Do you like ghat roads? The question arrived the way all good questions do — simply, without preamble, from a brother who already knew the answer would be long. I do. I have. Since 1989, when the Mumbai to Karnataka track first showed me what it means for a road to breathe — crossing Mahad, tracing Chiplun, the Western Ghats unfolding in curves that felt less like engineering and more like calligraphy.
Memory gets colored and modified over time.— what I wrote, what I know
Things might have changed by now — without my comprehension of how they were back then. That is the quiet truth of long memory. It does not preserve. It interprets. Every time you return to a remembered road, you are traveling inside a painting that has been touched and retouched by invisible hands — your own, mostly, without your noticing. So that long yes to ghat roads comes with that caveat folded inside it, the way a ghat folds a valley inside its descent.
Miss April is still in her infancy. She has not matured to the 30th. She has not yet merged with Miss May. Time, like a good road, still has distance left in it — and that is its own kind of gift. So the question hangs, unhurried: how does your continuum look? Where does the road go from here?
The circuit back home has to be designed too, this time. Chopta was a good plan — it would have been, had we moved on after breakfast in the Devprayag stay. We did not. And that is where the road offered something unplanned, which is to say something real.
We got lucky with the Ganges beach. A couple of chai at a riverside khokha — the kind that gets submerged entirely when the monsoon comes, when the Ganges gushes and rises feet above itself, swallowing the little stall whole, as if it was never there. But it was there. We were there. And the river was exactly as loud and indifferent and beautiful as rivers always are when you let yourself sit beside them without agenda.
Open highway was tempting to let her know who she is when rubber meets the road.— Roorkee to Yamunanagar
The Roorkee to Yamunanagar stretch changed the mood entirely. I got lenient with the throttle. The highway opened. There is a particular honesty that arrives when you stop managing a machine and begin to simply ride it — when you let her find her own rhythm against the asphalt and she tells you, without words, exactly what she is made of. I lived it. I loved it.
The Suzuki V-Strom 800DE did transit my mind back then — briefly, the way thoughts do on a highway, arriving and dissolving without quite landing. A machine worth considering. A thought worth letting pass. Both things at once.
That is perhaps what riding from the inner space means — not the machine, not the miles, not even the road. But the quality of attention you bring when the throttle is open and the mind, for once, is simply present. No agenda. Just April, still young. Still full of road.
Written by
Roger