The day little stones started to come out of the tab in my triangular Delhi flat I knew I was moving for good. That year monsoon never came. The city was a big sweltering oven. Dust was all over. Food had that sandy taste and everything looked like a movie from the dawn of cinema: everything was sepia color, everything was filthy, and smelly and despairingly hot.
A dry summer Delhi is also an electricity less Delhi. Nights are long, days are longer. I packed my things, enough to fill a backpack, left and, never looked back.
Somehow India did not want to let me leave. The bus to the border came in twenty hours of agonic heat with three times as much people packed in every gap. I half dozed for hours on end over my sweat and that of my travelling neighbours, amid the reek of vomits from children and alcohol from the driver’s helpers. Trains to Sonauli, a much better option were simply not available. Packed for the summer season New Delhi station had been an apocalyptical tide of humanity.
However hard, years of India had taught me how to deal with no matter how much heat, overcrowding, smells or lack of sleep. A dense and profound sense of patient contemplation brought me to the border. Still today I carry that memory like crossing from hell to heaven.
Sonauli border was not heaven. Like all borders, this was a sordid no man’s land god forsaken piece of land where travellers mix with smugglers, corrupt officers, obscure inn keepers and other fishy elements. After all Sonauli border is well known for being the passage of all the victims trafficked from the poor regions of Nepal towards the Gulf countries or to the terrible brothels of Mumbai or Delhi.
At the time I felt it. I only learned about what meant my feeling much later.
No matter the filthy state of the border, on the other side a tiny bus with one person per seat was waiting for me. Clean, silent and compared to the Indian bus, driving like silk, the driver brought us to Kathmandu ant sunset. The pagodas in twilight, the freshness in the air, the peaceful faces of the mountain people…
I felt I had escaped from hell. Much better, I felt like I had arrived home. Still today, no other place I can call so.
