google-research and images. It was a delusional experience. It's hard to say wether this was due to Jet-lag or the sheer intensity of the fact that I was in London. Its hard to pinpoint such things.

It's the interplay between the vagueness and clarity that shaped my experiences in London for about two and half months. My previous associations about London were mostly about flashes of lights, red cars, black coats, underground crowds and organized behavior. These associations mostly strengthened as the time passed, but with dark and chaotic undertones.

I had to walk and research to SEE London(no.. not just the bookish research).Late-night long-walks opposed my morning bus-rides in London. With darkness, the tubed, individualistic, capitalist, morning-London morphed into a spectacular, bizarre and anarchist space. To bump into those cigarette-seeking, half-conscious, home-going, room-seeking characters, was a contrast to the office-going, bureaucratic londoner images. It was like a salvador Dali's painting.

To comprehend the juxtaposition of self-centered morning and anarchic night was very hard. My opinions began to collide and change, as the nights passed. The wasted Abduls and Loras in the nights of brick-lanes and oxford streets, had many stories to offer. These stories were mostly disconnected, yet profound.

I would randomly bump into Abdul once in a week or two, mostly in brick-lane, on fridays. And he would narrate his half-African, half-french pasts until he wanted to piss his wine off. He taught me how and when to say 'C'est la Vie.'

Lora, was this lesbian chick who spoke about india in general, and Kerala in particular. She was a political science student from Poland. She was kinda drunk, and went on blabbering in the middle of the oxford-street-night about how conservative the city of London is, when it comes to the ways in which lesbians are looked at. She even said SOHO is just a gay-paradise and that she didn't have a place there, and so she was walking in the middle of the oxford-street. She wanted me to drop her till her home and subsequently hopped into some random bus with a good-bye laugh.

While the days strengthened my presumptions about the city of London, the nights challenged them. I saw and felt the mad and vivid narratives about London only towards the night. Days contrasted them. That was the only way I could ever have comprehended or experienced london. C'est la vie.