DELHI AIRPORT [First published in February 9, 2016]: Early morning in a coffee shop space while Jiab is checking-in for her flight to Mumbai. Me looking around and up above this steel glass and tiled environment to the old vaulted ceiling structure. Sometimes all I can do is find a quiet place and just sit. Looking at things from an oblique angle… it’s an unreal world. There’s this pain in my head, but I have a magic medicine pill that sends the pain away… then it’s gone… and a part of my mental functioning gone with it. Where’d it go? I think it went into another room where there’s a dance party going on all the time day and night. I can hear the music beat through the wall throbbing constantly… don’t recognize the music being played, no worries, the main thing is I can’t feel the pain; besides, it’s more like stress than pain. Sometimes I have no stress at all; sitting alert and mindful, vipassana. Other times I feel the energy of that stress so strongly it brings attention to the thin membrane separating me from the pain – it could rupture any moment now. Wait and see if it’s gonna happen?

Allow all things to pass, continue to sit, mindful, quiet and alert to everything that’s going on. A few tables next to me there’s a teen-aged girl with head and body hunched over her phone device, all I see is the reflected color glow from the screen on her face. The colour of her eyes sparkles with light that’s continually changing; flashes of blue, pink, and then, everything goes orange. She is having a conversation with her friend on speaker-phone, so she has her hands free to work on the keyboard and smoke her cigarette secretly, and here’s the thing, she’s writing messages on her phone and speaking with her friend and smoking a cigarette, all at the same time. Multi-tasking with a keyboard, speakerphone and the sound of very noisy texting: poo, paw, poo, paw, pee, pay, pay, poo; auditory stabs pierce my being, on the frequency that all phone-ring-tones and unfriendly digital sounds seem to inhabit.

The voice of her friend at the other end is really LOUD. Must be she’s calling from another party environment similar to the one going on in my head, all kinds of party noises – in fact I can’t tell the difference… what’s happening to me? Is she calling from inside my head? Disregard that thought. She has to shout to be heard: “Yeh, I know her, an I got natheen to say to her, that back-stabbin sawn offa beech!”

The girl here says something I can’t make out really loud in agreement. Maybe I can seek some peace from this noise, up in the ceiling structure, the bigger picture, the larger space within which all this is contained, and already the sound of the girl’s phone is like small harmless sparks from a loose electric wire.

But again, the intrusive lunge of the girlfriend’s voice into my space, razor-sharp blade of steel brings me back to the way things are. Language syllables, smack-your-head-around in shrill sound waves that slice my head and upper body into pieces fall to the ground, scattered around. The sense of bien-être quivers and gasps in a kind of death… such are the battles fought in the mind.

Jiab comes with her cabin luggage running on wheels behind; she is a small oriental with a large heart, we say goodbye at the security line and I make my way back. Out through the crowds and into the car, squeezing through traffic cacophony of car-horn noise and wondering why then realizing we are doing a U- turn, back to the way we came in.

The whole landscape is familiar but unfamiliar, pieces and parts of what is remembered, digital sound-and-vision recognizable from faraway events in history when huge towers in slow motion tumbled to the ground, as if all the concrete and steel had turned to dust. The population just can’t figure it out… please no, it’s too huge, time to move on from there. Only clouds of pollution now, the effect it has on everyone is the metaphor; devastation is all that remains.

You hide me in your cloak of Nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of Being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles [Rumi]