When a journey turns into something more

When does a journey become more than a journey?

It’s coming up on vacation season, the month of May. Plenty of Indians take advantage of their children’s school holidays to go on trips near and far, and that’s usually a time to forget about serious things. And yet travel, more than other pursuits, has a way of springing things at you when you least expect them. Reminders of other concerns. The understanding that in an odd way, the further you roam, the closer you are to home. The sudden reality check. Out of the blue, a journey turns into more.

You think I’m waxing metaphysical? Maybe you’re right. But let me tell you about a couple such, from my own peregrinations.

The first is from, of all places, South Dakota. You might label this story somewhat trivial, but bear with me. I had driven most of two days to get to a tiny town called Sturgis, which for one week every August becomes the biggest city in all South Dakota.

That’s on account of an annual rally that attracts leather-clad bikers, the great majority on Harley-Davidson machines, from all over the country; indeed, from across the world. Some years, three-quarters of a million such men and women. Which is a lot of bikers indeed, especially in a town that houses 6,000 the rest of the year.

One August not long ago, I went there, feeling entirely out of place in my little rented car. Plenty of bikers on the roads I took to get to Sturgis, and their presence had me taking some stupid risks. More than once I lifted my camera to my eye, as I drove, to shoot a picture through the windshield. Other times I grabbed my little pad, as I drove, and made quick notes about them — their clothing, their gloves, whatever.

As I drove! 100 plus kmph!

But the enormity of how stupid I had been didn’t really hit me till I reached Sturgis. I was wandering around, taking in the sights, many of which involved inordinate expanses of bare female flesh but that’s a story for another day. Came upon a store that had a whole wall of photographs, an alarming number of which featured more expanses of bare flesh.

A huge printed sign above said “WE’RE YOU HERE?” — I’m still trying to figure that one.

Then, elsewhere in the same store — a poster of a bald young man smirking atop a sleek bike, with these to-the-point words: “You Drink. You Drive. You Crash. You Die. Your brother-in-law gets your bike. Bummer.”

I felt so suddenly faint that I actually had to sit. Now I have nothing but affection for my various brothers-in-law — one of whom even works hard for this esteemed publication — but it had taken this whimsical sign to drive home the point. Sure, I don’t drink and drive, but I had been doing some other truly halfwitted things, hadn’t I?

Not just your routine vacation.

The second is from an Odisha mining town called Joda. Not your routine vacation destination, I’ll admit, but we were indeed on vacation. At the time, my brother and his wife lived in Bhubaneswar. We had taken a train across the country to spend ten days with them. She had some work in Joda and suggested that we come along. “A mining town?” we asked, wrinkling our noses. But she promised that mining or not, Joda was actually a pretty spot.

And so it was. Especially the guest house where we stayed: surrounded by bright flowers, it had lovely views of both the shallow valley below and the magnificent night sky above.

(At night, of course). Oddly, even the great heaps of slag from the mines, dotting the
place, somehow added to the beauty.

 Brother and his wife are both doctors. The next morning, my sister-in-law had to go across town to an anganwadi, or child-care centre, to examine the children there. We tagged along. It was situated in a shady grove, fronted by a large open space where the kids could run about safely. It caters to a small colony of mine workers nearby. Since both parents usually work, they leave their kids here every morning, to be cared for during the day by a firm but gentle matron in a rust-red sari.

Left to myself for a couple of hours, I sat down and played with some of the kids, chatted idly with the matron. At some point she brought out a sheaf of papers she needed to attend to and showed them to me. They were graph papers issued by the government of Odisha, some instructions in fine print on top, four graceful curves arcing across them.

One for each child, these were growth charts on which to plot weight against age. Part of the matron’s job was to fill these in, and this morning she had to update them with the past week’s data.

When I examined them, I noticed a few things. The curves marked malnutrition levels in four grades, No. 4 being the worst. Nearly every child’s plotted curve meandered along near 4, plunging below it often enough. If I had to plot my then 4-year-old son’s data on such a chart, I would not be able to: he’d be way off the top (and you would not call him, then and certainly not now, a particularly chubby child).

No, I noticed one more thing: the charts were pre-printed with those curves. That is, the government of Odisha actually expected these kids to be malnourished. (And given their particular plotted paths, that expectation was spot on).

Call it a moment of epiphany. We expect our children to be malnourished. More than just a journey. No doubt.

The author lives in Bombay and writes so he can keep his cats Cleo and Aziz fed