A long-gone author’s timely tips for life on the road
Mohan Rakesh didn’t book tickets in advance and make hotel reservations. He went where the road led, and kept going
The lockdown is over, but our lives still seem unreal in so many ways. When will we be able to visit one another again without fear? Go on holiday and feel the excitement of prebooked tickets, hotel reservations, sightseeing itineraries and eating-out plans?
That’s how most of us travelled. I wonder, though, if it is the only way. I’ve been reading a lot of Hindi writer Mohan Rakesh lately, and I’ve been struck by how much and how differently he travelled. He was a peripatetic in the true sense of the word. He was 22 at the time of Partition, when he left Lahore and went from city to city for work — Jodhpur, Bombay, Jalandhar, Shimla.
Though he eventually settled in Delhi, he continued to travel incessantly, to Dalhousie and Dharamshala, Kufri, Allahabad, Calcutta, Kashmir. Fellow writer Rajendra Yadav called him a “really restless soul”, saying a group of friends could be sitting around in a coffee house chatting and Rakesh would suddenly decide to take off for Shimla the next day.
Rakesh had a special love for the hills and they bore silent witness to pivotal moments in his own life. It was in the mountains of Kashmir that he first met Kamleshwar, the well-known Hindi writer, in 1955, a meeting that would mark the beginning of a close, lifelong friendship. In his memoir, Jo Maine
Jiya, Kamleshwar writes that, on the same trip, Rakesh and his first wife decided to terminate their relationship, while on a horse ride from Pahalgam to Chandanwadi.
Much of Rakesh’s fiction is set in the mountains as well. His 1968 novel, Na Aane
Wala Kal, is about a schoolmaster in a missionary school in the hills (Rakesh was a schoolmaster too, for two years in a Shimla boarding school). In his short stories, characters grapple with fragile relationships, loneliness or just life in capital letters as they go for solitary walks on misty paths, stay in quiet rest houses, or travel in buses that lurch along winding roads.
Rakesh was also clear what travel was not about. In a must-read essay, Yatra Ka
Romance, he offers two examples of ways in which no one should ever travel.
Exhibit A: Rakesh recalls standing at Wular Lake in Kashmir, the early-morning sun turning the water to shimmering silver. In a shikara is an irritated, hassled man. He’s lost his pipe and is looking for it everywhere, under the cushions, in his pockets, asking everyone, ‘Have you seen my pipe?... It was brand new.’ The entire shikara ride is spent like this.
Exhibit B: Rakesh is at Krishna Sagar Lake in Mysore. He meets a man who is on a three-week ‘full Bharat darshan’. He’s carrying camera, binoculars, travel guides. He’s booked all his flights in advance. But he can’t even remember the names of the places he visited that day.
But perhaps Rakesh was the strange one. As Rajendra Yadav said of him, he longed to run away from wherever he was… whether it was a place, a job, love or marriage. What was he looking for? Maybe nothing. In his own words, from Yatra Ka Romance:
“Where does this road go?” asks the traveller.
“Where do you want to go?” is the reply. “Wherever this road will take me.” Rakesh walked down the last road of his life too soon. He died in 1972, aged 46, leaving behind so many unfinished journeys.