Night Safari and Tremisana Lodge

RANEE'S SOUTH AFRICA DIARIES: JOURNAL 9

May 24:
We finally reach a crossing near Hoedspruit where we change into an open 4-wheel jeep for the next part of our journey. This one, driven by another Anthony—a park ranger—will take us to Tremisana for a night safari before we are done for the day at Tremisana Lodge. Alan/Fred will also stay at Tremisana. Bill and Ellen will go on to Marc’s Treehouse Camp for the next 8 nights.

But first we have to stop at Hoedspruit for petrol to be filled up in huge jerry cans. Here, we see long lines of black people standing patiently for their buses to come and take them home. We are told that most of them work within the Kruger or in Hoedspruit and commute from their villages far and wide.

Petrol stop over, we eat up the miles. We will soon know that distances have no meaning here at the Kruger. Each day, we will go about a hundred kilometers from here to there outside Kruger meeting up with the group and then we’ll drive another hundred or so within Kruger, in search of the wild animals.

The night safari around Tremisana doesn’t show us too many animals, but it is fun all the same for my mind if not for my poor back. We see a tiny white-faced owl and lots of Impala, a.k.a. “the Macdonalds of the bush" for 3 reasons:

a) they’re eaten by anything and everything,

b) they are fast food and

c) they have a big M marked on their rumps.

We also see a zebra, a mongoose, a black backed jackal and sundry birds.

At Tremisana, we have 2 ensuite rooms, nicely appointed. It is again a loose structure with individual blocks of 2 rooms per block built around a central "common area." Dinner will be served buffet around a bonfire in one of the thatched structures in the centrum.

The children go on ahead while we freshen up and have a couple of drinks and when we arrive, we find them in animated conversation with old Alan/Fred. He has been to India many times on both business and pleasure, it seems. He’s stayed in the Grand Hotel in Calcutta, visited the great Banyan and the Howrah Bridge and the Howrah Station way back in the '70s. He’s been to the Kruger 20 or 30 times. He’s been pretty much everywhere, including the Arctic. Turns out, he was on the board of Johnson & Johnsons and went everywhere on work. The old man is interesting, knowledgeable, dignified and approachable. He gives the children individual respect and attention. I begin to warm up to him.

It is a cold and clear night, with stars hanging as low as I’ve ever seen them. Earlier, our ranger, the enthusiastic Anthony No.2 had taken us to a hilltop to show us "Northerners" the stars of the other hemisphere. We saw the Southern Cross and learnt how to tell “South” from the cross.

However now, bone-weary after the simple dinner, the day is finally done and we fall into much needed sleep.

The Muck Stops Here!

All over the news today. Who knew what about Kandahar. Who covered whose a**-hem, political persona, shall we say? Who shrugged? Who covered? Who recovered?

All is being revealed--and reviled--in a "Sitting-down-for-thinking" session of a certiain poll-itically down-trodden party that isn't thinking too much but is certainly not standing up proudly for itself nowadays!

Well with the "immovable" undeniably shaken into gestures only a few care to grasp, the rest of the party seems doomed into a roiling and a churning of the limited ocean of its ideology.

And in the waves, we see the Kabuliwallah returning.

Hallucinations

Yesterday, I had two conversations with two different people about botched surgeries and badly healed bones. So obviously, I woke up this morning thinking about surgeries. My surgeries. I've had ten of them in my 62 years. 

I hate going under anesthesia. I hallucinate. I hallucinate universes. If it's a good trip, I wake up feeling WOW!! Everything is wondrous, I have seen the secrets of the multiverses, everything is mindbogglingly clear to me, but I don't know or remember exactly what it is. If it is a bad trip, I wake up despondent; despaired; all hope is abandoned.

When my sister had her C-section, I asked her if she had hallucinations. Yes! she said. She went shopping in London!

Mine are about universes opening up, or shutting down. I think a lost safety pin was involved in one--it led to layers and layers and layers and infinite layers of a line of possibility deleted. In another, a dog named Biscuit on a dark tunneled rail track caused a universe to collapse. I also remember one in which I was version seven of myself and I caught a fleeting glimpse of earlier and later selves--or maybe it was parallel selves? One time, I was on the ceiling looking down as a white-clad cohort that included my neurosurgeon operated on my spine. They were talking, laughing, and listening to some happy music. I know the music was happy but I didn't remember the tune when I woke up. Overactive imagination? Too much sci-fi?

I've found out that memories of hallucinations are not very reliable. It's the feelings that stick--the "Oh, WOW!!!" or total desolation--and result in many subsequent weeks of positivity or emptiness, purpose or ennui.

The mother of all hallucinations occurred one night around six weeks after that spine operation. Was it a hallucination? How could it be? I was basically recovered and off all medication. Our bed was then next to a bank of windows. It was late April and the windows were all open to let the breeze in. I was awake-asleep. You know, that time when you're aware but inert? I felt a physical pull: like an immensely powerful magnet was reeling me in, arching my body toward the skies and I could not stop it. Part of me didn't want to stop it. Scared-thrilled. Afraid-yearning. My husband was snoring next to me. I couldn't tell him. I was levitating, resisting, being reeled anyway. It took all my effort to stretch my hand down and actually tether myself to Sanjib's forearm. I held on for dear life. Then I fell back down into bed.

That's all. This happened in April 2001. However, with this one, there is no memory loss. I remember every detail clearly. I feel every feeling. I see, I taste, I hear, I smell. It felt real. 

What was this experience?

As I write this one, I imagine how it will read.

I suddenly feel like one of those people who report being kidnapped by aliens: those people I laugh at, the UFO kidnap victims (or should I be more politically correct and say, survivors?)

And then, I say, like them, I can't explain it but it was real.

Expressions and Impressions

 

Haiku: 15 March, 2024

I write myself but

Do I express to impress?

What if no one reads?

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Will I still be me

If you don't see?

 

Will I still say

If you don't hear?

 

Will I still feel

Even numbness

If I cannot share?

 

Will I still imagine

Worlds in words

If my world has only me?

 

I like to think

I am complete

I suffice in myself

I am enough for myself

But a little niggle wriggles

 

Would I be

If I couldn't see

Myself in your eyes?

Of frayed edges and burst seams

South of the smart new skyscrapers, a narrowing artery signals the end of the metropolis. 

Now begin the signs of suburbia: small, dusty shops line both sides of the street; cycle rickshaws and cycle “vans” ply people and objects through tight by-lanes that narrow snake-like as they get further from the main road. Here, suddenly, people actually have the time to just stand and gaze at vehicles passing by.

We stop for tea and samosas at a small roadside shop in an amphibious settlement that is neither suburb nor village and we are promptly mobbed by lungi-clad men and hardly-clad children who unashamedly ogle us as we drink our tea.

We are in a frayed edge of Calcutta.

It is just a few miles out of the urban jungle, but it may as well be another world. Thatched mud-houses coexist happily with concrete structures amidst palm trees and ponds.

Concrete gives way to overgrown flora between the main road and the villages behind it. The busy road with its densely packed metropolitan debris and fast-paced traffic is a dramatic contrast to the almost asleep, rural, lush green and brown landscape just a turn and a few yards away.

Only minutes out of the Eastern Bypass, we’re out of the human bustle and into the wetlands. As we pass the serene palm-green, grass-ringed, reed-filled bheris, the sunlight is still dew-wet and the breeze is cool and pleasant on villages with creeper-vegetables like pumpkins and gourds growing on their thatch-roofed huts.

How do I describe these places that are nowhere, really. 

It's like a sudden interstice of sunshine piercing laser-like through dense smog. It demands to be seen, but is too starkly different and so it hurts the eye. It is too thin a sliver of light, so it vanishes before you know it and you're back in the smog.

Delhi has burst seams.

Numerous pockets that are not-Delhi appear constellation-like all over Delhi. They exist intermittently within the bounds of the capital city, which goes on and on neverendingly in all directions. Delhi's burst seams are the lal-dora areas.

More on them later.

Mother-musings

 Mamma,

I always thought 

I was more like Papa 

and Anju was more you.

Then, that day in Lucknow, 

I held my hand flat against yours 

too-thinned

age-withered 

soft-brittle

I was shocked to see that they matched

so exactly. 

The palms

the fingers

the dividers on the fingers

all matched perfectly

line by line.

There's so much more that is you in me

Your thin skin, both literal and otherwise

Your veins and arteries interlace so visibly just underneath the surface of my arms

Your thick red danger signal appears on my forehead when I am emotionally charged

Your thick, luxurious long hair that you never cut, and I never let grow

Your eyebrows, your long limbs, your gait, 

Your affinity with words, your love for traveling, 

Your visceral desire to climb things that reach up to the sky...

I hope I also got

your doggedness, your generosity, your ability to hold your own

your magic ways of making anywhere home

your self-sufficiency, your resilience, your happiness in yourself

your eye for detail, your need for perfection

your ability to recycle and use everything in many different ways

and never let anything die...

Mamma,

in you I see

myself

my past

my now

my future

I look at myself now and see the woman you were

I look at you and see who I will become

As long as you are here

I know where I am going.

When Papa went, 

I mourned him. 

I missed him. 

I wished he was here.

But I know 

when you go

I will become lost

untethered 

from that invisible umbilical tug

that makes me you 

and makes you me

 My Life in Haiku:

born and died and in between

over and over

 

image credit: DWilliam from Pixabay

Every time I am born I die

Every time I die I am born

to something new

 

And in between, I live

sometimes the same life

sometimes another

 

And in between I think

sometimes like a prophet

sometimes absurdly

 

And in between I say

sometimes what others also say

sometimes strange things no one understands

­­­­

And in between I love

sometimes too much

sometimes not enough

 

And in between I am

sometimes myself

sometimes not enough

 

Thus I reincarnate

over and over

in gyre-turns: 

spires, not cycles

of life and death