In this day and age, when carbon emissions have been proven to cause climate change and fossil fuels are considered environmental toxins, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to wax nostalgic about road trips. Yet, when I was a boy in the 1960s and early ’70s, there was still a certain innocence and, yes, even some romance to piling into an automobile and heading for the horizon. India’s highways were not as crowded then, as they are today, and most vehicles couldn’t accelerate above fifty miles an hour. (Kilometres still lay in the future.) Major roads between cities were no wider than two lanes with large shade trees providing an overarching canopy of green foliage, sometimes so dense it felt as if we were passing through a tunnel of leaves. Road trips were a family tradition for us. In the winter of 1933, long before I was born, my grandparents and their four sons toured north India in a Model A Ford, with luggage strapped on the back and tied to the running boards. The following summer, at the age of five, my father travelled to America for the first time with his parents and brothers. After taking a steamer from Karachi to Basra, they cruised up the Euphrates by boat and then hired a Nash convertible to drive from Baghdad to Jerusalem. There were no roads along this route and they joined a caravan of motor vehicles that drove across the open desert. After circling around the eastern Mediterranean and finally sailing from Genoa to Boston, my grandfather immediately purchased a second-hand Willy’s Overland and drove the family all the way across the United States to San Francisco. Those journeys should have cured my father of any wanderlust but, in fact, they only made him want to keep on driving. My mother didn’t have much choice, though she seemed to enjoy road trips herself. Our first family car was a Landmaster in which we travelled regularly from our home in Etah, on the plains of Uttar Pradesh, where my father was posted, to the hill station of Mussoorie, where my brothers and I went to school. It was a 12-hour drive by way of Delhi, where we often stayed overnight before proceeding via Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Roorkee and Dehradun. If any route on the map is imprinted in my genes, it is the drive from Delhi to Mussoorie, though many of the landmarks I remember have disappeared and the highway is now six or eight lanes of high-speed traffic. One of our favourite stops along the way, where we often had a picnic lunch, was the canal bank next to the bridge at Khatauli. When I was nine or 10, a small restaurant called Cheetal sprang up on this site and quickly became a popular roadside halt. After the Landmaster was sold, my father’s obsession with internal combustion led him to purchase a 1954 army disposal Willy’s Jeep that he bought from a kabbadiwalla in Motia Khan, Delhi’s second-hand market. We used to tease my father that his optimistic philosophy of life was reflected in this jeep — “Nothing is hopeless. Everything can be fixed!” He was a good mechanic, and the jeep was constantly in need of repair. The self-starter seldom worked. My brothers and I were enlisted to turn the crank, which had a nasty habit of kicking back like an ill-tempered mule. The fuel gauge didn’t work either, but again the crank came in handy. We would dip it into the petrol tank to check the level. Our family took many road trips in this jeep, to places like Kashmir, Kulu and Corbett National Park. Often, we travelled in summer, during our school holidays. Of course, the jeep had no air-conditioning, but then neither did it have any windows or doors. The canvas roof rolled up at the sides, so that while we were moving the breeze kept us relatively comfortable. At some point, my father put a makeshift aluminum cover on top in a futile attempt to protect us from rain during the monsoon. Five of us, along with our two cocker spaniels, fit snugly in the jeep while all of our luggage was packed in the trailer. Driving from Mussoorie to Kashmir took us four days, stopping overnight in Ludhiana, Pathankot and Batote before finally reaching Pahalgam, where we camped on the meadows for two weeks. The journey was leisurely and often interrupted by railway crossings where we had to stop to wait for a train to pass by. We didn’t really mind these delays because there were vendors selling cold drinks and snacks. There were also regular stops because of flat tyres or a broken fanbelt. A section of our trip followed the Grand Trunk Road, which evoked a sense of history, retracing the past. Thirty-five years earlier, my grandparents had driven this route in their Ford. And then, in 1967, when we visited America, my father insisted on driving from New York to California and back again. Ultimately, my brothers and I learned how to drive the jeep ourselves, more by trial and error than through any formal lessons. Sadly, I didn’t inherit my father’s mechanical skills or his patience with vehicles that refused to start. Over the years, I have taken several road trips myself, more often on a motorcycle rather than in a car. Recently, though, I’ve lost any desire to drive long distances. Perhaps it’s because most highways have become characterless ribbons of concrete or maybe there isn’t the same sense of adventure, not knowing how many hours the drive will take or what obstacles and detours lie ahead. These days, you just punch your route into your phone, and it tells you where to go and how long it will take. The unpredictability and freedom of those journeys are gone. Stephen Alter’s forthcoming book, The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage, will be published in February
