Tamas: Where the Stage Becomes a Mirror

A personal essay on the NSD Repertory Company's production at the Summer Theatre Festival

The opening scene told me everything I needed to know. Before a single word was spoken, the set announced itself — grand, layered, a visual feast of the kind that the National School of Drama Repertory Company has made its unmistakable hallmark. And then the music began. Not from some invisible corner of the wings, but loud and emotive singing from the actors themselves, on stage — music so carefully chosen and so organically woven into the fabric of the narrative that it ceased to be accompaniment and became the play's very bloodstream.

I had been wanting to encounter Tamas for a long time. Bhisham Sahni's novel had sat on the edges of my reading life, always deferred; the celebrated television series with Om Puri had similarly eluded me. So when the NSD Repertory Company staged Vibhajan Vibhishika — Tamas as part of their Summer Theatre Festival, it felt less like watching a play and more like finally keeping a long-overdue appointment with a part of our history.

Powerful acting and strong casting are, with the NSD, almost a given. These are professionals shaped by years of rigorous training and then honed further by the demands of a performing repertory company. But where this production scaled genuinely newer heights was in its theatrical imagination — in its daring choices of form and staging. There is a scene where three actors, dressed identically, impersonating the same person, emerge simultaneously from different directions, converging on one of the protagonists. The effect is not merely visual — it is psychological, almost hallucinatory. Fear, worry, mental unraveling: the protagonist conveyed all of these at once, and the staging made you feel each one separately. Brilliant.

Then there were the mob scenes. The easy choice would have been noise — shouting, chaos, the full volume of human violence. Instead, the directors chose silence. The cries and clashes of rioting crowds were rendered through violent, contorted movements of hands and faces — a choreography of horror without sound. Sometimes the noise began and then was drained away into an unbearable quiet. The choice was deliberate, and it was devastating.

The use of props was, as one would expect, precisely calibrated: swords when the moment called for them, guns when a shot had to be fired, sticks to make a point. Nothing excessive, nothing absent.

I come to Partition-themed work with a particular personal weight. One of the first plays I performed in Delhi — at the India Habitat Centre — was Kharashein, written by Gulzar. That encounter shook me. The violence and brutality with which human beings can turn upon one another in the grip of a communal frenzy — the fire, the blood, the gore — seemed almost unthinkable. It marked me.

But Tamas does something more unsettling than depicting violence. It exposes the architecture behind it. It shows, with unflinching clarity, that the riots are rarely as spontaneous as they appear — that there are engineers, profiteers, and political orchestrators working in the shadows. A quiet bedtime conversation between the British Deputy Commissioner and his wife. A petty squabble between political leaders. A local strongman pulling strings from a distance, for purposes that have nothing to do with God, religion or culture. The audience is made to see this slowly, through accumulation — a hint here, a gesture there — and the realisation creeps up on you like cold water.

And the people who actually die, who lose their homes and families and everything they have — they believe they are fighting a righteous battle. They feel they are acting on God's will, or their community's honour, or their own wounded pride. They have no idea they are pawns. They have no agency. That is the most unbearable thing Tamasforces you to sit with.

Tamas — darkness — is the right word. But Sahni's darkness, as rendered on this stage, comes in two registers. First it erupts: violent, volcanic, like molten lava pouring out of the crater of a riot. And then, when the lava cools, you see what remains — not clean ash, but something far worse: the dark, stagnant waste water that surrounds us always, filled with the organic and inorganic debris of our own nature, our own capacity for complicity and silence.

Go. If the NSD Repertory Company's Summer Theatre Festival is still running, go. If it is not, watch for the next one. These are plays that do not merely entertain — they insist, quietly and powerfully, that you look at yourself

Jajabara in the US of A (Part V: Hola Familia, Lola and the Road That Runs America)

 Virginia announced itself gently.

The mountains of West Virginia had been dramatic and demanding — beautiful in the way that requires your full attention. Virginia was different. Around Middleburg, the land softened into something almost European — pretty houses set back from the road, fields rolling easy and wide, hedgerows and horses and a particular quality of afternoon light that made everything look considered, composed, like someone had arranged it all with care. If West Virginia was a poem that grabbed you by the collar, Virginia was one you found on a quiet shelf and kept returning to.

I kept looking at the signposts of Highway 50 E, that has been the North Star to my compass and a familiar friend. How a particular font, colour and design connects with you in a situation is quite something in the trivia that’s life! 

I was heading to Aldie. A small, unhurried town in Loudoun County where Twinkle Apa and Subrat Bhai had made their home with their two daughters and, newest to the family, a dog called Lola.

---

I had been to this house before. In 2013, on my last visit to America — the trip where I had landed at Dulles International and Twinkle Apa had come to pick me up. Her younger daughter Sayona had been barely a year old then, carried in arms, all eyes and unawareness. Her elder daughter Ishu had been in Grade 3 or 4, small and curious. Twelve years is a long time. Ishu was now at UCLA. Sayona was in Grade 8. The house was the same, the warmth was the same, but time had done what time does — quietly and completely rearranged everything within the familiar outline.

Subrat Bhai was in the driveway when I pulled in.

He gave me a tight hug — the kind that needs no words and uses none. And then Lola arrived, all energy and enthusiasm and absolutely no concept of personal space, jumping at me with the complete conviction that this was the correct response to a guest arriving after a long journey. She was not wrong.

Lola was social, vibrant, and entirely certain of her own importance in any room or driveway she occupied. We became friends immediately, which is the only speed at which you can become friends with a dog like Lola.

---

I had been alone for days. Not unhappily alone — the solitude of the road had been chosen, enjoyed, wrestled with and ultimately cherished. But alone nonetheless. And now here was Twinkle Apa's warmth, familiar food, familiar language, the sound of a household going about its life around me. I felt it settle over me like a blanket you had forgotten you owned.

I stayed four days.

We walked Lola through the neighbourhood in the mornings, which Lola treated as a serious professional obligation. We drove to Manassas National Battlefield Park, where the Civil War had been fought in the fields that now lay quiet and marked with careful signage — the details, the dates, the human cost of it all laid out with the solemn precision that American historical parks do very well. It was impressive in the way that places of genuine consequence always are, even when the grass has grown back and the cannons have been made decorative.

The drives around Virginia were done in Subrat Bhai and Twinkle Apa's Tesla. I was not consulted about this arrangement. The couple had heard a summary of my West Virginia adventures — the GPS gone, the toothless signpost, the farmer, the unpaved road, the fuel warning — and had reached a swift and unanimous verdict. No more driving for the guest. I debated this with them, twice, with diminishing conviction each time. The Tesla stayed in their hands. I sat in the back with Lola, which was, I will admit, not a bad outcome.

---

I did win one small negotiation. Philadelphia.

It had not been part of any plan — nothing about this trip had been particularly faithful to plans — but I had read about it and could not walk past it. The first capital of the United States, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the Constitution was written, where a young nation had argued itself into existence. I would drive there on my way to New York.

On the way, the road made one more spontaneous offer and I accepted it — Annapolis, Maryland. A port town of quiet beauty and deep history, sitting where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay. I found myself, by a series of small accidents of timing and curiosity, inside a live legislative session. I watched the proceedings for a while, understanding some of it, moved by the ordinariness of democracy in action — the arguing, the procedure, the patient accumulation of governance. Then I stepped back out into the Annapolis afternoon.

---

Before Philadelphia, there was one final errand. I drove the Nissan Altima to Chantilly to return it.

On the way, I stopped at Manassas — the battlefield again, this time alone, on my own time, with the particular attention you can only give a place when no one is waiting. And somewhere in the logistics of the return, I made a discovery. I had a whole day saved. An entire day that I had not accounted for, had not planned around, had simply driven into existence by covering more ground than I had imagined possible.

A colleague had told me this before I left — you always underestimate how much you can drive in America. I had nodded politely and not quite believed him. He was right. America is a country that runs on roads and is, in some essential way, run by them. The highway is not just infrastructure here — it is identity, it is freedom, it is the original promise of the place made physical and paved.

I handed back the keys to the Nissan Altima at Chantilly. It had carried me from Normal, Illinois to Virginia — through Route 66 and Highway 50, through thunderstorms and mountain roads without signal, through rust belt towns and West Virginia woods, past a signpost with a toothless grin and down an unpaved road a farmer had pointed me toward on faith alone.

It was an unassuming car. It did not let me down once.

---

Now it was the move to Sunny Philly? I must confess that I watched the movie Philadelphia starring the magnificent Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington - my men !! 

Jajabara in the US of A (Part III: The Loneliest Road - the Dust and the Rust)

The rain and thunderstorm from the previous evening had not entirely made up its mind.

I watched the news before sleep took me — equal parts weather forecast and optimism, washed down with some food I had carried from the café in St. Louis. The risk was not rhetorical. Tornadoes in middle America are not metaphors. They are real, they are sudden, and the loneliest road in America would be a particularly poor place to meet one. I filed this thought under "things to worry about tomorrow" and let the tiredness of the day — the concentration, the rain, the accidental state-crossing — pull me under.

Morning proved the optimism correct.

---

I looked out of the window and the sky was clear. But it was not the weather that held me. It was the water.

Right behind the motel room at Super 8 (run by Indians), quiet and unhurried, ran a small stream that opened into what was unmistakably a private lake. Ducks — white, unhurried, indifferent to me — dotted its edges. I stood there after breakfast for a while, watching them, thinking about the lake.

In India, a body of water like this would have seventeen competing claims on it — the government, the village panchayat, the farmer next door, the man who has been washing his buffalo in it for forty years. Here, someone had simply put a fence around it and called it theirs. America has been blessed with more natural resources than almost any nation on earth. It has also, I thought, been blessed with a remarkable appetite to capture, own and label them. The ducks had no opinion on the matter.

I took the car out for a slow drive through Vincennes before leaving. I hovered around the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park — that grand rotunda built to honour the Revolutionary War general who wrestled the Northwest Territory from the British. It sat there magnificently, a little too large for its surroundings, the way American monuments often do. I was too restless to go inside. This is something I was beginning to understand about myself on a road trip — the road takes priority. Everything else gets demoted. Museums, historical sites, the carefully curated versions of places — all secondary. The place itself, lived in and moving, is what the road offers.

---

Lagootee arrived next. A small, middle-of-nowhere town that the highway had not forgotten but the world largely had. Someone had mentioned it was close to Amish country and I had been quietly hoping — the Amish, that extraordinary community that has chosen a different bargain with modernity, were something I had only seen on television. I wanted to see a horse-drawn buggy. I wanted to see the hats.

Instead, I walked into a diner and found something equally worth seeing — a full house of sixty-plus year olds, four or five waitresses also of similar age at ease with each other like a family, and a level of conversation and banter that needed no translation. These women knew every customer by name, knew their orders before they sat down, knew which one needed more coffee and which one needed more sympathy. The omelette was excellent. The coffee was strong. The Amish were elsewhere, and I did not miss them.

Outside Lagootee, I had my first solo encounter with an American gas station.

In India, pulling into a petrol station is a full-service production. Someone waves you in, someone else asks — cash, card or UPI — a third person handles the nozzle, and if you are lucky, someone offers to wipe your windshield. You sit in your car like a person of leisure while the world organises itself around your fuel tank.

Here — a machine, a card slot, a series of prompts, and the distinct impression that the machine was mildly impatient with me. I recalled every instruction Soumya provided me. I followed every step. I filled the tank. No help, no guidance, no human involvement whatsoever. A small and private victory, celebrated alone in a car park outside Lagootee, Indiana.

---

The drive east from here was where the road began to tell a different story.

The Rust Belt. A phrase that sounds almost romantic until you drive through it. Town after town that had once hummed with industry and population, now wearing a hollowed-out look — discoloured houses, broken fences, overgrown lawns, shops shuttered so long the signs had faded. These were not abandoned places. People lived here, families persisted, curtains moved in windows. But the prosperity that had once organised these towns around it had quietly packed up and left, and what remained was the structure without the pulse.

I stopped for coffee in one of these towns. Walked in. The few people inside looked up with the particular attention reserved for something genuinely unexpected. I was, in that room, an alien. Not unwelcome — just entirely improbable. I drank my coffee. We exchanged nods. I left.

I crossed from Indiana into Kentucky briefly — the road dipping into a third state almost as an aside — and then into Ohio, the land flattening and widening with each mile.

---

I crossed briefly through Kentucky — the road dipping south almost as a casual aside — and then into Ohio before the day finally drew me into Chillicothe.

Chillicothe is one of those American towns that carries more history than its current size suggests — Ohio's first state capital, ancient Hopewell culture earthworks buried in its surroundings. I knew none of this then. What I found was a pub dedicated to Highway 50, warm inside, unhurried, with good beer and decent food and the kind of atmosphere that a long day of driving makes feel like paradise.

I had a couple of beers. I had food. I was content in the specific way that only honest tiredness and honest hunger, both met at once, can produce. Yet again, talking about regrets, I should have bought some more highway 50 merchandise as memorabilia.  

The route maps and details in the planned kept referring to mounds and I was keen to explore them - but I realised you need to know about something for you to be excited about it. What it is? What it was? What it could be? I missed the mounds despite their highlighted importance. 

I did not want to miss a good night’s sleep. The motel (again run by an Indian family) that night was however a different matter.

Practically empty. Situated beside a freeway that did not sleep, massive trucks announcing themselves through the thin walls at regular intervals. Around it, the kind of vast empty American space that looks fine in daylight and deeply unsettling at night — a car park the size of a small town, pools of orange light, nothing moving except perhaps some shadows.

I was the only guest, as far as I could tell. But I had company, the cleaner of the room had left a small hand written note for the guest ! The gesture brought the human connection to a rather inhuman situation. I wrote something back and left a tip. 

I locked the door. I did not investigate further. The road, I reminded myself, was waiting in the morning.

It always was.

Jajabara in the US of A (Part IV: Mountain Mama, a Signpost and the Road Home)

I was out of Chillicothe before the town had properly woken up.

The ritual was the same as Soumya's driveway — unpack little the night before, pack in the morning with deliberate care, restore a sense of order before surrendering to the beautiful disorder of the road. There is something about this routine that I was beginning to trust. The packing was the last thing I controlled. After that, the road decided.

And today, the road was taking me to West Virginia.

I had heard West Virginia in songs before I had ever looked at it on a map. Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong — West Virginia, mountain mama. 

I had been fascinated by mountains my whole life and I could see them assembling on the horizon as I drove out of Ohio through Athens and then Parkersburg, the land gathering itself upward, the sky getting closer. It was one of the finest days of driving I have ever had. The road curved and the mountains curved with it, the trees pressing in on both sides, the occasional car ahead disappearing around a bend like a thought you almost had.

Soumya's voice was in my ear, as it had been since Normal — follow the speed limit signs and you will navigate well. I followed. I navigated. I was happy.

Then I crossed the West Virginia river, saw the signboard welcoming me to the Mountain State, and the phone signal quietly disappeared.

---

It did not happen all at once. First patchy, then unreliable, then gone. The GPS screen stared at me blankly. I was in proper woods now — thin at first, then thick, the big trees closing over the road like a roof. I was enjoying it. Eyes on the road, carefully reading each curve, the scenic beauty arriving from all directions — ahead, both sides, the rear view mirror framing what I was leaving behind like a painting I would never own.

Then the road ended.

A closure. Unmarked on any map I had, unannounced by any signal I could receive. I sat there for a moment and took stock — no GPS, no signal, no data, no way to call anyone, printed maps that showed roads but not this particular problem. Just instinct and road signs and whatever came next.

I turned left.

Not knowing where it would take me. Whether it would fold back onto the road I had been on or carry me somewhere else entirely. This is the thing about decisions — you never fully know. There are parallel lives waiting at every fork, diverging infinitely, never intersecting. Richard Bach explored this in One and in other books — the idea that every choice creates a version of you that goes the other way. Robert Frost, of course, said it first and said it better. Two roads in a wood. I took the one that turned left and told myself it would make all the difference.

The big trees blocked the sunlight. The road narrowed. And then I found it — a small water body, still and dark, with a wooden deck extending over it. I parked. I walked to the edge of the deck. Across the water, an abandoned house looked back at me, windows empty, roof patient. I rolled a cigarette and stood there.

Nothing crossed the road. Nothing hurried me. No sound that needed answering, no phone that could ring. I was completely with myself, in a way that a city, a conference, a full life of obligations rarely permits. This moment was entirely mine. I stayed until I was ready to leave, which is the only correct amount of time to stay anywhere.

---

Then I drove for another hour and the solitude began to shift from beautiful to unsettling.

Where were the other cars? No one was overtaking me, no one was coming the other way. The road kept offering itself ahead and I kept accepting it, but with decreasing confidence. Whom would I ask, if I needed to ask? There was no one to ask.

And then the signpost appeared.

It said, verbatim, in letters that left no room for interpretation — YOUR GPS IS WRONG. PLEASE GO BACK.

I was shell-shocked. Every Hollywood film I had ever watched in which a group of travellers ventures into the American wilderness and meets some unspeakable country legend came flooding back simultaneously. I sat with this information for a moment, in a car, on a road that had just been told to go back, in the middle of West Virginia, with no signal and no fuel to spare.

Then someone arrived.

A farmer. Friendly, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the sight of an Indian man staring in panic at a signpost in his woods. He knew exactly what my situation was — he had, I suspect, seen this before. He directed me to a small unpaved road that wound down from where we stood. I had no choice but to trust him completely, which is the most exposed kind of trust there is.

I drove down the unpaved road. It was not built for a Nissan Altima. I leaned in, kept it slow, kept it careful. It seemed to go on forever, the trees pressing closer, the surface making its objections felt through the steering wheel.

Then, in my rear-view mirror — headlights. Another car, behind me, on the same impossible road.

Every Hollywood instinct fired at once. I gripped the wheel. I kept driving. And then, in the way that ordinary reality eventually asserts itself over an overactive imagination, both of us emerged onto something resembling a proper motorway, the other driver peeling off without drama, without incident, without being any kind of country legend at all.

I checked my printed maps. I could not work out where I was — no signpost, no landmark I could match to anything on paper. I knew only that Aurora and Romney lay ahead, if I was on the right road. I was mixing up Aurora with Anora — the Oscar-winning film — in my head, which tells you something about the state of my concentration at this point.

Then the fuel warning light came on.

---

I drove twenty more miles on patience and an impatient heart before civilisation appeared — an island of it, surrounded by mountains and streams and trees and animals and the vast indifference of wild America. There was a gas station. A big, tall girl came out before I had fully stopped and did the filling herself, which after my proud solo performance outside Lagootee felt both like a slight and a relief.

Inside was a store that sold everything. Of course it did — there would be nothing else for fifty or seventy miles in any direction. But more than the store, there was a community. People having breakfast together, collecting their weekly groceries, talking to each other with the ease of people who have no choice but to know one another well. I joined them for a while. I explained my trip — the Indian driving Highway 50 alone, the GPS gone, the signpost, the farmer, the unpaved road. They listened with the generous attention of people who have time and are not pretending otherwise. And they confirmed, which was the most important thing, that I was on the right road. Romney was ahead.

---

Romney stole something from me. So did Winchester, Virginia, which came shortly after.

Romney is the oldest town in West Virginia, though it wears this quietly. Winchester was full of flowers — it was March, and March in Virginia means blooms everywhere, small streams running clear, cafés with their doors open to the new warmth. I should have stopped. I wanted to stop. But Twinkle Apa and Subrat Bhai were waiting in Virginia with their daughter and their dog, and the pull of family — of known warmth after days of beautiful uncertainty — was stronger than any café or flowering street.

Some places you promise to return to. Winchester is on that list.

I drove on. The mountains gave way, the road widened, the signs began to count down the miles to Virginia. The jajabara was not over — but the wandering part of it was drawing to its close, and something warmer was waiting at the other end.

I put my foot down. I had earned this arrival.

Jajabara in the US of A (Part II: Of a Sleeping Town, a Kind Waitress and an Accidental Exit)

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.

Jajabara in the US of A (Part I: Of Brownies, Borrowed Confidence and the Mother Road)

There is a particular kind of restlessness that hits you about a month before a long trip. Not anxiety. Not excitement exactly. Something in between — a low hum that gets louder the more you look at maps. I know this feeling well. It is the wanderlust arriving, right on schedule.

The occasion was CIES 2025, an academic conference in Chicago. A work trip, officially. But it was also close to a month long, loosely planned, and the US of A was at the other end of it. I had been here before — 2013, to be precise. And 2013 had left behind one solid regret.

I had chickened out.

Many would say that is quite non-typical of me. A senior partner at Accenture US had offered a fully sponsored, exciting business development trip along the famous west coast. California. The Pacific. Route 1 perhaps. And I said no. I don't fully remember why. But the regret, I remember very well.

So when Chicago came calling in 2025, I made a quiet decision. This time, I would make up for it. And some more.

---

A few things were decided early. The conference was in Chicago. I had friends and family to visit. I had to fly out of New York at the end. Everything in between — rest, I said, we'll figure out. A road trip or two across the heart of America. I romanticised about Route 66, explored the idea of the West Coast, and finally decided to head east from Chicago. The research only deepened the wanderlust. I downloaded maps from the Road Trip USA website. I applied for an international driving licence. I was going to drive in America.

My family had no idea.

My wife would have thrown a fit and threatened with everything she had to forbid me. 

---

Chicago received me at the historic Palmer House Hotel — 1641 rooms, one of the largest hotels in North America, and a history as layered as its lobby ceiling. It was here that Bertha Palmer invented the brownie. Yes, the brownie — that most beloved of baked goods — was born in this hotel, conjured up by the wife of Potter Palmer, who had gifted her this very hotel as an engagement present. Shah Jahan, you are not alone.

My friend Soumya Ranjan drove down from his home to downtown Chicago and we stayed together in the last day of the conference. And it was Soumya who, knowingly or unknowingly, would go on to play the most important role in this adventure — not as a companion on the road, but as the man who gave me the confidence to drive on it.

But first, the Art Institute of Chicago. We visited it together, that magnificent building that stands at the very spot where Swami Vivekananda addressed the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, on the sidelines of the World Fair. A moment of history quietly folded into an afternoon of art.

---

From Chicago, I headed south with Soumya to his home in Normal, IL, where his lovely family — two children and an amazingly warm wife — waited. She cooked Odia food for me. In Illinois. In America. Some things about Odia hospitality, I have decided, are simply immune to geography.

Over three days, Soumya let me drive. His Honda. On American roads. Left-hand drive, right-hand traffic — everything my hands and instincts had been trained against for decades. We made small trips — the supermarket, restaurants, a local brewery, the Rent-A-Car store. Each trip a little longer, a little more confident. Soumya guided me on the said and unsaid rules of American roads with the patience of a man who understood exactly what was at stake and the calm of someone who pretended he didn't.

By the time we walked into the Rent-A-Car store that evening, I was ready. We got a Nissan Altima. Available. Practical. Unassuming. Perfect.

---

The morning of departure, I gave myself one hour to pack. This is a ritual I trust — an hour of packing gives me the illusion, and sometimes the reality, of organisation. Before I left, I gifted Soumya a scarf of mine. Kissed his children goodbye. Stepped out into the fine Normal, IL morning.

Adventure and excitement were in my eyes. I know this because I could feel them there.

The Nissan Altima and I pulled out of Soumya's driveway and pointed ourselves south, toward the Mother Road. Route 66. And the first stop — Lincoln, IL. The only city named after Abraham Lincoln before he became president, christened by the man himself, legend has it, with the juice of a watermelon.

America, I was coming. Again. This time, I wasn't chickening out.

Are we in a state of emergency as a society?

S and I often respond with a pause to a certain sound & sight on the roads of Delhi or elsewhere. The sound of the siren and the flashing lights of an ambulance. S immediately says a silent prayer sending wishes towards the person concerned. My first reaction as a driver is usually of attention and looking at my mirror(s) to ascertain the exact position of the ambulance. I must admit the siren does achieve the purpose it was meant to have been their in the first place - get the attention of the other drivers on the road and get them to make way for the ambulance. 

I find now that I get too distracted, disturbed and almost irritated by the sound of the ambulance and the sight of the flashing lights around me. It is primarily because of the way I see other fellow drivers and traffic respond to the presence of the ambulance on the road - indifference or worse, opportunity. The noise persists for quite some time and one feels that one is in that state of alertness for prolonged period while trying to concentrate on driving. 

I have seen ambulances struggle to find a way to navigate their way along the traffic lanes which sadly no one follows in our cities. They struggle to speed past other vehicles to save the precious seconds and minutes called the "golden hour" and reach the hospital where the paramedics and doctors can try to save the life of the patient. It's really sad to see them stuck with you and one can't help but think of the contrast. While most people on the road are on they way to their everyday jobs, or some errand or even a leisurely visit to friends and family, it is truly a matter of life and death for the person in the ambulance and his/her family. 

What appalls me to see sometimes is the stubborn refusal to acknowledge this situation of the "other" person and try to do the basic minimum - make way ! Put your indicators and move to another lane. I have seen the ambulance drivers struggle to move across the lanes to find the slightest scope of moving ahead of other cars and swivel in a zig-zag manner. It should be the other way around. We should make way for the ambulance. It is truly a wonder that we don't force these ambulances to cause more accidents on road. 

If at all the ambulance finds a way to go past others or a traffic signal, one also witnesses the most opportunistic behaviour which some drivers - cars and bikers alike, tag right behind the ambulance to speed ahead of the traffic. I don't feel envious of them because these guys got to go to wherever they were planning to go and do whatever they wanted to do. I feel bad and almost sad at the state of affairs as a society. Where is the sense of any empathy or sympathy ? What about common sense? How can we be so blinded by our own sense of importance of our life, activities and priorities that we ignore this.