LOVE & TRAVEL - REFLECTIONS

For writer and translator Sara Rai, Banaras has her heart and is everywhere all at once. On a trip to Palermo, she wraps her way around the two cities in one breathless sentence

- Sara Rai

There's certainly something odd about this-I have no words to describe it-I, who have spent my life engaging with words, I don't have the words for it, but whatever this is that I have no words for, this mood, or emotion that drips from the sky, that rises from the sea, that hovers over crumbling buildings and creaky doors-it's simply there, and has had me in its grip ever since I landed here, in the city of Palermo, whose heart beats in its every lane and alley, in each door and window, in alcove and in tower, throbs inside each tunnel, I listen and dream, walking in that lane, coming down these stairs, sitting in the piazza, looking at those enormous trees that resemble banyans but are not banyans, in their hanging roots are tangled the beards of ancient rishis; I wash my face at the stone fountain and by the edge of the churning sea, walk on my toes on the sharp black rocks guarded by the hissing serpent-sea, the sound of the bells that comes not from the church but from the belly of the earth, the earth that holds within it the folds of the centuries, and it's so hot that my head is on fire, the sunlight like a sharp knife; and as if cleaving asunder two provinces and flowing between them like a river, the pungent smell of urine, and at a roadside café, four men playing cards, slowly and silently demolish crabs piled high on a plate, their faces like fish preserved in brine, and the garbage from everywhere that has in it the detritus of life and of death, and nine bad-tempered cats fight over the spoils it's not just cats, there's the man with long golden hair dressed in a toga (or perhaps it's a woman) who is keeping aside a