Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago in advance of my friend Rina Singh's "Eka" collection unveiling at Amazon India Fashion week. In conjunction with this show, she decided to publish a commemorative scrapbook titled "Seekers, Keepers," which showcases the stories of various friends' and writers' memories of a time, place, or object to highlight this significant theme running through her collection of distinctive pieces. I was privileged to be a part of this endeavor, and this piece appears in that book.
The daughter of a college professor who generally had summers off, save for the occasional summer session, I grew up familiar with the art of road trips. Lots and lots of summer road trips. After all, as a family of five, we couldn't afford airline tickets or multiple nights in fancy hotels (or basic hotels for that matter), so our great big and brown Ford Econoline Van with the the bench seats and table in the back for us kids (you remember — the table that lowered down to make a full bed in back), tent and sleeping bags in tow, would just have to do. As proud as I am now to have experienced so much of America in my growing years, the traveling and camping then was often tedious, as we either sat bored stiff in our seats or tormented one another mile after mile. (Having three children of my own now, I can only imagine the pain we inflicted on my parents' very souls.) My father would do most of the driving and setting up of camp. My mother would handle meals and our daily schedules and care. We ate oodles of fruit flies on our canned stew in a campground by a fruit orchard near Disney World. We drove our van into New York City from a campground in nearby New Jersey, parked it somewhere I cannot recall now at all, and rode the subway down to Battery Park (or should I say hopped the subway, since we got in the wrong car in the back and had to make our way up to the very front one) to see the iconic statue my grandmother most certainly cast her eyes upon when sailing from Hamburg, Germany, 70 years earlier. Hours later, in midtown, a grand, older lady mumbled contemptuously beneath her breath as we all passed her clumsily in the revolving doors at Bloomingdales, "Tourists." I still remember how that word hurt me to the very core. You see, for a girl who grew up in the midwest dreaming of far away places, a "tourist" I never wanted to be.
Fast forward nearly thirty years. Nalin and I are proud and experienced road trippers in our own right. When we met right out of college (now go back again twenty years), our first date, practically, was on a road trip to St. Louis to see a new band out of Ireland, quaintly called "The Cranberries," play in a basement club in University City. On the trip back, we sat a row of three in the front seat of the car even (oh those great ol' forgotten bench seats), listened to a lot of U2, and talked all the way about travel, philosophy, religion, music, you name it. For the next five years, in grad school or in poverty (or both), we traveled by car virtually everywhere, save India. We graduated to air tickets, even domestically, for a truly indulgent period between our latter twenties (once two incomes started paying off) and our mid-to-late thirties. It's like we finally arrived. And then, after the birth of our second son, due to the gradual increase of stuff and bodies, we started road tripping again. We bought a minivan and set off for New York and New England, boarding passes nowhere to be seen. But the maps, they were a-plenty.
The preparation has gotten a little easier now that the boys are a little older. They now pack their own backpacks full of odds and ends... the odd Lego piece, the back end piece of a toy car or train, some Playmobil figures, a slingshot, a magic box or flashlight, some oversized slippers stashed away from the hotel in India. I pack the thin paper pictorial books (easy and not too heavy to stuff in my bag or backpack), journals, pens and pencils, an Etch-a-sketch or two, along with the canvas bags full of snacks and water. So... much... stuff. Everything utterly unimportant and, yet, invaluable to these little hands and minds. Nalin and I have our arsenal of children's audiobooks, music or podcasts ready to play, our thermoses full of tea and coffee respectively, and a back cargo area full to the brim with overpacked bags and foodstuff (because you see, after years of road tripping, I still can't master the art of a good frugal pack). Some of the finer moments have been listening to Calvin Trillin's Family Man, laughing to high heaven about his preferred holiday meal of spaghetti carbonara for Thanksgiving and vividly imagining the grand Halloween parade his family attended every year in Greenwich Village (who even calls it that any longer?) when his girls were growing up; and another moment that happens on nearly every trip is hearing Nalin sing along in his childhood-trained classical voice to the haunting and soaring ghazal "Aik Alif" (One God). And herein the transporter becomes the transportee, memories cascading and flooding until tears cannot help but surface. This road here with this family is just too far from the road he once knew. The kids could be arguing or singing loudly in the back. No mind. This family man is in another place right now. Let's just leave him be.
Kos Minar, Tirawdi
There is a Sufi shrine, visited by both Hindus and Muslims, located near Kurukshetra, where Nalin's family lives in Haryana, India, called Naugaja Peer. It is venerated for safe journeys, and stopping there is a sign of good luck, apropos given its situation alongside National Highway 1 or Grand Trunk Road as it's so long been called, one of the oldest and longest highways in India, commencing from the east Pakistan and finding its westward end in Dhaka, Bangladesh. You know that moment while traveling, after dozing off for a while, when you start to slow down and realize you're close to home? Well that's Naugaja Peer. On the way back from the foothills or from Chandigarh, the traffic inevitably starts to beed up all along this area, as lines of cars merge as if attempting the passage through the eye of a needle. When this starts to happen, Nalin always knows he's near home. It's not far now. He's been cared for and watched over yet another journey back. The places along this highway in Haryana, like so many others in India, are focal points for followers of more than one religion. The medieval mile marker in Karnal, a bit south of Kurukshetra is the Kos Minar, Tirawdi, built by the Mughal emperors to mark distance. They stand today as pillars to the history that built these highways and oversaw the creation of cities. And the beautiful Tomb of Sheik Chilli near Kurukshetra is a monument to Sufi Abd-ur-Rahim Abdul-Karim Abd-ur-Razak. We've inherited this history, as clearly as we've inherited the roads that bypass the grounds they inhabit . These are the oasis markers of Nalin's childhood travels, the tokens of a much grander, more elaborate "I spy" game, and they most certainly come into clearer focus as he sings the resounding lyrics of "Aik Alif":
“Parh parh ilm te faazil hoya
(You read to become all knowledgable)
Te kaday apnay aap nu parhya ee na
(But you never read yourself)
Bhaj bhaj warna ay mandir maseeti
(You run to enter your mosques and temples)
Te kaday mann apnay wich warya ee na
(But you never entered your own heart)
... asmaani ud-deya pharonda ay
(... you try grabbing that which is in the sky)
Te jera ghar betha unoon pharya ee na
(But you never get hold of what sits inside yourself)
Ilm-oun bas kareen o yaar
(stop seeking all this knowledge my friend)”
These memories, which come most alive during the quiet moments on those long stretches of highway, are both eclectic and ecumenical. They are what connects National Highway 1 to the interstates of America in a collision both powerful and almost indeterminable. There is an organic absence of a common religion or language or place that demands an insularity impossible for traveling the larger world we live. What happens on a road trip is a great clearing out. A clearing out of all the knowledge day in and day out that clouds our faculties and prevents us from seeing that which is right in front of us. We traverse the roads of many before us and divine in them new meanings and experiences. Our seeking is never finite; our senses never quenched. And yet we go on and on; over and over. As the song goes, stop forever seeking and enjoy what is.
This one boy from northern India and this one girl from midwest America came together as tourists of a larger world. Even if they don't like the word. That is, indeed, what they are. As are their children now, as well.
One final note: upon reading this during our road trip to Missouri over spring break, my father corrected two of my mistaken memories. "We didn't drive into New York City, Heidi, we took the train and left the van in Princeton. Don't you remember?" Perhaps I just liked the thought that we may have just rambled into town in a big oversized van, squeezing through those crowded streets of Fifth Avenue as slow and conspicuous as a big brown bear. A couple moments later he recalled, "And the old lady didn't just say, 'Tourists;' she said, 'They're just tourists.'" First, I thought, oh that's worse than I remember. Then I though, wow, that's quite the memory, Dad. Perhaps we both were equally unnerved at the insult. Like father like daughter, I suppose. But why should I be so surprised at his uncanny recollection? After all, our memories of that time are exactly the same age. I love that about memory. Even with our different ages and backgrounds, a memory can link us to one moment of time, and we will forever share its origin, sort of like a birthday.
