There and Back Again. Part 1

That about sums up the trip. There, which I figure was about 750 kms of biking and back again, which was about 697 kms of the similar.

A day has almost passed since I touched the bike. 21 hours to be precise since I reached home. To say I got back home would be like I am stressing the fact that I am glad to be home, which I am. But where does that hang the trip then?

I have not, to put it plainly, washed since. Well yes the parts I had immediate use for, but the rest remains covered with the filth of memories and dust and care and weariness and spit and, for no fault of mine, anonymous vomit. It would seem I sailed through the places I had been without actually changing anything about me or about the place. Just came back with an apologetic smile frozen on for not being able to stay longer and covered with all the souvenirs I mentioned earlier.

I am tired, true. My back is being a pain in the neck, I have slept far too much in the past day or so, and the face hurts for having borne the weight of the head, the bedspread is creased in all the wrong places, and even though I want to sleep a lot more, I know I have things to do, people to meet, places to go, all of which is so very ironical that it is hardly funny.

Still because I am sunk over in front of the pc with a bed sheet for a toga for my chair, I suppose I have to keep promises and "tell all". But you have to understand that memories are no one’s bitch.

Now to begin what kind of writer would I be not to quote myself? Not a very self-centered one.

And so, "There is only a movement, a warm lugubrious moan from what was before, no sense of actual movement. In my grip I hold the representation of this world, and yet what do I feel? Am I moving forward? Moving backward? Is time a noticeable factor at all? For as far as the self will concern itself with such matters, do space and time even remotely overlap each other’s territory? Is what I call my progress a function of time alone? As I slowly walk to the water, I feel a leaden sense of the sameness dragging me back to a place I never really felt having been. My intent hasn’t changed, the world around me did. If I could feel with longing for an immutable place or one in my memory, perhaps I would feel different about where and what I have been, perhaps even what I have been part of. This, this that is me for now, moving, shuffling along time and space, altering what I inspect, feels like melted plastic. I can pretend to be anything, anyone, even pretend like what I am doing now is the most real instancing of existence I will ever need, but then what am I if I believe myself? Pain and a quest for truth maybe such great motivators, but aren’t they the same? And if they are not, don’t they together form the abstruse complement to the whole of my self?"

Leg 1: 423 kms.

Now the root cause is quite complex, and whenever I met someone who ask me the why, I said, "To find out how far is far." Yes quite. Still it all started from someone asking me to come down to Ahmadabad to meet up half a year back. They reminded me of that promise I made then a few weeks back. I half-heartedly agreed again. Because I was stuck at rewriting the end bits of the second chapter, in a bored afternoon, I went and inquired about fares and the like. Prices, it turned out, had shot up by a trifling 100 percent. But that was reason enough for me to think further, imagine-dream and go about being indignant. "Que, Que??"

And so onto the drawing board, come the Google Maps. Quite a handy tool, but it does make everything seem so small. And so I decided I would get on the bike, fill up the tank, and go on a 16 hour long drive on 660 kms of wide national highways. Simple enough.

But things change, people introduce new ideas, and so plans change. So the end result was to visit some Navi Mumbai pub packed with ex-bar dancers dancing away anyway, have some R&R, stopover at Vedchhi for an overnight stay, and then go on. So if you're expecting a fascinating turn of events, there isn't. That is exactly what I did.

I left home at around 7 am armed with a bag full of odd necessities and necessary oddities, and a body with a earache, backache, and a fair deal of stomach upset. Evacuate myself. Get dressed. I remove the packaging from the pair of socks I had bought last night only to find them lacking toe-holes. Lament lament. Wear them anyway. Call up peeps, let them know I'm leaving.

Now the idea was to measure the distance I had gone by the number of songs I finished on the iPod. Thought would finally listen to all the 13 albums by the Beatles. Started out with Dylan instead. R&R was still a long way away.

Go out, vroom vroom the bike a bit. The oil had been changed the last night, and the bike was happy. Petrol filled to a maximum capacity of 15 liters usable. Took the highway that needed taking, felt the cold air nip at my exposed skin, lament not finding any pair of gloves, check up on the air pressure at a different petrol pump. There is hardly any traffic on the road. Continue driving till I reach my college. I do not slow down. Reached the express highway between Pune and Mumbai, that six (or eight lane) pothole less wonder. Sighed at how my bike is a pariah in such places. Turned onto the four lane (but well maintained) NH4.

Had occasion for a near-fatal accident soon after when I was looking at the dials and numbers instead of the road that they measured. Passed it up, and decided to swerve back on course and not hit the naughty three wheeler cargo hauler after all.

The road joined in the expressway fun for a bit, passed through one of the tunnels too, but that was far too short-lived to warrant more memory space. Reached Lonavala, stopped, had 1.5 kilos of chiki packed, drank 10 rupee tea, stretched limbs, turned up the iPod’s volume, kicked tyres, promised to stop next only at Mumbai and did.

Now I am guessing the fastest bit of travelling I did was between Pune and Mumbai. After that everything (except my magnificence (the word does sound like something a peacock would have)) turned to shit. The roads were terrible and for the first time in a long time, I had to slip into the first gear. I stayed below the fourth for a very long time. Almost an hour and a half. Mumbai is deceptively large. Of course it was the roads that did most of the deception because it seemed the shit would end right at the next corner, but the maps were to blame too. Who would guess the scale varies as you zoom in and out of maps?

What seemed like a straightforward road in and out of Mumbai, turned into a long snakeskin-y corridor with a long snaky chain of traffic permanently planted in it. The roads had been dug up too, but that can be expected. It is the little sacrifices we make for progress that get counted in someone's diary. Of course that diary is eventually lost in the annals of grand openings and the like. But of course, God, we hope, is a better accountant.

After asking my way around (two rickshaw wallahs and two traffic cops), I managed to get out onto the wide part of Ghod Bandar road. The next part was fun, even easy fun. Of course my careful signaling had much less effect than my incessant honking and so I stopped the former and got onto city traffic rules, much of which entails overtaking from the wrong side, honking, marking up grievances, and gesticulating with middle fingers.

I stop somewhere on the road, where my hurrying self gives out, get the horn wiring repaired, fill up the stomach and the bag with chocolates, and thus was my first meal on the road. No bar, no morally flexible girls around, so I sigh, and go down that same road and so, eventually, in an hour or so, on the shoulders of giant hoardings and giant curse-word coalesces, I left the city of little people with giant dreams.

My roads have now changed from the NH4 to the NH8. Still a tar road, perhaps more potholes here. The sun has come up to its 10 am highness. The stilling breeze has left my helmet and it is getting sticky in a great many ways. Bob Dylan has given way to Bob Marley and he finished up to Bob Seeger and I skipped Bruce Springsteen and Cat Stevens to go onto Cream. Now, to avoid a permanent loss of hearing, I have to dial down the volume to a low where I have to guess what is being played. But then I haven't heard Cream ten million times for nothing.

I stop a few more times, at about a 60 or 80 kms intervals, each time asking folk how much further some place is. It always turns out to be a lot. So I find the odd five or ten kilometers lose meaning on the highways. After all, even with an average of 80 kmph, I am covering more than a kilometer a minute.

I was a bit surprised at how many people I asked gave me accurate directions. But then things occur which make you lose hope in the collective omniscience of the collective other. Now I was to look out for this place called Billimora from which I would take a right turn and onto Vedchhi. I couldn’t find Billimora. I found Saron Villagae, Chikhli, Gandevi, Endhal, Bhulafala Village, Jallalpur, Kabilpore, Amadpore, so I did what comes naturally to tourers, I passed them all. The thing was, I had asked a rickshaw wallah how I could get to Bardoli and then onto Vedchhi, and he asked me to go to Navsari. And I did. And it turned out to be quite expensive advice. At the very least, I drove an extra fifty kilometres that day to land up in a series of villages teeming with accommodating folk armed to the teeth with loud condescension. Their directions led me through another 30 kms of scaring-chicken roads. Bowie wasn’t helping much, so I switched him off.

Directions (wonderfully incorrect now that I fondly think back to them) came from a group of Mallus sitting around drinking tea in their garage. I asked for directions and they all gave readily, and I understood none of it. So I countered their enthusiasm with “Malayali aano?” which is “Are you Mallu?”, paused a bit, and fired another salvo “Evedna?” which means “From where?”. Now after this my capacity to go on asking or fielding questions in the lingo drops like the appeal of a princess metamorphosing into a toad.

When I meet a Mallu (originally inhabitants of Mallu-land/Kerala), I do feel a sense of brotherhood, me being part-Mallu. And that is probably a good thing considering how they are as much a part of our highways as the aluminium siding they open garages next to. But then, also comes anxiety, not from the tea they might offer. But from the expectation they have that I must be able to at least speak the lingo with some fluency. One fact of the matter is that I am quite bad at this fluency bit, and another is that I see no immediate urgency to remedy the matter. This inadvertently means the smallest of garage attendants, the boy who holds the wheel while it is under the water, can make me feel smaller than him. So, I go “Eh, Mallus are such pigs.” After all, as I am informed by a knowledgeable source, one cannot easily find goat milk in Gujarat anymore ever since the influx of goat-devouring Mallus began. Pigs.

But eventually I did reach the Vedchhi Vidyapeeth, and the small sacrifices that I had made and the smaller favours I had done unto me, seemed quite irrelevant when faced with such abundant R&R potential.

Greeted and meeted Surender bhai. Had food served. Ate. Talked. Again my apparent Mallu-dom comes to haunt me. I had let on earlier how I was mallu. So in comes Sahadevan bhai, who is pukka Mallu, expecting a kindred soul, firing away like kindred souls can be expected to. Kindred soul or not, my Mallu-ness cannot last long under pressure, and I falter, crack and switch back to my usual mixture of Hindi and English. That aside, I find he, like everyone there, is great company. Next I retire to the room I had been given. I sleep fitfully, being interrupted frequently by well meaning callers inquiring about my shell and the mind it came in. Met resident pets.

By the time I am sleepy, I decide it would be a good idea to switch off the phone, go out and do a little clickety-click. I feel tired enough to skip two of those, and so head out to eat dinner. The food is very kindly simple, and by the next morning my stomach is to feel peachy again.

After the food, the chit-chat and the leg-pulling, and (un)fortunately I’m not acquainted enough to be fodder for the latter. Then came the Sammellan, a gathering of everyone at the ashram. Almost everyone was quite vocal. I am guessing that might have taken some time. The main issue raised was one about funding for the Vidyapeeth. Now from what I gathered, there had come a letter offering funds, which could be used to repair the Library building. The caveat was that they wanted a name attached to their donation. Now this was unacceptable for most folk at the ashram. Understandable. Of course there are no solutions that would satisfy both parties completely. So I kept quiet even after the entire situation was explained through the questions of others. I just kept sifting through my allotted wheat for the unwanted and the alien. At the end, I was asked for an introduction. I declined.

And then the floating log stilled for the night.