I imagine Aakash sitting on the beach chair with his hands folded and eyes closed, thinking about his people. He does not know how the breeze from the open, blasted sea cuts through his face. Nor does he know about people dancing around him, surfing on the ascending and descending waves, and enjoying the sunbeam slapping their chins as their topmost faces are covered before the books. All he can know at this time is his people. Oftentimes, he pulls out his phone to see what his childhood friends post on the status or what his mom’s sister is cooking nowadays. His friends, his mother and father, and other relatives live somewhere ten thousand miles away in a small village in India, and this torrent beach reminds him of the river where he used to swim and play among his friends while his mother would make him food back home. Everything flashes through his mind about his village.
On the contrary, I imagine Tanisha altogether in a different light. She is sitting on a seat of the M1 coach of the train, which is taking her back to Indore, away from her town, her parents, and everything she cares about. Yet she has not had her eyes closed, nor is she sitting in a constant position. Everything is moving in her as the train gets through the rough tracks. She is thinking about how on earth she will be able to finish the biryani in a crouched position, as the middle berth is already open, and the person on it is already sleeping and cannot be disturbed. She makes several adjustments while also moving her hair from one side to another and back to the original side, like how normally she is accustomed to wearing, and finally, she realizes that nothing can be done on this unsettling train and that that is the only manner she has to finish her biryani. She completes her food and puts the empty plastic box in her bag, and again starts to move and make several adjustments, as if for one minute she forgot that she was on the train and was eating her dinner. Finding a comfortable position, she moves her eyes here and there to observe her berth and the people: a couple came from a much earlier stop than hers, who was sleeping when she arrived, is still sleeping: above her, a teenage boy is listening to music, and several times their eyes had met when she was putting her luggage underneath the seat: many people adjacent to her berth also noticed her when she arrived on that coach, but now she also sees them in a sublime deep sleep. All her surrounding voices have been consumed in and of themselves, and what remains is her moving eyes and the sounds of the train becoming one until she finally decides to sleep for the following day.
In my imagination, if Tanisha and Aakash were to swap their places, I would not be able to produce any difference in their behaviour. This needs an explanation. Why would Aakash think about his people situated in the town, whereas Tanisha never thought about her town, or for that matter, her family in my imagination? Do not get me wrong, Tanisha does care about her friends and family. But the rapturous degree we see in Aakash is missing from Tanisha’s. In order to explain this, I would have to tell you about a general idea, and it is the following: We live in our existential problems.
Movement is directly related to one’s existential problem. When one changes their position successively without brakes, it can only mean one thing: one is uncomfortable under their skin. On the other hand, stillness directly relates to one’s escape from their existential problem. Aakash is still because he locates his existential problems in his village, among his people, his mother and father, and all the rest of them. Tanisha is constantly moving and restless, so to speak, as she has the tendency to bring her existential problem almost every time, wherever she goes. Maybe it is because she got the habit of identifying herself with them. Aakash, however, is slow and still and has learned never to identify himself with existential problems. But as that cannot be possible according to the general rule of our being, Aakash constantly thinks about his town and the people he has left. He will definitely return to his village. He cannot bear the weight of the remoteness of his existential problems.
I would like to make a short remark for you. No, it is not a remark but a noticeable fact about my diction. It is repetitious and banal. I will call this my existential problem as a writer, which I will carry everywhere, and that will make me restless all the time, to constantly move my pen and scribe some good sentences. Right now, as a matter of fact, I still do not know what exactly Tanisha’s and Aakash’s existential problems are. But for now, I can be content about this discovery that movement and stillness of the being tell us whether or not the existential problem (whatever that might be) embodies or escapes us.
And yet, this exactly must not be true. Maybe my imagination has fragmented the indistinguishable cases of movement and stillness for me to conceive that fact, and in actuality, both might be attached together like the buttons on the shirt. Sometimes, we really do not need to fasten the buttons and can simply wear the shirt while opening some thin signs of nakedness. On the contrary, we sometimes do not have to wear the shirt itself; this occurs mostly when we are stripped of our social life and do not really care anything about our bodies. And why should we care when it is night and time to sleep? I think Aakash does not wear his shirt when he is sleeping. In his dream, he thinks about his town, people, and everything he cares about.