Moving Windows

Give me a moving window and I am lost. It’s almost as though I’ ve been a captive in a cell without a window for years. All my life, I have been one of those “window-seat” persons. From my childhood days to the present, this is the best way to shut me up.
(I think it possibly originated when Mom would ask me to “look out of the window” when a T.C would approach us in the train. Apparently for a very long time after I had turned 5, I could pass off to still be under it. Mom always optimized this to her advantage and never bought me a full ticket (a.k.a adult fare ticket) in the train, for quite a few years. Yes, you can safely say, that my ‘cheating the system to save some money’ habit, is a much-valued inheritance.)
In a window-seat, I can sit and stare, without talking for hours. Time and again when I have done this, (in a train/ car), I have often been misunderstood to be arrogant, quiet, reserved, feeling out-of-place etc by my fellow travelers. But that’s usually me taking my time-out, from being the social, talkative person that I am, to becoming a recluse, engaging myself with the sights/ sounds/ smells that the window brings.
Looking out of the window, I acquaint myself with the outside. The window is a threshold, between the world and me, both of us moving in sync with each other, one ahead, the other behind. The window reveals different worlds, usually ones different than mine. Sometimes tinted, sometimes not, the windows always speak. They tell me stories and I listen. They show me sights that I see and emanate smells that I experience.
Not all windows engender a dialogue. Those that do, are ones in buses, cars and trains (in India), especially when kept open. Mainly, because they are also the most dynamic and interactive. Airplane windows fall more in the reflective category; the monotony in their view instigates my mind to reflect. Subway windows, reflect the inner scenes on themselves and ironically, superimpose the ‘inside’ on the ‘outside’.
Moving windows make voyeurism legal. They exist so they may be looked out of, sometimes even looked in to. Moving windows are frames in motion, their movement being the essence of their existence that perhaps lures everyone from children to adults, to window-seats.
It’s almost like sitting by a painting in process, a story in progress and a journey in rhythm; a collage of multiple images like a slide-show, where the slides proceed in an iota of a second...and I lose myself in what has gone and what shall soon be gone.