Buried (in Andalusia)

by Aakriti Jain (India)

I didn't expect to find Spain

I was breathless, surrounded by the people who cared for me. I was speechless surrounded by the people who loved me. All excitement had waned and it did not seem like a typical travel happenstance anymore, as I got into the bus reaching a precipice where all energy had left me and I was numb. As a traveller one expects to be overwhelmed by what they see and hear when they visit a new place, and as any traveller, I too was enchanted by the Flamenco dancers in one of the traditional caves in Granada. My eyes brimmed at seeing the singular passion with which their body and hot faces exhibited, tapping their toes hard into the ground, and even harder into the rhythmic flamenco claps or palmas. As the performance was coming to an end, one of the dancers chose me to dance with her making that moment indelible for me; I had, after all, never been able to do anything as spontaneous for sure. I came out of the performance and saw my boyfriend waiting for me , who I thought had gone back home. I hugged him and exclaimed how amazing the performance was, adding that the fact that we had not been able to see Al Hambra did not matter at all even though it was a place not to be missed if one wanted to know Granada. In that moment I rather thought that seeing the flamenco, doing synchronised palmas and enunciating olé every time I felt a surge of energy within me, as if transferred straight from the feet of the dancers was enough to know Granada. It was true too, that the entire experience of the city seemed to be balled into that one performance in Sacramonte. But let me rewind a little bit to the start of my Andalusia trip which was not particularly what I was looking forward to. Ever since I was young, I had been on many trips and they had always been with my family — properly planned in a monotonous itinerary prepared by expert agencies. So it was actually a relief that I was not in expert hands and had decided to not plan it a lot with my friend and my boyfriend. I still have no doubt that that was how I wanted to travel, but it was not the case for all of us. Rifts came between us even before the trip started, ironically enough, it was our inability to secure tickets to see Alhambra in time. I was torn, since there was no going back, quite literally. Emotion ebbed and flowed every single day of the trip, but oddly it did not take anything away from the generic feeling of encountering new plazas, cathedrals and the immense pleasure of finding new cafes and a sceptical Starbucks. With two mates walking in two different directions, unwilling to make amends through the whole trip, differences as they had cropped up, I was in that moment being pulled apart in an even worse way. However, nothing had an effect on me, I felt nothing even after the only two people I was with cared so much for me, so much so that they acutely made me suffer by continuing the trip just for me. It just, as I think back, kept getting buried, although, I have no idea by what processes ; the anger, the guilt, the impulse to leave everything as it was , and go back. It just kept getting buried deeper and deeper, until the passion of flamenco in Granada emerged in a full blown panic attack. The cobblestone street of the beautiful plaza turned into a place where we waited for the taxi to take me home, as the energy that I gathered from the flamenco performance dissolved into emotions erupting like a volcano. I liked Málaga the best, and the last city we went to right after Granada. It is beautiful , the natal home of Picasso where I found myself saying again and again, “ This is a place where I would retreat to write.” Yes, Málaga would be a place to write.