Trying to improve my writing would appreciate honest feedback on this piece
I had never done anything like this before. No cab booked no one to drop me. Just me my bag and a decision I had made before I could talk myself out of it.
It was 9pm when I left home. The citybus was crowded and hot the kind of crowd that presses into you from all sides. I was sweating before I even reached the station. But when I finally walked through those gates and saw the platform lights something settled in my chest. I lit a cigarette on the street outside and took a long breath and thought okay. You did this part.
The Poorna Express boards late at night. My entire compartment had been taken over by a college group trip loud and comfortable with each other in the way only people travelling in groups can be. I had a berth among strangers going somewhere together while I went somewhere alone. Somewhere around midnight I stopped caring and fell asleep to the sound of the tracks.
I woke up to mountains.
The train was cutting through Karnataka by then rivers, waterfalls, tunnels, valleys, thick green pressing against the windows. I stood at the door of the compartment just watching it pass. These are the moments solo travel gives you that nothing else does. No one to turn to and say look at that. Just you and the thing itself.
Gokarna station is small and was under construction. I arrived around 3pm took an auto and climbed a small path on foot to reach the dormitory. It was in open land on the outskirts away from everything. A few other buildings nearby but mostly empty space, silence and the sound of something I couldn’t place yet.
Then I walked the path to check in and saw it.
The sea.
Vast Blue. So open it felt like the world had exhaled. I was exhausted from the journey but I stopped walking and just stood there with my bag still on my back. I don’t know how long. There are feelings that don’t have words and that was one of them.
The dormitory had maybe three or four guests. I tried to make eye contact with a couple sitting outside smiled the man looked away. I let it go checked in and slept.
I woke to the sound of someone entering the room.
He was 26 bags already on his bed calm energy broken Hindi. He was from Manipur. His name was Mohan. I was in a towel fresh from the shower and we started talking the way travellers do cautiously at first then easier. He felt safe. Smiling in a quiet way. I didn’t know yet what he was carrying.
Over the next day or two it came out gradually. He worked as a waiter in Goa. The hotel life had pulled him into alcohol, weed, drugs though he told me drugs had been part of life in Manipur long before that. Easy supply he said. If you live there you do it whether you want to or not. He had been to rehab twice. Ran away once.
He had come to Gokarna for 20–30 days to get away from all of it. No circle, no access, nothing. Just distance and sea and time.
It was 6 in the evening when we sat on the cliff edge.
The dormitory was near a cliff overlooking the main Gokarna beach. From up there you could see the whole arc of it ships moving in the distance people surfing figures so small they looked like punctuation marks against the water. The sky was clear and the wind was steady and darkness was just beginning to approach from the east.
Mohan talked about his addictions the way someone talks about a person they can’t leave. Coming back to it again and again. I tried to steer the conversation if you find something better it naturally replaces the bad change your environment there are other industries other lives. He listened. He even said he was looking for different work. But his eyes had a helplessness in them that my words couldn’t reach.
At some point I stopped trying to fix it and just listened.
He told me about Manipur, people fighting each other, violence everywhere, drugs supply. How if the system had been stricter if access had been harder he might have lived a completely different life. Sitting there on that cliff I understood what system failure actually looks like. A person. A 26 year old with broken Hindi and a calm smile who had been fighting something since childhood that he never asked for.
Tell me about your life, he said at one point.
I told him. Job parents stable normal. Nothing dramatic.
He said GRATEFUL.
Just that one word.
It was a full moon night.
At some point Mohan pulled out a notebook from his bag and started drawing. Moon. Trees. A few patterns that didn’t seem to be anything in particular. I watched him and thought if you can’t draw well what’s the point. Then I looked at him.
There was a kid in him in that moment. Someone who just wanted to put something on paper without it meaning anything. Without it being good or bad. Just free.
I reached into my pocket for my cigarette.
Then I put it back.
I don’t know exactly why. I just didn’t want to light it right then. We sat there instead him drawing me watching the full moon over the vast dark sea and neither of us said anything for a long time.
Some moments don’t need words. Some people you meet for two days and they stay with you longer than people you’ve known for years.
I never saw Mohan after Gokarna. I don’t know if he stayed clean. I hope he found that other life he was looking for.
I still have the image of him drawing in that notebook the moon above us the sea below his face completely quiet for once.