Father's Day is fast approaching, and by coincidence, I am preparing for a trip to Nainital, where I’ll be with my father, who always migrates to the happier altitudes for the summers. Here’s something that I feel is a sorts of inheritance from the man.
Why do we travel? Or maybe the better question is, where does wanderlust come from?
I was thinking about the origins of my own travel curiosity and remembered my father's stories of traversing great distances, either as a necessity or out of impulse.
For a background, my grandfather was from a remote village in Kumaon called Guniyalekh, that lies a little beyond another slightly-lesser-remote village of Padampuri, in the district of Nainital. Family tragedies and the cause of employment had him settle down in Lucknow almost 80 years back. He kept his fascination for his roots alive by building a cottage in the quaint village of Gethia, not far from Nainital. Come the summers, Gethia would serve an ideal base-camp for visits to our ancestral lands that lay deeper in Guniyalekh. My father recalls the entire family travelling the distance in equal portions by bus, on mules, and on foot. Those were the days of denuded dirt tracks through forests and dangerous stream crossings, and I’m still surprised to hear of my grandma and my aunts’ courage and struggles to travel these distances. Being abused and seduced by the nature, all at once.
My father took a difficult resolution upon my grandfather’s death, that he would legally obtain rights to the lands – or whatever was left unoccupied of those – in Guniyalekh; the longing that lay in all hearts now turning into a hope, a hope that turned into expectations from my father. Having graduated in law, and choosing teaching for a profession, a man who spent much of his time extolling and preaching the ideals of ‘kanoon’, now set forth for the corruption-laden legalities of the real India. More than the legal procedure, it was the travelling involved that could make a person submit to defeat. After several trips between Lucknow and Nainital, endless juggling between Gethia, Nanital, and Guniyalekh, fighting the bureaucracy in Nainital, and death threats by selfish villagers who had their own plans of illegal acquisition in mind, he managed to get a piece of eternal satisfaction that everybody wanted... If the geographical pinball of a great acquisition wasn’t sweet enough, there are his tales of spending snow wintry nights in shacks out of necessity, going on a snow leopard hunt with the villagers, among the others.
The sights, smells and sounds that I lust for must be nothing but a nostalgic fact to my old folks, I am just trailing on their footsteps, clutching for a version of my own.
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