After a minute, two more bikes passed us, then one more, and then five more. In the next ten minutes, about thirty bikes had sped ahead. It was quite a scene as they sped by on their monster machines, leaving my ten-year-old Maruti Swift hatchback coughing on the road. What’s going on? I thought to myself. Was this one of those secret races a friend had once told me about? I had heard about these underground race clubs and their often dangerous bike races. Was I witnessing one of those clandestine events?
I think the cop read my puzzled look.
“They’re going to Goa,” he said, pointing at the bikes.
“I see these people regularly at the tollbooth. Mostly as the weekend approaches…” the cop stopped to take a sip of water from his bottle.
“These bikers are from Mumbai. They go to Goa around the weekend and return on Monday. Riding long distance is a hobby for them.”
“These look like pretty expensive bikes,” I remarked as two more bikes whizzed past us.
“Yeah, they cost about 5—10 lacs. Sometimes even more,” the cop informed me, quite casually, as if every second person in the country owned expensive bikes.
Long-distance travel was my dream too. And just like there are cat-people and dog-people, or coffee-people and tea-people, I think one can categorize road travel enthusiasts into bike-people and car-people. I am most certainly a car person. Mostly because my body isn’t well-equipped to deal with nature in its fiery glory and having a roof over my head helps. Sometimes, I also think of myself as a camper-trailer kind of person, but I’ve never owned one, so I’m a hippie-gypsy-on-the-road only in my fantasies, with the hope that, like fairy tales, these fantasies may also come true someday.
I looked longingly at the bikers and envied the lifestyle they enjoyed.
As a grad student in Charlotte, I often dreamt of owning a camper van and traveling across the USA in it. In my dream, I’d eventually return to India and do the same here, spending large amounts of time in the northern part of the country in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand where I could live close to the Himalayas.
I had nurtured this fantasy for the entirety of my grad-student years, hoping for it to materialise in some form. However, my dream was nipped in the bud because of severe health issues which were eventually diagnosed as Crohn’s Disease.
These bikers reminded me of that dream. I looked ahead on the road and remained conscious enough to make sure that the car didn’t swerve, but mentally, I was in my fantasy camper van.
The Earth below; the sky above; green fields with bullocks, a farmer or two with their kids playing in the background; mountains of all sorts: large barren behemoths, green rolling hills with waterfalls and streams; rivers; lakes; forests; distant places rising up magically from the fog; villages with mud houses and villagers smoking hookahs on their charpoys; understanding local cultures; my laptop in my backpack, and working as a remote software consultant from my camper van. That was the life I had dreamt of as a student—and that’s the world my mind inhabited as I drove on the smooth patch of road between Pune and Belagavi.
Life doesn’t always match up to our dreams, yet, twenty-two years after I had sowed the first seeds of travel, here I was: on a solo 1000-Km drive from Pune to Tiruvannamalai - a place I had longed to visit after reading Paul Brunton’s book: A Search in Secret India.
This was no small opportunity—and it filled me with gratitude. The road, the hills, the trees, the sky... everything was laced with gratitude and joy.
Previous Episode: A Swarm of Bikes
Next Episode: From Fantasy to Reality
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