Travel broadens the mind, some wise man said.
I went on a road trip in 2021 with my dear friend Hemant of Rustik Travel. I joined him in Gujarat in October and the North Eastern part of India in December. After spending a year at home due to the pandemic, we ventured on this trip after we were just coming out of the second wave of Covid in India. It was a time when the mind was forced to appreciate the little joys and the simple pleasures of life. It was also a time when we could see people less fortunate than us in the midst of strife.
When I travelled by road, many of the scenes and landscapes left an imprint on my mind. I absorbed them like a thirsty man drinks water. But more than the roads, the mountains, the deserts, the natural landscape, and the man-made wonders, what left the biggest imprints were some of the people I met on this trip. People who I didn’t know, people who didn’t know me, but people with whom my paths crossed, albeit for a few minutes, a couple of hours or, at best, a day or two during the journey. Each of those people, I reckoned, could have a story that I felt a need to discover.
The stories in this collection are inspired by the people I met, the places I went to and the experiences I had during the road trip. I have taken the liberty of taking characters that might appear ordinary with uninteresting, simple existences, and then placing them in the imagination of my mind to unveil the stories behind them. I found that these characters might have had something to say, something to tell us, something waiting to be discovered, something that might move us. I have plucked many of these characters out of their reality and put them into mine.
I must add to clarify that while the stories might be inspired by real places I went to, real people I met and real experiences I have had, beyond that starting point, the stories themselves are just that – stories that are the makings of my own mind. None of the stories are actually true. So if you have travelled with me or independently travelled to these places and find yourself identifying any location or any person in the stories, suffice it to say that it is only the inspiration of that tale that you have identified. Beyond that, the story is entirely a figment of my imagination. It is then only your imagination playing with mine connecting the stories in our own minds. All of it is fiction.
While writing these stories, I met villagers and guides again in my mind. I revisited hotels to experience hospitality anew. I went back on a visit to lakes, mountains, and forests to uncover stories. I relived my visit to the Indian border in the Himalayas to unveil what might happen. I rediscovered lost kingdoms and met monks in monasteries to unearth their stories. I came across spirits from the past, travelled back in history, went to past civilisations, and did some time travel.
The stories in this collection are woven together like a necklace by the theme of travel on a road trip. But they are also individual standalone strands and beads with their own settings and characters. So to that extent, they are independent and not connected with each other.
Journeys are of many kinds. For some, we step out and take the road. For others, it is sufficient to dive deep into a book and go on our own trip. While I took the journey on the road with my dear friend and other fellow travellers who joined in, I am hoping that I have filled these pages with enough interesting stories so that you are able to take the journey to those places and meet those people through these tales. I hope you enjoy reading them as much I enjoyed writing them. Every great journey starts with a single step. Let us take the first step forward!
-Ranjit Kulkarni
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Check out ‘A Bend in the Road’ at my estore.