The loneliness started right after Normal.
Not a bad loneliness. Not the kind that unsettles. The kind that clarifies. The Nissan Altima and I slipped onto the highway and the world quietly rearranged itself into just two things — the road ahead and the bright Illinois sun coming straight at my face. The AC was perfect. The steering was responsive. The acceleration, smooth. I had worried about this car, this road, this side of the road. The car, at least, had decided not to worry with me.
It did not take long to notice something that the maps had hinted at but the road made obvious — Route 66 and the new freeway run almost parallel to each other, like an old story and its modern retelling. The Mother Road, all nostalgia and legend, quietly keeping pace with the interstate that replaced it. I found this strangely moving.
Lincoln, IL arrived on a Sunday morning, and Lincoln, IL was very much asleep.
This was the town named after Abraham Lincoln before he was Abraham Lincoln — before the presidency, before the legend, before the memorial. He christened it himself, this little town, with the juice of a watermelon, or so the story goes. I had expected something of that energy — some small civic pride on display, perhaps a statue mid-gesture, a diner with his face on the menu. What I found instead was a main square so quiet you could hear your own footsteps.
The deserted look of the town matched that of the road I had expected to be so happening. Route 66 — the most romanticised highway in the world — and on a Sunday morning in Lincoln, Illinois, it felt like everyone had been given the same memo to stay home.
I was hungry. I looked for a coffee shop and found instead a cheerful little store selling American merchandise — the kind of place that sells everything from fridge magnets to flags to things you didn't know you needed. I browsed. I bought nothing. Then I found coffee and some breakfast, and a newly opened bookshop that had no business being as good as it was in a town that was still rubbing its eyes. I encircled the main square once — still deserted — and pointed the Altima south towards St. Louis.
My colleague Kumud had lived in the US for a few years and had offered, with the generosity of someone who has genuinely been there, a fair amount of warning about St. Louis. He was descriptive. He was specific. He was, I would discover, not wrong.
I arrived in St. Louis excited nonetheless — the kind of excitement that a fair warning produces rather than diminishes. I pulled in for lunch and parked on the road. And then, sitting in the restaurant, I understood precisely what Kumud had meant. The worry about the car parked outside did not entirely leave me through the meal.
The food was good. The waitress was heavily pregnant, petite, and kinder than the afternoon required — she brought extra portions of bread without being asked, twice. These are the people you remember on a long road. Not the landmarks. The people.
I did look up for the Arch — you cannot miss the Gateway Arch, that great gleaming curve over the Mississippi, America's monument to its own westward ambition. I saw it. But what caught my eye and held it longer were the flowers growing alongside the road. Wildflowers, ordinary and unannounced, doing what wildflowers do — blooming without occasion.
And then, without entirely meaning to, I had exited St. Louis.
I realised this a few minutes later and kept driving. What was I going to do — go back? I was on the road precisely to be on the road. The exit, accidental as it was, felt like the right decision.
The plan had been to stop at Salem or Lawrenceville, both in southern Illinois, both reasonable places to end a first day. Then the rain arrived.
It did not drizzle. It battered. The kind of rain that makes you grip the wheel a little tighter and lean forward slightly as if that helps. Here I was — first day alone on American roads, wrong side of the car, unfamiliar state, and the sky had chosen this precise evening to make a point.
I remember thinking — why this challenge on the first day itself?
And then, almost immediately — well. You wanted this, didn't you?
I drove on. Through the rain, through Salem, through Lawrenceville, through the rest of southern Illinois which slid past in the dark and the wet. Somewhere along the way I crossed into Indiana without ceremony or intention. The rain did not let up. The road did not offer explanation.
Vincennes, Indiana appeared, and I let it stop me.
A motel. A room. Dry. I had driven through an entire state in a rainstorm on my first day alone in America and arrived, unplanned, in a city named after a French colonial fort on the banks of the Wabash River.
The jajabara had well and truly begun.
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