The Traveller and the Cockroach

Sometimes what we notice, briefly and without explanation, says more about how change actually works than any structured plan.

I heard this from a traveller in the Here & Now chai stall on Morjim Beach. The shade was good, woven palm leaves laid thick overhead. Solid wooden tables and benches, level and worn smooth from use. The people running it moved steadily, used to the work, tolerant of whoever came through.

The baba had been there a while, speaking to no one in particular.

They said they had been on the road too long by then, Manali to Varanasi via Delhi and Kanpur. Super deluxe video coaches, the kind without exposed sharp metal on all the seats, but with back-to-back, sometimes looping Bollywood films. Chai that tasted faintly of metal. Valium taken more for quiet than for sleep. The days had begun to flatten into each other.

It happened at a bus stand in Varanasi. The traveller had gone there to learn dance and come away amoebic. People moving, always moving.

The traveller stepped down from the coach and felt it under their sandal before they properly saw it.

A soft crunch. Nothing unusual.

They looked down out of habit more than concern.

The cockroach was broken. Not dead in a clean way, just disassembled. Then, slowly, without urgency, it began to come back together. Legs drew inward. The shell closed. It stood again, intact, as if the interruption had been administrative rather than fatal.

The baba said they had the sense they ought to feel something sharper. Shock, perhaps. But the feeling did not quite arrive. Everything was slightly padded, as though the world had been wrapped in cotton wool.

An inner voice explained.

There were still several cycles as a roach left for that entity. It would be inefficient to process a full transition and return it again so soon. Some merit would be achieved by cooperation. Reassembly was simpler. Less paperwork.

That last part, the traveller said, seemed important at the time.

They looked around. No one else had stopped. A man stepped past them, careful not to spill his chai. A child, ragged and filthy, yet not diminished by it, dragged a bag that was too large.

The insect moved on.

After a while, so did the traveller.

The baba finished their chai and shrugged, as if it were nothing much.

It felt less like something impossible had happened, they said, and more like they had briefly noticed how things were usually done, before returning to the version of events that required less explanation.

A note on change

It’s easy to assume that change should be dramatic, decisive, and immediate. In practice, it often isn’t.

Patterns tend to persist. Systems prefer continuity. We find ourselves returning to familiar ways of thinking or behaving, even when we intend otherwise. Not because nothing is happening, but because change is often gradual, iterative, and, at times, strangely administrative.

Being “stuck” is rarely permanent. It is more often a phase within a longer process that is not always visible from the inside.

What matters is not forcing change all at once, but recognising where movement is already happening, and working with it.