The Hindu Business Line : Stop... watch

The best thing about some places is their insignificance. Stop there and time stops with you. That merciless inner clock doesn’t know why you stopped or how long you will be there. A whiff of worry seizes you, both place and pace being unfamiliar. Then, like fumes from an unseen opiate, the slow times take possession of your mind. You surrender to the world you fell into. The door shut on distant Mumbai; there was nobody to go back to in Ranikhet, Almora was a coordi nate 30 km away and Sitlakhet, if the jeep turned up, was a potentially reachable destination.

What was immediate and around was Katpudia. I put my rucksack on the bench in front of a grocery shop, gazed back at the faces studying my presence and pretended to be at home. It was a T-junction; once in ten minutes a vehicle appeared on the Ranikhet-Almora road, the one towards Sitlakhet, where I was headed, remained empty. A dozen shops, three to four jeeps and a temple to the side of the junction.

Praveen, who had just come off work at the children’s camp in Sitlakhet, appeared at the grocery shop. He emerged from inside, even sold a few things and put money in the cash box, but did not own the place. “I stay down there,” he said, pointing to the shop’s rear and a gully beyond. A dark, heavy doorway framed the sunny descent. I couldn’t see a house, so like he said it must be “down there.”

In the hills, distance and location are always approximate. The shop-owner came; he had a squint, one weak arm and a limp. He loved his Philips radio. Praveen vacated the shop and hung around near me. “You must be headed for the camp. That’s the jeep but it won’t move for another couple of hours,” he said pointing to the taxi, battered and rooted inactive to the ground as Katpudia was to its laidback ways. His slit eyes kept darting from me to the lonely junction and back; a young James Coburn, tall for his age with a face that held much yet gave off little. For a second, I thought of Magnificent Seven.

Katpudia had mobile phone connectivity. I messaged a friend in Mumbai, “am in Katpudia.” Wonder what she would make of it — people travel to Alaska and Mongolia; I was in Katpudia. Katpudia what? Katpudia where? In today’s competitive environment, even time spent away from ‘work’ has to stand out; grab attention, trigger conversation. “On this expedition to Everest” or “at this café in Casablanca” sounds more impressive than “I was sitting on this bench in Katpudia.”

Anyway who cares? Deep down, I was beginning to enjoy my time away from the world. And this lonely junction, very un-exotic and so-plain-Jane as a place, the sort you would never find in travel brochures, embodied that personal revolt. Slam the door shut on the times and choose instead your own time zone. The shop next to me had done precisely that! It was old, worn-out and had wooden shelves stacked with notebooks. Hill shops usually stock a variety of goods, the market being too small for specialisation. This one stood out defiantly, stocking mainly one thing and of all things — notebooks. One shelf also held a clutch of Hindi publications — there was the Uttaranchal Jnaan Rashmi with, strangely, Subash Chandra Bose on the cover; another shelf held bottles of ‘Master’ writing ink.

There was nobody in the shop. I was the only one around, jotting down things in a small diary. So, who does the shop stock all those notebooks and inks for? Two school kids appeared at the junction clad in navy-blue trouser and blue shirt. Maybe if you comb the sprawling hillside you would find their friends and thereby the shop’s mysterious clientele.

In the quietness of Katpudia, David Niven’s cough rang out loud and clear; down to the last droplet of crackling sputum. He was locally called “Sethji,” resembled the Hollywood actor every bit, appeared at the junction to keep a tin bucket under the public tap and promptly forgot about it. The conversation at his smoky café was more absorbing. The grocery-shop owner kept calling “Sethji, Sethji,” as the bucket overflowed but with Sethji busy entertaining his customers, limped across himself to close the tap.

A pressure cooker hissed angrily at one of the dhaabas; the cook calmed it and continued talking to Praveen standing on the road. The youngster was restless; he wanted to revive his attempts to work in Delhi. He had been there once, found it too hot. That itchy, restlessness likely explained his arbitrary excursions around the junction, into one shop and the next.

Tie a ball of thread to his legs and you could weave a cobweb from one doorstep to the other. Suddenly Praveen got into a parked jeep, fiddled with the controls, ran his hands along the steering and momentarily lapsed into a childhood that he had just left. A middle-aged woman and her son, both of them bound for Sitlakhet, watched Praveen’s antics patiently, hopefully. Was he the chosen one to resurrect that dead vehicle? From afar, Praveen points to the jeep, lightning streaks from his index finger and the engine roars to life. All of us Sitlakhet-bound bow in respect. Nice dream.

A rustle nearby returned me to Katpudia. The owner of the notebook shop! He was old, as weathered as the wooden shelves; yet strangely for a man in the service of writing, betraying impatience. He lit a beedie, took stock of his sleeping business and strode out to join the laughter at Sethji’s café. Owner gone, the shop returned to its old self. So much like life — you, at times others, perceive a vacuum. And when you finally fill it, the picture of completion is all too fleeting. Which one are you — that moment of completion or the eternal vacuum?

More than two hours after I came, a flicker of life graced the jeep assigned for Sitlakhet. Eventually it filled up; the driver put his finishing touch — squeezing the 13th person in, and we were off. Not exactly, for we made the first of our several stops to discuss the world, just 50 metres away.

Katpudia’s gravitational pull was strong. It would take a very determined driver or a bunch of grossly irritated commuters to make this shuttle break free; we were anything but that. We loaded chicken mesh from a hardware store, stopped frequently for gossip, unloaded kerosene drums, craned our heads to look at “Suresh’s new wife,” greeted a sarpanch and reached Sitlakhet an hour before darkness.

As I bought some bal-mithai at the local sweetshop, the owner realising I was from Mumbai said, “Whenever the weather is good here, we say Mumbai is happening.” Content, he gave me a broad smile. The next three days we had bad weather. I was happy for it.