The Silver Road

Once you’ve stood in a cloud and looked upon miles and miles of lush green rain-washed forest, you never quite fit inside a South Delhi apartment again. You can try. You can go to office and bludgeon out the memories with more of the same old same old that had made you go driving in the hills to begin with. Mostly, the bludgeoning works. The senses get numbed and you get back to being a socially accepted, daily-shaving member of the rat race. But you can’t stamp it out completely. A remnant still lurks, and keeps rearing its beautiful green head at increasingly inopportune moments. And then one day a travel show or a magazine article or just a stray comment ignites it all. Suddenly, the urge is back; you see the ‘smallness’ of the work you’re doing, feel claustrophobic in the biggest city in the country. So you escape again, with ears dialed into the rhythm of rain on a tin roof and eyes hungry for another glimpse of the Silver Road.

It’s cyclical.