Voyage into the Golden Screen

Dawn came early, with rosy fingers. They pried through my eye sockets and into my skull. This was the first hangover of the New Year. I had woken up in a strange room, in a 12th century sandstone fort, a Rajasthani citadel. At the open stained-glass windows, I beheld from my high vista the Golden City, Jaisalmer, in all her glimmering glory.

Stalking to the rooftop for a hot-lemon-ginger-honey, the morning’s sing-song jangled up from the thoroughfare far below. Time could stretch on forever here; it was limitless and full of possibility. The echoes of my grandmother’s falls, her breaking bones, were fading. But still everything seemed punctuated by M, her skull cracking on the pub steps. She should have been sharing the view.

Yesterday a procession chanted past my cafe. They wound through the alleyway, past the temples carved into the sandstone, past the snake charmer and the tightrope-walker. Incense billowed, and a body, wrapped in white, was carried by a stretcher. It seemed weightless.

Later, I was asked to join a group of sunglassed tourists to have our picture taken for the newspaper. We seemed, apparently, dazzled by the city. The fort walls rose high and a crack of sky struck a length of violet silk; I had found my outfit for the hazy night.

On that rooftop I sipped my warm drink, and felt myself begin to thaw. Time spread out in all directions. Weeks from now, down south in Mamallapuram, I would leave my camel leather diary at a jewellery shop. Retracing my steps, hours later, I’d find the shopkeeper relieved to see me, having cycled around town trying to reunite us. There would be tea. In Hanoi, I would share a meal with an eighty-year-old American woman, and wave goodbye as she clipped on her helmet and flagged down a moto. There would be more tea. In a few months I would find myself bogged on an Omani beach at dark. A tuna fisherman would spend hours trying helping me free the car, and, camping with me, would take me out on his tiny boat the next morning, to watch him work. Later, I would meet a hitchhiker at the summit of majestic Jebel Shams. I would drive him home, share a meal with his family, and be invited by his wife to stay.

In all of these places I would leave a part of myself - shaking hands, smiling, sailing, sitting - sprawled on that desert rooftop cushion, forever.