… On a trip.
Out of the blue, I remembered two things I left behind in trips spaced eight years apart.
In Delphi, Greece, I left behind a travel guide that I’d borrowed from the Ang Mo Kio public library in Singapore. My friend and I realised it when we’d left Delphi, I think, and were on the bus back to Athens.
Every time I think about that book, I imagine it lying on a broken pillar that’s a few centuries old. And for some reason, that image has me in splits. I wish I’d left behind something more romantic – a journal, my travel notes, or some such thing that is personal and will be discovered by another romantic tourist who will wonder who this mysterious human is – alas, it’s a dog-eared book with a sticker that has Singapore’s National Library Board logo and colourful bands. Almost always, next I imagine a woman, in charge of organising the cleaning of the place, getting the book from a worker who found it lying about. She looks at it without curiosity – a Greek woman surveying an English book – and she tosses it into the bin without a second look.
Eight years later, when leaving St Petersburg for Moscow, I got out of the taxi that brought me from my Airbnb to the station. My neck pillow, a faithful companion through many trips, was attached to my suitcase handle. We got off the taxi, and within seconds I realised it was missing. I called out to VK, who ran after the taxi and stopped it in the nick of time. We opened the car boot and looked – there was nothing there. I tried remembering where it may have fallen, but couldn’t fix on a particular memory. It just seemed to be there the whole time, and suddenly it wasn’t.
Sitting in the train and fretting about not sleeping for fear of getting a stiff neck, I imagined that the neck pillow fell off in the few minutes we spent near a statue of Dostoevsky outside the Airbnb. It had become a regular haunt in my five days there. He sits solemnly overlooking a square that’s got a few smokers, hawkers (grannies selling farm produce) and an odd street musician or two, milling about. I imagined the neck pillow – spongy and dull red in colour – being discovered by some smoking locals after VK and I had left in a taxi. I imagined one of them picking it up, commenting about who may have left it behind, and whether to keep it. Of course there are the polite Russians who would have thought about finding its owners, but the people in my imagination knew that it was a futile cause. Now, a week since I got back to Delhi, I imagine that the neck pillow lies stuffed inside a small cupboard overflowing with jackets and socks.
The things we leave behind, and the lives that I imagine them leading.
Haha, this brought back memories of the same two things I left behind during my trips, one of which I was lucky to get back 🙂
The last time I was in Kochi, I left a book -‘ A Man Called Ove’ in the public bus. I remember reading it and then all of a sudden taking my camera out to click photographs of scenes in the bus. This time when I took the bus from airport to my room, I was imaging what would’ve happened to the book. I consoled myself saying the driver/conductor would’ve found it and handed it over to their educated kids who might have found the book a fascinating read, just like I did.
The second was of course a neck pillow 🙂 I dropped it back at an aircraft in Malaysia. We had a connecting flight elsewhere a more than 4 hrs to kill. Nearly after an hour after deplaning, I realized I had misplaced it. We ran to the aircraft counter, explained and after few (many) rounds of chatting, they allowed us to get back into the empty aircraft, only to find an honest cleaning lady having kept the pillow aside to be handed over to the ‘lost & found’.
Oh, did I also tell you about forgetting my laptop in the Delhi security check? And picking it up after a week in Nepal, on our way back? That’s one long story for the next time 🙂
The Russian mafia junta who we were speaking to me might have the pillow still. I never think about the things I leave behind for then I will only be thinking 🙂 Nice that you were able to quickly write this out.