On A Wheel And A Prayer

By the mid- eighties, I was a tweenager. Such things didn’t carry much weight back then as they do now, when children are the most opinionated people in the household. But things had changed. The first was the advent of television in the small towns, leading to the “Small town Girl” aspiring to bigger things, especially after ‘Looking Beyond’ with an irrepressible couple called Hugh and Coleen Gantzer who were the pioneers of travel shows on Doordarshan, the national and only available channel. Next came the revolution in how India travelled. The cars of the earlier era were heavy and tank-like. They roared along, churning enough dust and belching enough smoke to leave a hazy trail, much in the manner of the Death Eaters leaving the dark-mark in the wake of their nefarious activities. In addition, they, in the manner of politicians (guzzling moolah) through the ages, guzzled fuel like it was going out of style and were moody at the best of times, taking offence and overheating given the smallest chance. The only excuse you could perhaps make for them was that they initially started out as gentle, kindly machines, but the roads made them the monsters that they were, jolting and jerking them beyond recognition!

All this was set to change however, with the advent of the Maruti Suzuki, the common man’s car. This was no less than the Second Coming. The Japanese were here to change the way India traveled and they ushered in A(utomobile) Revolution which had far- reaching consequences. Bitten by the travel bug, thanks perhaps to my incessant whining on wanting to go on a PROPER holiday, my father jumped on the band wagon to become the proud owner of a Maruti Suzuki Omni in the late eighties and we began our tryst with a few states, instead of just two.

Dad now had his eyes on the distant horizon. Perhaps he had always seen himself as an adventurer, an explorer (he had undertaken a couple of distant and daring trips during his youth and had quite a few adventures including a session of eating whole chilies in Andhra Pradesh) and he decided that we were going to reprise the route. Now that he saw himself in the role of explorer- in-chief, Dad with the air of Christopher Columbus, out to scout new lands, put us to work. The trusty Omni was the Nina, the Maria and the Pinta all rolled into one, and better stocked with necessities than all of them put together.

Back then, most things had to be done the hard way. The road was indeed less travelled, a mystery which revealed itself only to those who ventured along it. The best one could come up with was the road map, which infuriatingly refused to be a tattle tale and gave up information grudgingly, if at all. Hotels, circuit houses, traveler’s bungalows, local sights, shopping et al were things to be discovered by serendipity. This was thanks to the fact that the only mouse we knew was the one we chased away with a stick and not one which revealed information at a click! Suffice to say that OYO was met with a resounding “AIYYO!” Prebooking involved lots of trunk calls and money orders and was a process so tedious that it made most give up the idea of travelling.

Since Google itself was a distant dream, Google maps was even more so. The only thing we knew about satellites were of course the moon, the maddening picture of Aryabhatta, the first artificial Indian satellite which we had to draw in school at random intervals and Indira Gandhi, the then PM talking to Rakesh Sharma on his maiden flight to outer space asking him “Aapko Bharat kaise dikh raha hai?” and his reply “Saare Jahan se accha!” (What was the poor fellow to say? Stop asking silly questions woman, I have no time for this while I am spinning like a top?). But I digress. The point to be conveyed here is with no satellites, there was no GPS, that guiding and guardian angel of the modern traveler. We traveled, singing “we three kings of Orient are” hoping that the star would appear over the horizon for us as it had done for the kings, guiding us safely to wherever we wanted to go! Crossing into another state was like crossing the heliopause, the sphere of your linguistic achievements no longer exerted its much- needed influence and with the air of Voyager 2 proceeding into deep space with a wistful backward glance, you proceeded into the deep unknown on your wheels and a prayer.

We could of course, always stop and ask for instructions, but the only common language we had with the locals was the sign language and it literally did not take us very far. Questions like “Where is the temple?” were answered by long tirades which could mean anything, much grunting and hand whirling or the one phrase we picked up in Kerala, “Nera Poekuka”, which means straight ahead, the length of the ‘ne’ syllable indicating the distance of said destination from where we happened to be. To add to our woes, the milestones and the signs were painted in the local script, which meant no amount of squinting at them gave you a single clue as to your whereabouts. Akin to Columbus, you could have set out for Kochi and found yourself in Kanchi or Karachi.

Under such circumstances, the car was much more than a mode of transport. It was a little slice of home which carried us to our destination. It was a tiny restaurant, a hardware cum clothing cum haberdasher store. It was the mother ship, a safe haven in the unlikeliest of circumstances and it was stocked likewise. Ask any Indian about the most important content in their baggage and apart from money, the answer will definitely be food. And so, the car was stocked with tins of food which could keep well for at least a week, theplas and masala pooris, mathris and chaklis, sev and namkeen, all found a place in the boot, topped off by a large jar of pickle. In addition, there were random odds and ends including a bucket, coils of string, soap, washing powder, screw drivers, a large hold all with bedding and the like, with our clothes stuffed in like an after- thought. A place of pride was reserved for the large trusty Eagle water cooler and the first thing we did at any halt was to top it up with ice if possible.

Our first and most memorable trip took us all the way along the west coast, beginning with where else? Goa of course! And ending at Kanyakumari. The only advantage of any road which called itself a national highway back then was that one could expect its surface to be covered by a thin veneer of tar and respectability and not shrapnel and susceptibility. Two cars if small enough could travel abreast in the up and down lanes, but if you chanced upon a larger vehicle, the smaller vehicle had to descend onto the shoulder (nothing but a fancy name given to the ditch by the side of the road from which one had to extricate oneself with a lot of scraping and grinding of gears and perhaps a punctured tire). Since this was the time of the old regime, plans for new roads remained what they should be, just plans by the planning commission. Why the unnecessary and unseemly haste seen these days? Life was slow and majestic and roads developed at glacial pace, if at all with said glaciers made of molasses for good measure.

When I try to recall that trip, memories flash in and out. The scenic drive, (since most of NH 17 hugs the west coast), fresh sea food, wonderful circuit houses which readily housed us, even though we had nothing to do with the government, majestic temples at Udupi, Guruvayur and Thrissur, Kalady, the birth place of Shankaracharya, the Padmanabhaswamy temple of Thiruvananthapuram (no, I did not get a chance to visit the famous vaults which remained firmly shut then, probably because people were busy leading their lives instead of meddling in affair which did not concern them) the musical pillars at Suchindram, capped by the famous rock memorial and the calm visage of the Goddess, eternally waiting at the cape.
It was not just a pilgrimage, a la Goa, and Raja Ravi Varma beckoned with his startling artistry as did the Chinese fishing nets of Kochi. Golden mounds of banana chips which had us hovering over them sniffing an all- pervading smell of fresh spices and coconut. Thekkady, with its tea gardens and the Periyar national park is memorable for a scrape with a few demanding monkeys (what is it with me and monkeys?) who did not see why they should not get equal shares in the packet of Bourbon biscuits which I (who they, rightly according to Dad and wrongly according to me, mistook to be close kin) happened to be devouring at the time, and an early morning boat ride which almost saw a rather well- proportioned woman take an unplanned morning dip in the Periyar lake after missing her footing.

There were mellow sunsets and waving palms (trees, not hands, what did you think?), a spectacular sunrise at the cape and miles of golden beaches, though Kovalam was awash with huge waves bent on wreaking mayhem, ambling elephants and backwaters, synagogues and science museums, coconuts and coir factories, kathakali dancers and karimeen and pepper and endless rice paddies. There was the warm hospitality of some family friends who lived in Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Nagercoil. Above all, there were the ever- expanding horizons and the feeling that nothing was impossible.

An epic fourteen- hour drive from Calicut to Belgaum was the befitting conclusion to this trip which reminds me why Kerala is still called God’s own country, it was the first of many memorable holidays in a car named adventure, looking beyond and discovering a life beyond the mundane. It made me a life-time fan of road trips. Because sometimes the journey is a destination by itself….