Beginnings
Giti Thadani

How does one recount the beginning of a journey? Where does it start, and where does it reach its climax? Its incompleteness starts yet another cycle, another threshold to be crossed or attained.
The crossroads become a leitmotif, a symbol that operates and connects at many levels. For me, in this context, it is the intersection of internal and external geographies—between strange, unfinished memories and the uncanny revelations of the present.
Awakening slowly to the dawn sounds of birds after an agitated sleep, a sleep of movement anticipating the shifts and jolts of new travels. No longer the familiar comfort of domes-ticity, of everyday rhythms; instead the mix of apprehension, agitation and curiosity that accompanies me every time I start a journey, particularly one on which I drive myself. Indian roads are a challenge to everyone, but all the more so for a woman driver, who must negotiate not only the potholes but the hordes of men, all trying to overtake so as to ascertain my gender. I drive unconsorted, a phenomenon of a foreign world. The constant refrain—Madam, which country?
The dense fog of the morning adds to the feeling of appre-hension. It also defeats the entire purpose of getting up to the dawn light, which today seems hardly visible. The city seems enshrouded in an impenetrable veil of mist and pollution. In all my years of travelling, I have never started on a morning like this. Early-morning winter light has always had for me a sense of wonder, as if with each ray of light, a certain daily mystery reveals itself. I have begun all my previous trips on this light note.
The fog is early this year, unprecedented in its extremity. Stories abound of delayed flights and trains, of cars crashing into headlightless trucks.
I allow myself an extra hour of twilight stupor as I coin this state, neither awake nor asleep, typical of the nether state of in-betweenness. The light filters slowly through the thick white curtain as the jeep winds its way through the dense Delhi traffic.
I make the customary fuel and air stop. I check the air in my tyres extra-carefully, as if sensing the small crisis that awaits us. Sure enough, two hours later, when the jeep is finally out of the extended industrial area and its seemingly unending stream of fumes, I let my concentration waver to the smell of burnt rubber. It is coming from my car. A piece of burning coal has entrenched itself in the tyre groove. The rubber has been slowly burning away, the tyre steadily losing air. It is beyond repair, and there is no shop in this rural vicinity where I can buy a new tyre. It will have to wait till Mathura.
A few minutes later, I am enjoying the clear and relatively smooth highway, savouring the view of the waiting-to-be-harvested wheat fields barely fourteen kilometres from Mathura —just before the little ugly town of Vrindavan, supposedly the birthplace of Krishn, situated on the banks of the sewage canal known as the holy river Yamuna. Suddenly I am in a huge traffic jam, a din of blaring horns, shrill loud-speakers and hysterical screaming voices—a procession to mark the birth of Krishn. A tamasha of overflowing people in tractors, bullock carts, elephants, scooter-rickshaws, tongas, trucks, vans, in fact any kind of believable and unbelievable form of transport. A true representation of neo-Hinduism, celebrating the birth of yet another baby boy. Baby boys are gods, after all, each a potential incarnation of baby Krishn. The jeep inches forward, and in a state of wry cynicism and frayed ears I wonder at my own absurd search and sense of pilgrimage.

From: Moebius Trip
pp 5-7

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