Highways have no intimacy, no quirks.
Take the M6 between London and Glasgow through breathtakingly beautiful countryside: green, clopping meadows; gentle elms and copses of trees that crest the soft hills like viridian fans; cattle grazing in contentment and smoke curling lazily towards a blue sky from chimneys rising from gabled roofs. All are seen from a distance, beyond the sanitised safety of cement embankments and medians that prevent you from losing your way.
Driving from Paris to Rheims, the A4 enters rural France: beyond the berms and the barriers, groves, fields and vineyards flash past. To pull over and walk up a hillock, lie on the soft grass to smoke and look at the blue sky and smell the vine leaves in the wind is out of the question. It’s the highway’s job to take you straight to Épernay or Rheims, depending on which champagne you would like to drink.
Take the US 50 — called the Loneliest Highway in America — towards Nevada and you pass through some of the most glorious, wildest desert landscapes in America. From Vegas, take the Interstate 15 north to Utah, pass the Zion National Park (of course you are welcome to linger there to bathe in waterfalls and take pictures of wildlife) and continue towards Bryce Canyon where the world’s most spectacular mountains await you. The car enters one tunnel, leaving behind towering colours to emerge into a dramatically different mountainscape pigmented with dazzlingly different hues and patterns. You want to get out and gather the dusty colours in your hands, but you cant park there.
Once, old journeys passed along paths and roads. Until the 1970s, many roads weren’t even paved. I remember a curving road that ran like a vermilion ribbon through endless, emerald paddy — tips burnished copper by the sunset — until it lost itself in a landscape of undulating copper and gold. Sometimes a bullock cart would sway along, charting its lonely path through the deepening dusk, a lantern hitched below the sitting boards and between the wheels like a badly hidden jewel. The road was a conversation between the traveller and the world around him. He could tarry a while by a temple tarn, sit on the stone steps and watch the wild lotuses fattening on the dark water. He could park by the side of a patriarchal banyan tree to seek the benediction of the snake gods, their black stone gleaming with anointments. Or he could simply sit on a milestone and watch the darkness gliding over the land as if the faeries who lived in the Nilgiri forests were washing their hair in the river of night. There are also the paths that seemingly take you nowhere, meandering under canopies of bamboo groves, sometimes rough with gravel under your feet, or a rock warning you of a sudden dip in the road.
Driving along NH1 towards the Himalayan foothills, you pass the Haryana countryside. Small country roads dip and curl away like the unkempt locks of wandering sadhus, unpaved and cinnabar coloured. There are hamlets afar, with crudely whitewashed huts, buffaloes chewing cud and urchins playing country cricket. A gigantic tree ruminates like a familiar guardian. Many times, I have wondered how it would feel to go off the highway to simply see where those little paths led. Maybe some banal little town or another poor village. But that choice itself is a little adventure, which is the purpose behind all journeys. It is what makes a road different from a highway.
ravi@newindianexpress.com