Journeys | The Gao Tie to Kaohsiung and an Exhibition on Time

Just as I land in Taipei, a friend from college arrives in Kaohsiung. On the first weekend out of Quarantine, I travel to meet her. Taipei Main Station is a maze of concrete tunnels and metal tracks, underground platforms, and a multistory depot with gates for arrivals and departures, housing the MRT, the bus stop, the local railway station, as well as the High-Speed Rail.

Used to the meanderingly long journeys of the Indian Railways, prone to such delays where arrival becomes a distant notion and journey a stage unto life, there was, I admit, some excitement to board a bullet train. As far back as I can remember, I have heard Indians tell tales of Japanese puctuality, especially their trains. Apologies are issued, I vaguely remember some uncle telling me, if a train is even late by twenty seconds.

Parallel Tracks Do Not Meet

Now, it was the Japanese Empire that brought modern railways to the Island of Formosa during their fifty-year colonial rule. And the coming of railways brings with it the need to standardize Time. People can no longer be left to their personal notions of time, understood as change of seasons, blooming of flowers and fall. Everyone must be on the same time, and simultaneously it will have to strike noon and midnight for all, notwithstanding the murmurs of the heart that wishes the morning to come a little later and the evening to linger a while longer.

Measuring the Last Grain of Time

With tickets purchased at a 7-Eleven, I follow the signs for HSR, or Gao Tie (高鐵) at Taipei Main, and become one in the movement of thousands. Through gates that scan my ticket, I arrive lower underground on a dark, cement-grey platform. Wheels roll by and came to a halt every few minutes on either side; some get off and others get on. I hop onto one such train.

After a brief stop at Banqiao, the bullet on wheels emerges above ground, and I see cities follow fields follow pastures on the left, amidst glimpses of the sea to the right. The sanatorium white panel of the train car, and lights running down the ceiling above the aisle, rapidly blurring scenescape outside and the calm stillness of everything inside, astounds the traveler's mind and sends being into a tailspin.

I wonder when the railways were first introduced; they must have seemed like a place outside the plane of time. All that we are is suspended on the rolling stocks, postponed until the moment just before arrival, when the panic or excitement to get off seizes hold of us again. For a brief span, which may be days, hours, or minutes, we are no longer terrestrial beings fixed to the small spot of earth beneath our feet.

To catch a train is to make an appointment, an appointment that so many make every day, some many times a day. When so many have to come together, it would not do for each to have a different notion of time. It must strike six o'clock for all at once. I reckon church bells and factories used to perform a somewhat similar function, and the railways only reinforced the dissociation of time with phenomena such as sunrise, sunset, high noon, the hour dusk and dust raised by cattle returning home that our ancestors had felt as time.

Conductor's Clock

Now hands clock seconds and minutes, hours and days, and those hands, too, have disappeared into refreshing digits on a screen. My train gathers speed and maxes out at 297/298 kilometres per hour. I imagine how long such a train would take to ferry me between Varanasi and Allahabad, between Delhi and Mumbai, and to all the other places I know from so many dots on the maps of India in geography class.

In less than two hours, I arrive in Kaohsiung, some four hundred kilometres from Taipei via Chiayi, Taizhong, and Tainan, all of which become so many invisible cities, places of imagination I will yearn to visit and encounter someday.

But now I am off the Gao Tie and in the streets of Kaohsiung. Roads melt in the setting sun, and the metal taste of reinforced concrete caresses the tongue. Scooters rip through the roads following the silent cue of colors. In the rented apartment where my friend lives, we see the sun wash over the distant hills rust red, and vanish. Some stars appear, and a breeze knocks restlessly on the windowpanes.

A Window into Kaohsiung

There is god time, the poet-psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar writes, it is like a lake. And there is human time, he adds, frozen cubes of ice we label January, February, August and December. In a day’s span, I was on mechanical time, attending classes that begin and end by the hour, and also on emotional time, hanging out with friends who never bother what hour it is if the company is good.

Two seas of time dwell within,

Pacific of the heart and Atlantic of the mind,

Like a boat, I am carried by their currents,

and go over to the other side

and back to where the waters do not mix.

Has anyone heard of such a place?

That’s where I am, have been and will be.

Every weekend is the desire to abolish time after it has been consumed by the week. Such is the scope of our freedom under the tyranny of the clock. That weekend in Kaohsiung, my friend and I ride Youbikes to a lake. On its shore, a Chinese opera entertains a gathering of locals. I understand little. A Daoist deity stands menacingly yet somehow reassuringly high. And on the opposite shore, a Buddha perches quietly on a temple top, its courtyard open and doors closed. I understand lesser still.