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Song Of The Road - Part 1 - Madhumita Gupta Madhumita Gupta is from Alwar in Rajasthan, India. She has been an English teacher in Dhulesia Public School (Rajkot, Gujarat), Gyan Vihar Senior Sec. School (Jaipur, Rajasthan), Arts College Alwar (as lecturer), Alwar Public School (Alwar, Rajasthan). she and her husband are presently running Aditya English Institute in Alwar. She has been an All India Radio announcer. She has been writing for Hindustan Times, Times of India and Filmfare. She currently writes for Femina.

They would never have the dull sameness of a railway track, its paralyzing parallelism; neither do they imprison you into a hermetically sealed bubble, which jets you from one country to another but doesn’t really touch any.

It meanders, it seems, at will and changes faster than you could say ‘abracadabra’ and yet can remain as constant as untampered history. Yes, its those snaky things all around us, sometimes smooth; most of the times potholed worse than Om Puri’s cheeks; sometimes taking an arrow straight dip right into the horizon; at others so crooked that you can’t see further than your nose; sweeping, stretching, bending, curving, dipping, rising again, but never still, never static, never ever predictable, without a beginning or an end, almost like the eternal love-story traversing eras and lives-it’s the road.

Travel, that rejuvenating antidote to routine, by whatever mode, is invigorating and instructive as no books can ever be because, for one thing, there’ll always be a whole world of difference between second hand and first hand experiences. Armchair travel has its definite bonuses, true, and a big ‘Ahhh!’ for the luxury of galloping all around the world from the comfort of your favorite rocking –chair, with your beloved beaker full of the sparkling by your side and perhaps the family Labrador beside, completing the homely picture. But. But a bigger ‘Ohhh!’ for all that you’re missing…

Can smelling a rose yourself ever, ever compete with even a Shakespeare describing what it is like? You may describe the surf at Goa more picturesquely than me; speak more eloquently about the awe-inspiring mountains than me. But can you ever feel the pleasure of the grainy sand running through your fingers; discover for yourself the quaint fact that your feet sink in the dry sand but leave firm gleaming foot-prints on the wet; or how the first spray of salty water on your face always surprises you; or the sheer exhilaration of the stiff wind whipping across your hair and the exquisite sting of a thousand sand granules hitting your bare legs, waking you up to the glorious fact of ‘being’ there? Not really!

Though train and air travel do take you from point A to point B, admittedly in better comfort too, when getting there is the thing that matters. But when the point is getting away, they lag woefully behind traveling by road. For all that goes into the preparation, the booking, the selective packing, the tremor of getting late and the frustration of having to wait… there’s precious little memorable about the monotony, which is about as exciting as the nth remix. Neither do they offer more than vague, disjointed glimpses of the strange lands that flit by. A train allows you to see and sigh and the plane gives you spellbinding aerial views, when the sky’s clear, that is, but that’s about it, and in bad-weather, you may well be a fragile piece of the most delicate porcelain, surrounded by mountains of fluffy cotton wool!

And that’s precisely the reason, roads have been ‘it’ for many of us for whom, as Nehru once said, ‘the journey is worth the effort, even though the end is not in sight’. The ‘package-tour’ types will not agree, but for us, the journey is as much a part of a trip as is the final destination, if not more. For one thing, a journey is about moving on, the destination about coming to be a stop. Making it to the destination is, of course, the whole point of it. But then, haven’t all of us at some point of time or other, felt the disquieting sense of déjà vu yet again, of finding on reaching ‘there’ that there is no ‘there’? To travel hopefully, in this sense, scores over arriving.

Once you reach the destination, the only way you can look is backwards, the journey, in contrast, is about looking ahead. The former is about satiated nostalgia, of the repletion after the feast; the latter, about breathless anticipation for the expected and unexpected delights ahead.

Traveling by road, has an added advantage, a romance of its own which has none of the cut and dried predictability of the other read tamer, modes of traveling. Where else can one find the similar excitement, the niggling sense of uncertainty which spikes a trip with a dash of thrill? Where else is the adventure, the exhilaration? Certainly not in one that has been chalked out for you to the last detail by the railways or airlines or God help me, a travel company!! Unless of course, one is lucky enough to have his train chased by a Gabbar Singh, a la Sholay, or get his plane hi-jacked!

But seriously, why would anyone pick the road? Does it perhaps appeal to that ancient, eternal nomad in us? Or is it the paradoxical mix of unpredictability and total control of being on the road? Of not knowing what exactly the next km. holds for us and yet having the liberty to choose whether we want to zoom off or linger near those rich yellow fields stretching to the horizons, spectacular enough to wake the Yash Chopra in anyone! Is it even our quest to know the unknown? The unexpected? A 50-50 mix of romance and suspense? Perhaps!

While even a familiar road has the potential of throwing up a few surprises, when it is uncharted territory, the suspense bit multiplies manifold. As everywhere, along the road, to twist a little what Carl Sagan once said, ‘something incredible is waiting to be discovered’. A journey also teaches you that the ‘incredible’ doesn’t always need to be something out of this world. It can be an everyday stuff you’ve never bothered to look at closely enough. Like Tagore’s oft-quoted words about the almost invisible but ethereal beauty of the fragile dew drop hanging for dear life from the single blade of grass. It never ceases to fill me with wonder how truly magnificent flowers bloom in the ditches along the roadside, and how unbelievably lovely a single flower spot-lighted in an errant ray of the early morning sun can be. Had we not been on roads I might never have realized how extra-ordinarily like a grim sentinel does a huge banyan, at the mouth of a hamlet look. Had I not seen it with my own eyes I’d never have believed that a soft-kneed baby donkey can be shown greener pastures not by its mother, but a matronly mare! Or that a hefty, full- grown dog can actually have to run for life from a monkey, who the next minute offers her long tail to its baby to climb out of a ditch it has fallen in!

The phenomenal possibilities of practically every tame journey evolving into an adventure, gives an edge to road travel over the other modes, along with the fact that nothing brings us as close to a nation and its people as does the road. Right from the days of ‘Ashvameghas’ to today’s ‘rath-yatras’, I believe, the idea has been a shrewder one than just ‘conquering’ lands- clichéd as it sounds, it has been about conquering hearts as well. And it is the roads, however potholed or invisible they are, that take you to the heart of any country. And if you’ve touched the hearts you have the election or selection or whatever, as good as in your bag!

India, in all her hues and colors can be experienced best traveling on its life-line –the roads. If you’re not the one to be content with a scattered jigsaw with crucial parts missing and want to view the complete picture and get an up-close view of a nation’s character, hit the roads.

Traveling by road, (by your own vehicle, not the state-bus, obviously!) opens up infinite possibilities- of literally combing through any area that catches your fancy, finding out where exactly that almost invisible track is leading and also getting to know your traveling companions really well, sometimes too well! Roads may not always be illuminated, even in post India – shining days, but they can be vastly illuminating! About places as well as people. Nothing, as they say, reveals the true characters of people until you actually live or travel under the same roof with them.

What you may learn about a person, as a person, in years, can be laid bare within a few days of traveling together. Take the mild mannered Mr. Sharma for example, you haven’t heard him raising his voice in the last six-months and honestly believe him to be Gentility personified. Lo and behold the transformation the minute he’s behind the wheel- he turns into a raging road hog, a screaming fiend! He shouts at pedestrians, screams at other drivers and honks like there was no tomorrow. You can’t believe it’s the same person, foaming at the mouth and glaring at any mortal who dares overtake him! is the same one you had to strain your ears to listen to!

Or take that Verma couple- the stern looking Mr., with his sweet Mrs.- you’d never have guessed it was she who calls the shots! You can almost see the metamorphosis taking place the moment they leave the public eye, as it were, and are in their own domain –on- road, the timid lady changes into a dragon and the fire-brand tycoon into a baa-lamb!

I should really change tracks before a suit is slapped on me, but honestly being in your own vehicle does impart a strange sense of familiarity, which makes you feel at home at the strangest of places. You’re in your own space, so to speak, and no place feels alien because as the famous advertisement says, you’re carrying your world with you. Being in your own vehicle, even in unfamiliar surroundings makes you merge, as it were, with the landscape. Without your mountainous back-pack behind you, which screams ‘TOURIST’, you don’t stick out like a sore thumb. And this perhaps is the reason why the ‘locals’ too react more positively to you.

The connectivity quotient goes up not just with others but also within families. And here a journey scores against destination once again. ‘Destination’ reads ‘what-to-do’ which in turn reads ‘preoccupation’ and ‘plan’. And when you’re preoccupied with plans about what to do, ‘togetherness’ as in ‘being together’, which is a leetil bit more than being just physical proximity, takes a back seat. In the public modes of conveyance again, with innumerable ears pricked all around you, it becomes unthinkable. Unless of course you happen to be one of those intrepid, unflappable celebrities, who give two hoots for goggling-eyes and shooting-eye-brows!

And this brings us to another luxury which road travel and only road travel affords one i.e. of substantial togetherness, in an era when ‘time together’ is at premium. When packed-schedules, cut—throat competition, mounting job and social pressures are trying their best to pull families apart, very few other things can help reconnect and strengthen those ol’ bonds as much as traveling together. Never mind the occasional squabbles, which will erupt when your hubby drives with the misapprehension of being in the Grand Prix, and takes a hairpin bend at 80 kmph. or you forget to change the gears or the children make an anthem of ‘Are we there yet?’ in the back seat! All this still constitutes ‘togetherness’ with a capital T.

Can you imagine being with your family for so many uninterrupted hours at a stretch? And that too minus the nuisance of the TV, incessant ringing of the doorbell and that dreaded ‘urgent’ call? Honestly I can’t understand for the life of me why these car and cell phone manufacturers are bent on intruding upon this coveted camaraderie and destroying this blissful, peaceful time-out by introducing car TV and computers, hands-free-phones and what not! You are going out to get away from it all, aren’t you? If they’re going to follow you like a dogged er… dog, well, what’s the point of it all? You may as well stay in your damned office or social circuit or whatever!

It will, in all probability (and humility!), make a bestseller if one were to recount the innumerable tales which a road starts ranging from side-splitting funny to downright hair-raising; insightful to ‘art-of-driving’ spiritual to the ones which can make it straight to ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’! But this life-long affair, I guess, began when as a kid that I first got hooked to road travel in the 70’s. This was when I came across the ‘tiger-who-stepped-out’. It was a time when cars were still a luxury select few could afford; taxis, unheard of in our tiny town and road travel had to be by the rickety roadways bus for the common man.

And so it was no mean novelty to be taken to magical Jaipur by car. I don’t remember much of the actual visit except for a blurred vision of the magnificent silver –pots at City Palace which stood at least a shoulder and head higher than me, the dwarfing effect of the massive and mysterious structures at Jantar-mantar and the towering filigree of Hawamahal. The memory, which stands out is the one of the return journey. We had got later than we’d planned and by the time we reached Sariska Tiger Reserve, it was pitch dark. Moving at a steady pace at about 50 kmph. (those were the days when there were more potholes than road) I’d almost been lulled to sleep when we jolted to a sudden halt. The scene which met my eyes has been etched in my memory, for I never again came across anything quite so incredible or so breathtakingly lovely.

In front of us, just a meter or so away was a tigress, spotlighted in the glare of our head lights, her eyes reflecting the yellow lights steadfastly, with two little cubs crouching close to her, apparently frozen with shock.

For an eternity (a minute or two, to be precise) the trio stood there, three golden statues framed in bright light with six pairs of eyes fixed unblinkingly at us. And then slowly, regally the mother stepped across the road, followed somewhat hurriedly by the clumsy cubs and disappeared in the surrounding darkness.

The ‘whoosh’ of the beeri-tinged breath from our astounded driver made us realize that we too had been holding our breaths! Whenever I passed Sariska, since then, I crane my neck around for a replay of the scene, even for the littlest glimpse, but in vain, so far. But hey, what’s to tell that something even more thrilling won’t be there at the next turn, just waiting to be discovered? And that, friends, is the unique magic of the road.

To be continued...

Song Of The Road - Part 2

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