pedals and a wheel (1)

M was done with months of work and he fitfully cussed his job, and everything else about him. A few minutes later, he sat up and said, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here; drive out to the hills or something.’ Sure, I agreed without looking up and flipped a page. I had grown accustomed to his fanciful ‘night plans’, so called, as they never materialized by day, and chapter 5 promised a murder, which I couldn’t turn down. He said he was dead straight about this one, and I played along, throwing in names of places we could go to, etc etc. In another hour, M was asleep, it had started to rain and Emily Inglethorp was found dead at Styles Court.

I had showered and dressed the next morning and was shoveling a sandwich down my throat when M, who had just woken up, asked me where I thought I was going. I mumbled ‘work, where else’ through the bread. ‘Aren’t we going to the hills?’ he mumbled through sleep. I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, but he wasn’t kidding.

Fine then. We were headed to the hills. It was time to strike things off the Driving Holiday Checklist.

The Driving Holiday Checklist:

1) leave town early: It was about 11am and we were almost packed. All that was left now was to shower, eat, pick up some stuff for the drive and strike off point 2.

2) music: ‘We’ll get a system fixed before we leave,’ said M.

3) hotel reservations: erm… ‘We’ll figure it out when we get there,’ said M again, in between throwing things into his bag.

4) a minimum of two drivers: I don’t know how to drive and it was a weekday and friends didn’t welcome such spontaneity. That left just the two of us.

‘What the hell, I’ll drive if need be. It’s just pedals and a wheel after all.’ I said.


I thought I heard M guwaff at that but I let it be. It’s not like I’d never driven before. In the spring of 1989, I had driven too far out and things hadn’t ended well. I still remember it vividly. My shiny blue pedal-push car meeting it’s untimely end in the drain that ran beside our kitchen garden. Still gives me the shivers that one. But oh, to be young and reckless!

It was 3 in the afternoon when we were finally out of town. A friend had suggested we go to Nalagarh fort a few hours from Delhi, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas it made a perfect weekend getaway, but M with his new boost of holiday energy, had made up his mind that he wanted to get to the mountains and nowhere else. I didn’t have a choice so I aye-ayed. The destination had been set, Mcleodganj it was. We had the wind in our hair, music in the car, our stash of herbals and beer and some 900 km ahead of us. It felt super.

We drove on for what seemed an eternity, before we hit the curves and bends of the hills. M’s energy had dwindled considerably and the sun had set making it impossible to carry on. Two hundred milestones, sixty cigarettes, twelve doobies, six bottles of beer, four pit stops and one plate of Punjabi idli sambhar later we arrived ragged, bleary-eyed and stiff at what we prayed was Simla. We had to stop for it was close to 2am. Simla was a city that went to bed at a respectable hour. We realized, as we circled the city’s deserted streets in solipsistic loops for a decent place to crash for the night, that we were at the mercy of its touts. Sure enough, one came by and fed us his regular I-have-the-last-room-in-the-entire-Simla crap.


‘It’s tourist season after all, sir. And you’re late.’ The cheek!

We recognized his faff but told him to lead the way nevertheless. The hotel, if you can call it that, was a shady affair. Dilapidated, with an underlying stench of stale beer, the place screamed ‘seedy, seedy, seedy.’ At the reception sat a woman dressed in black with a retinue of sycophantic bellboys one of whom showed us to our cupboard for a room. She had asked us a set of elaborate questions with dramatic pauses in between. In times like this I kick myself for taking the Driving Holiday checklist lightly. But with such exhaustion comes a sleep where you couldn’t care two hoots if the place was a kookie can.

The only reason we were up early was to get the hell out of the place. That’s the fastest I’ve seen M go about his business. We were back in our car and I rolled the window down to see Simla. But to my surprise there wasn’t any Simla there. 

This wasn’t the Simla where I had held onto my father’s hands as he looked for a bookstore that sold originals of the Gazette. This wasn’t the Simla where my mother had forced me into an itchy polo neck. I had cried, complained but had worn it because it had been cold. And it wasn’t the Simla either where I got a telling-off by them because I had picked up so many pine cones that there wasn’t any place left in their bags to put them in. There wasn’t any of that left. Tourism had come, conquered, massacred and left behind a tragic alopaeceatic landscape where coarse hoardings that read ‘Lake View Hotel’ and ‘Hotel Paradise’ stuck out where pine trees had once stood. The devastation was complete with resorts and hotels, which mushroomed grotesquely. To top it off, it was hot and the streets bursting in its seams with traffic. 


Feeling dismal, I rolled up my windows, turned on the air conditioning and hoped McLeodganj would be better.