Smoking all the way back to Paris.

Tony's a flying instructor who drinks in the café I drink in early most mornings. He always takes his second cup of coffee outside to a rickety table for a smoke and he smokes French cigarettes and the smoke leaks back into the café through the louvered air vent in the big shop front window and wraps me in nostalgia and I'm right back in Paris.

A hot afternoon in Ahmedabad.

There were flies in the small café but at least it was cool. The chink of plates and cutlery and the low buzz of conversations gave the impression of busyness, but the busyness wasn't happening round me; I sat on my own slightly away from the other customers. From a pot plant just outside the window a faint breeze wafted a whole summer of hyacinth scent in my direction. The smell wrapped itself round me like grave clothes. I found it nauseating and it stayed with me the rest of the afternoon. Even the heavy smell of cumin drifting in from the kitchen was no match for the sickly, deathly hyacinth. The television was turned up loud though no-one seemed to be watching it. The music from the adverts screamed in my head and a football commentator raced faster than the ball he was chasing with his eyes and voice and even the mad dash of red and yellow football shirts that I caught in the corner of my eye were deafeningly loud.

 

I walked back to the hotel reeling from an afternoon of sensory overload beneath an over-headed sun. Children kicked cans up and down the street and shop keepers shouted at each other. Scooters scooted around me like demented wasps at the end of summer and it wasn't until later, in the cool of the evening,  that I began to recover from the day's assaults.

 

At the hotel buckets of water were brought to my room for me to bathe in. Afterwards a sprinkler revived the tired looking lawn while I sat on the veranda. Alcohol would have been too heavy so I ordered a nimbu pani and let the lush garden hidden from the rest of Ahmedabad soothe my eyes and heard. The sounds of the city couldn't reach me from the other side of the high walls: I could have been in a desert rather than in the middle of a dense and clamorous urban sprawl.

Looking out over Naples.

The man leaned against the cold metal rails of the balcony three stories above the street and lit a cigarette. He drew on it deep and slow with long intervals between each drag and let the smoke out through his nose as slowly as he was able. and all the while he looked out over the street below and enjoyed being solitary, brooding and Meursaultesque.

 

 Young people sauntered and dallied in the street and late buses cruised about under the brusque control of drivers who wanted to get home. In the distance over roof tops the man kept an eye on funnels of boats at the docks. The smell of fried food wrestled with the smell of the docks and the street, each taking its turn at dominating the others, but once his cigarette was smoked the man let the smell of the sea win and his imagination turned to scented islands, albatrosses and dusky maidens. The mournful call of fog horns and sirens raised the tension in his breast as did the wail of trains carrying away the cargo brought from faraway places by ships, and he let the night get swallowed up in dreams that tasted of salt and coconut.

Ancient and forgetable.

The world was already old when I was born. I tumbled into its ancient, incomplete story just as one day I will drop out of it, unnoticed by most and soon to be forgotten. Even the memory of me will one day be gone; it will probably survive a while in the minds of my grandchildren but then people will stop talking about me, descendants will look at family photographs, point and ask who I am, and no-one will have an answer. My own grandparents' faces are still easily recalled among my siblings but my children cannot recognise them. My great grandparents are now only dark, faceless impressions, ghostly memories, though I do remember the hearses that took away their bodies so I assume they must have been real at some time. By the time I follow after them there will be no trace left to say that they were here other than faded ink on parchment that itself will one day crumble and fall apart. But for now my birth and childhood are vividly held in my parents' minds. My brothers hold other parts, and yet more episodes sit half-forgotten in the unstable memories of school friends. Most of the people I have met along the road have already thought it not important to hold onto whatever snatches of life we shared briefly. My children take care of other impressions and my wife of others still. As one by one their memories or bodies will fail, a part of me will die till there is nothing left.

A cafe in Vienna.

It was an old café with polished tables and high-back, leather chairs. It was an old part of town. The customers were old too, not necessarily in years, but in taste and status. They took breakfast in this particular café perhaps because of its air of endurance, and there they checked the state of the markets from the privacy afforded by the broadsheet newspapers that they held in front of their faces. The rustling of newspapers was the only music to be heard and it wasn’t intended to create an atmosphere that was either convivial or relaxed.

 

I walked into that cafe early on a morning in December many years ago. The pavements along the narrow street were backed up with the snow that had fallen during the previous night, with little paths cleared from the front door of each building out to the road. I had just arrived in the city on the first train from Budapest. My heavy, black travelling coat was all filled up with the memories of trains and European cities, reeking of cigarette smoke and alcohol and dozens of cheap hotels. I was probably also carrying with me a strong whiff of loneliness, though in those days I didn’t know that was the name for the dull ache that I woke up with most mornings.

   

Not quite Smyrna

I stood on the deck leaning against the rail and watched. The dock was heaving with life,  people arriving or departing or just there to look for some lucky break. There were two other boats tied up along the quay. I smoked a cigarette. (I don't smoke in reality but it feels right that I should smoke for the purposes of this little memory). The sun beat down hard on my head. Three bulky, black water buffalo ambled onto the quay. Their long, curved horns were coated in red lacquer that gleamed in the fierce sunlight like bloodied scimitars. Children cried. This wasn't Smyrna quay that Ernest wrote about but it could have been.

I felt uncomfortable in my clothes. I'd slept in them all night on top of a bale of tarpaulin on the deck and watched stars appear in the late sky then fade a few hours later. At the same time the land on the port side of the boat had faded into the night as we headed south then it turned up again in the palor of a cold morning. In no time the temperature had risen again and by mid-morning waves of shimmering heat lifting from the land was distorting my vision. There were only a few shacks clustered around the quay, no town to speak of. A dusty track ran back from the sea across the narrow plain and I could see a road zig zagging up into the hills in the distance.

I could see nothing lush about the landscape. Ruth said it was lush country but it wasn't. The air smelled dry even when it drifted a mile or so out to sea to meet us in the cold morning. There were no trees. There was no grass. We stayed tied up at the quay that had no name for two hours. The sea was slack and silent and the boat hardly rose and fell at all against the land as boats usually do. The people were noisy, the sky and sea were quiet and it was too hot to go inside to the small dining room and bar and lounge. It stank of sweat and stale beer. Ruth was nowhere to be seen.