Twinkle Apa left for school early.
The goodbye was wistful — written clearly on her face even as she kept it brief, the way people do when they don't want a farewell to become one. She extracted a promise before she left — bring S next time. Her sister, my wife, who had known nothing of this adventure and would have opinions about it. I promised. It was the easiest promise to make at that hour of the morning.
It was left to the men — Subrat Bhai and me — to sort out the logistics. We drove to the Rent-A-Car outlet near Dulles Airport together. I missed Lola immediately and completely.
I picked up a Volkswagen Jetta. Large, beautiful, and grey — the same grey as my VW Polo back home in India, the same grey as the Nissan Altima that had carried me from Illinois to Virginia. There was something quietly reassuring about this, as if the trip had a colour scheme I had not chosen but was being faithful to regardless.
Subrat Bhai and I hugged. I went on my way.
The rain arrived almost immediately — first mild, then stronger, drumming on the roof of the Jetta with growing conviction. This was becoming a pattern. In Odia tradition, rain on an important occasion is auspicious — a blessing arriving uninvited and damp. I had now been blessed, by this reckoning, several times on this trip. I chose to take it that way.
Annapolis came first, as planned.
The town is smaller than its history suggests, which is part of its charm. The naval influence is everywhere — in the architecture, in the unhurried confidence of the streets, in the way the whole place seems to know it has earned its standing and feels no need to announce it loudly. I walked those streets with the particular pleasure that old port towns produce — the sense of centuries of arrivals and departures quietly accumulated in the stones underfoot.
I had soup and lunch at a café, then wandered into the Maryland State House for the legislative session — democracy in its working clothes, unglamorous and essential. After, I found a T-shirt shop, which produced the familiar and universal experience of being so overwhelmed by choice at the start that whatever you finally buy feels like the wrong decision by the time you reach the till. I bought something. I have already forgotten what.
The drive through Annapolis and out was lovely.
Delaware arrived next, quiet and brief — the First State, the first to ratify the Constitution, wearing this distinction with the modesty of someone who knows the fact matters more than the celebration. I stopped near Delaware City in the afternoon at a Mexican place for tacos, ate well, and drove on.
I only discovered much later that the daughter of my teacher, Madhu Pant madam, was working in the city. A coffee, a meal, a conversation missed entirely. But you cannot plan everything — and this trip had long since made peace with that.
Then the toll road offered me a choice — take the free route, or pay and cross over water.
I paid.
I had no idea what I was crossing. The map said Chesapeake Bay Bridge but the reality of it — driving above open water, the bay spreading in every direction, the scale of it only becoming clear once you were committed and on it — was something the map had not prepared me for. You feel, on a bridge like that, simultaneously very small and strangely invincible. The engineering of it — the audacity of laying a road across a stretch of sea and then driving cars across it as a matter of daily routine — produces a specific kind of awe. Human beings, I thought, are capable of remarkable things when they decide to be.
I reached Philadelphia as the evening was beginning.
My Airbnb host had warned me about the parking. Philadelphia and its parking, she said, were a matter requiring preparation, patience and possibly prayer. I found a spot on the street within minutes, in the manner of someone who has spent years navigating Delhi. Some skills transfer across continents.
The city met me at every corner with graffiti.
Not the hasty, throwaway kind — the kind that has something to say and has decided that walls are the right place to say it. Messages of identity, of protest, of solidarity, of defiance and belonging and the complicated business of existing in a city that contains multitudes. You understand very quickly that Philadelphia is an inclusive city — not as a policy or a slogan but as a texture, something you feel in the streets before anyone tells you.
I signed up for walking tours. Multiple ones, spread across two days — the Constitutional Walking Tour being the centrepiece, taking in Independence Hall, Liberty Bell and the streets where the American republic was argued into existence. Benjamin Franklin is inescapable in this city, and rightly so. The man was a polymath of the most extravagant kind — the first Postmaster General of the United States, a founder of what would become the University of Pennsylvania, a scientist, a diplomat, a writer, a printer, an inventor. The bifocals. The lightning rod. The almanac. Philadelphia wears his memory the way cities wear their best buildings — proudly, and everywhere.
The Quakers too have left their mark — in the architecture, in certain civic instincts of the place, in the quiet insistence on conscience that runs through Philadelphia's history like a thread you keep finding in different rooms.
But the tour that stayed with me longest was the Dark Philly tour.
Ghosts and prostitution — that was the billing, and it delivered on both counts with considerable enthusiasm. The history of vice in Philadelphia turns out to be rich, detailed and, at certain points, featuring some of the most celebrated names in American history. The founding fathers, those marble men of monument and currency, had feet of clay in ways that the Constitutional Walking Tour had not mentioned. There were the Yellow Pages equivalents of their era — directories of available company, matter of fact and businesslike. There were names in those directories that would have caused considerable difficulty had they appeared on the historical plaques we had admired earlier in the day.
I walked back to my Airbnb that night with a considerably more complete picture of the city that had launched a nation. More human, somehow. More real.
Next day morning was devoted to Rocky Balboa at the Museum of Arts.
Two days in Philadelphia. Not enough and exactly right.
I loaded the Jetta and pointed it north toward New York. The last leg. The end of the road, or at least this road.
Philadelphia shrank in the rear view mirror, its graffiti and its founding fathers and its Dark Tour ghosts receding together. Ahead, the city that needs no introduction was waiting — loud and tall and entirely itself.
The jajabara had one more chapter left.
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