A Trip of a Childhood
Posted on | January 24, 2005 | 159 Comments
I have revamped an old post of mine for this month’s Blogging for Books #12 contest. Of the three topics in the list, I’ve chosen to write about – A memorable trip or “mini-vacation” (with “memorable” covering everything from “best time of my life” to “unmitigated disaster”)
Note: The journeys mentioned in this post took place twenty years ago in India. All you need to know is, it was a different place and a very different time. Back then, in India, the railway and the public bus system were the most reliable means of long distance travel for the majority and the journeys were planned months in advance. The concept of hiking and camping were as alien to Indians as arranged marriage was/is to Americans/Westerners. Now hop on aboard, lets us travel back in time and space – to India of the early eighties.
There is an old nursery rhyme, I learned in Ist grade which predicted the future of people according to their day of birth. If you ask me, the best line in that snippet of a song was, “Thursday’s child has far to go.” Of course, obvious in the favoritism is the fact that I was born on a Thursday. A six year old with boundless optimism, I took the meaning in a literal sense – that I’d travel to all those far off places, the idea of long travels to unknown places thrilled me beyond description.
I seriously suspect that there might be a gene in human genetic makeup totally dedicated to wanderlust. Or how else could I explain my father’s erratic behavior when he spotted public transport buses sporting the names of unfamiliar destinations. The man who till that point of time had appeared sane, with enough common sense to design rockets (yeah, he did that for a living, so did more than 100 others in our small city) would shed all pretense of possessing any such quality and board the bus, exhorting us to join him, “Come on girls, lets see where this one goes!” We knew for sure that rickety public transport contraption had no intention of leaving the earth any time soon, this ruled out Moon and Mars as its final destinations. But if anyone thought that only extra terrestrial destinations caught the fancy of two hyperactive little girls, like my mother, they were wrong. Much to her dismay two of us would enthusiastically board the bus as if it was pied piper’s own private limo to the magic mountain. She’d have no choice but to follow.
That was how we found ourselves at places at the ‘ends of earth’. After three or four hours paddy fields fleeing backwards, rivers playing hide and seek in mango groves and all that poetry of nature later we’d arrive at the final stop of the bus. In most cases it’d be a nondescript place with a shack of a tea stall/cafe, sometimes there’d be a river flowing unobtrusively as possible and at other times there’d be mountains hanging back at the edge of the scene trying to look indistinguishable.
The conductor and the driver of the bus would take their mandatory 15-30 min. break, whereupon my father would lead our little pack of explorers to the nearest exotic feature – which might be an old well overgrown with weeds or a small hill that promised a fantastic view of the great beyond or some other feature equally glamorous. The word “hiking” had not yet invaded our dictionary then or else my mother would have surely claimed the title of ‘the best hiker in the house’ insisting that she hiked 5 kms(approximately 3 miles) to and from her work-place everyday(well, she did walk those 5 kms every work day). We did not know then, but our occasional bus-trips of fancy did involve some hiking. Sometimes it was a 30 min. walk to the nearby hillock and back, just in time to catch the bus on its return trip to the city. But if the location looked promising, my father would make inquiries with bus driver as to when the bus would make the next trip and we’d stay on ‘hiking’ longer and farther and sometimes we even ended up staying overnight if decent accommodation was available.
What passed off as decent accommodation would many a time be a houseboat which the owner usually used to transport farm produce to the city market but available for use for a night(this was a time long before the houseboat owners discovered another more lucrative cargo – foreign tourists) or an old palatial relic of the colonial times which had reinvented itself as a government guest house or sometimes a local family who thought it was only right to provide free room and board to a small family of city dwellers who were at last going to put their unremarkable village on the tourism map of the country. The success of my father’s unplanned excursions largely depended on the kindness of strangers. But in a country where a guest is considered next only to God, it was not really much of a gamble.
The insatiable wanderlust and the trust in human kindness have passed on from one generation to the next. As years pass, I have ventured farther and farther away from my home turf, from the humid tropics to the bone chilling Arctic, with the travel bug making inroads in to my psyche with every journey, getting bolder and more curious with every border crossed and every visa stamped.
The benevolence of strangers I have met on my journeys has been an inspirational influence in my life. It has made me less scared of farewells and partings, when friends part I am positive that I’ll find equally agreeable ones in the next friendly sunrise, to share coffee, a pair headphones or life. But places had a different effect; they grow on me like stubborn vines. Scar tissues of memories surface every time I walk out of the door in search of the next destination, ghosts of my past habitats compete to set standards for the new place beyond the bend.
Thanks to my father, my childhood had been my life’s most memorable trip. His spur of the moment outings to places long fallen off the borders of maps had led us to uncover small yet unforgettable surprises down the paths less traveled. The way the green slippery mud yields to tread leading down to a pond of water hyacinths, the rush of warmth when a winter dawn breaks over the distant hills, the almost-painting of a slice of a chimney emitting purple haze with morning coffee at the wayside cafe, the rhythmic sound of oars and the boatman’s song under a blue-black sky framed against the swaying black cut-outs of coconut palms – indelible impressions left by disjointed places I might not return to, but hold dear. From the whimsical journeys of my childhood, it has been a long walk from home, but there are no regrets. My feet walk on as my shadow stains the receding pathway in the fading landscape.
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159 Responses to “A Trip of a Childhood”
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January 30th, 2005 @ 6:38 AM
This is an incredible post, and reminds me as to why I added your LJ to my reading list in the first place. I wish you’d write more often.
January 30th, 2005 @ 6:38 AM
This is an incredible post, and reminds me as to why I added your LJ to my reading list in the first place. I wish you’d write more often.
January 30th, 2005 @ 6:38 AM
This is an incredible post, and reminds me as to why I added your LJ to my reading list in the first place. I wish you’d write more often.
January 31st, 2005 @ 6:00 AM
yes;-)
January 31st, 2005 @ 6:00 AM
yes;-)
January 31st, 2005 @ 6:00 AM
yes;-)
January 31st, 2005 @ 7:52 PM
Not secret anymore- by revealing it there is also a sly hope that some of the “friends list” might become big shots in the future and will sponsor 🙂 such trips.
Yeah looks promising, will have to read at leisure. thanks for suggesting.
You have miles and years ahead of you, lucky dude u, damn I wish I was younger.
January 31st, 2005 @ 7:52 PM
Not secret anymore- by revealing it there is also a sly hope that some of the “friends list” might become big shots in the future and will sponsor 🙂 such trips.
Yeah looks promising, will have to read at leisure. thanks for suggesting.
You have miles and years ahead of you, lucky dude u, damn I wish I was younger.
January 31st, 2005 @ 7:52 PM
Not secret anymore- by revealing it there is also a sly hope that some of the “friends list” might become big shots in the future and will sponsor 🙂 such trips.
Yeah looks promising, will have to read at leisure. thanks for suggesting.
You have miles and years ahead of you, lucky dude u, damn I wish I was younger.