Detour Italia

It is 6:50.
It has been so since the first time I stood on this platform, almost an year ago. Alvega- Ortiga is a broken station; just as its clock is. You cannot even buy tickets here. You can just wait. At the horizon you see the skeleton of what was a factory. Perhaps, it is there just to offer some explanation to the station, the station that is broken.

I remember my first day here. Slightly shivering in the early morning chill, I looked through the mist and wondered when the clock had stopped. Was it at dawn or at dusk? But I ask the question no more. A year in Mação has taken it away. The clock is symptomatic of Mação. A cloister town. And on several occasions I fear that I am trapped not in space alone, but in time too. That sends a shiver through my spine.

I am thinking all these sitting at a window side seat of a train. A train with a single compartment, just as long as a bus. A blue and orange train. I try in vain to recapture the charm I ought to have felt seated on this toy. Charm that seemed to have stopped at 6:50.

The train passes through wheat fields and mountainscapes. Fields, green and gold. Mountains, blue and gray. They say, down the lane there is a station called Capo di Ponte, where I should get down. And at a nearby village I will spend the next two weeks recording rock art. This is my first trip to Italy. I reached Milan the day before. I did not get to see much of it. But Milan is a city to the core. It is in the air. From there I took a train to Brescia.


***
The middle aged man in a brown well cut suit got out of the train. He looked at me , smiled tentatively and walked past. Then he came back. I almost knew what he was going to say. “SriLanka?” It is a familiar question. From my first days in JNU. And during the last few hours from Milan to Brescia the question followed me in different persons. People seeking the familiar out of the cosmopolitan city. I smiled and shook my head, which meant, “Almost, only a few leagues of water away.”

The flight landed at Milan through the Alps. Blue peaks juts out through the fog. And within their niches, snow rests as if the cottony clouds that floats above have come to rest. Snow white amongst the deep blue.



(cont. )