Myth-lover Melissa Randhawa follows the unifying spirit of storytelling which compels mankind to travel the world.
The thought of traveling gives me goosebumps – the good kind and the not so good kind. It’s the packing, leaving things behind, carrying of things and making space for bring-backs in my luggage that fuss about in my headspace. Then, like many others who have the heart of a traveller, there’s the stowing away of memories that’ll be resting in a handsome cabinet of curiosities cached within my memory. I’ve travelled to places before we had the urge to click a pic and upload it onto a trendy app. It was different knowing myself before the whole shebang of checking into an airport’s VIP lounge began to breach the borders of one’s online resume.
Don’t get me wrong, but traveling is really for the soul. Yet that is hogwash nowadays because the soul is already a traveller and doesn’t need jet fuel at high altitudes to make good upon the ticket stamp.
Back to the cabinet of curiosities, or cities of the curious, someone had given me a musty book on Cairo with a Sphinx and hieroglyphs on the cover. It meant nothing until I’d smelled Cairo, whiffs and all, and heard the din from a hookah café, the dialect of Arabic and whatever else is ordinary hullabaloo in Cairo. The famous traveller’s song Ya Rayah – the version by Dahmane El Harrachi rang through from the restaurant on my last visit to Petra, a week before I’d heard this it performed by the late Rachid Taha.
When in Paris, I’d noticed their fatso pigeons. Fatter than most I’d seen in all of Europe for being helpful spy travelers during the Cold War. Champs-Élysées saw much of my clan, while I saw much of what lays beyond ballroom chandeliers and luxurious amber scented carpets decked with majestic Christmas trees and cheerful ribbons.
It was during a rather dashing-through-the-snow visit to Strasbourg and an upward drive to Neuschwanstein Castle that it donned on me – why Santa Claus was so important to winter. That evening after a hearty bowl of Hungarian goulash, I sat to write at the desk in the hotel room, mostly lured by the thick paper stationery and the sound of pen on wood… ‘that when the chilling duvet of white snow rests stubbornly upon all earth, it can make one forget the colour red, or any colour for that matter. Shivering cold hasn’t any colour, and that’s when the kindness of strangers and gifts from loved ones can warm the cockles of your heart’. Roman myth will approve it is the chilling curse of a mother Ceres whose beautiful daughter Persephone has travelled far away into the Underworld because Hades was at large. So, mortals will keep candles aglow to remind themselves of hot chocolate days gone by, armed with a few merry bells and Christmas Carols that’ll compensate for the birds that have bolted out for the winter.
Travel is such a human experience that it defines how we feel about cultures and how we may belong to the bits and fragments of them all. The brain awakens as if Proust dipped his madeleine in tea, to ping at ideas both loved and unloved. I would want to pair today’s Camembert (cheese) at Maxim’s Café not with white bubbly or Chardonnay, but with that habañero (Mexican chilli) which cuts through like Santana’s guitar taking flight in Black Magic Woman from his sensational album – Abraxas. I’d ditch what the Mariachi band was drinking and just parlez-vous for a velvety golden Moroccan tea that Yves Saint Laurent sipped in the late 60s to transform his empire into the Rive Gauche of the 70s. That stylish era when travel and culture were romantic soulmates has never stepped out of fashion. Strawberry Fields Forever.
Across the Atlantic, New York has been fabulously good to me, whether I wore black boots or not, it knows how broodingly vibrant I take my coffee.
It served me the same arabica brew as his forefather’s cucina in Milan, Italy. On that sunny day, a passerby carried an art book on Leonardo da Vinci, and I thought only of how lucky I have been to make it to the Louvre for their last private session to see the Mona Lisa near the turn of the century. It wasn’t a big deal, but that I had travelled to see her was comforting. Perhaps because it is a famous painting of a smiling woman sitting in a monstrous building with underground cellars, and all those folk stories of a princess hidden away in a castle came flooding back. The gigantic Melusinian flying wings from coin memorabilia I purchased at The Louvre beside the pamphlet on the House of Julia resemble closely the spout and handle of the coffee pot on the one-Dirham coin in my Dubai coin purse. It’s in the vicinity of the ‘Bindu’ by S. H Raza shown at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi during their opening in 2017. The work by an artist who showed the universe in a single bindu had become a crowd-puller at the first universal museum in the Arab world to signify their focus on what unites mankind. There you have it – all possible travel destinations in one dot. Whether we have always been aware of how travel in the mind unites us or whether we have had to physically travel in order to grasp that humans are a race defined by collective cultural jaunts, is what I’ll be thinking of when I next buckle a seatbelt on an aircraft, or on a spacecraft in the not-too-distant future.
The good
Itinerary or not, your travel was unforgettable and your journal doesn’t care if you’ve kept records; comfy, jovial attire.
The bad
Tourism boards that advertise what they can’t deliver; being careless with one’s belongings.
The trendy
Traveling because you know how much you enjoy it; a great hat or scarf so we can describe you to a nearby boss or madam when you’ve wandered off.
Author’s rant
Loud roar of airplanes – If you’re anything like me, someone who for 40 odd years has lived only a few kilometres away from one of the busiest airports in the ME, then the travel bug has felt hungrier in 2020 than the year when Boney M released Rasputin. ~Mel.