The Roads Not Taken

Almost a year ago, I had accompanied some of my bosom buddies on a hiking trip to the magnificent Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Malaysia. Standing at the summit of Kinabalu for the second time was a joy that surpassed numerous lofty heights reached before. Soon after that, achilles tendonitis had crept in like an uninvited guest at a wedding and plagued my left foot for months. The resolve to overcome that has still not succumbed a year down the line.
I have travelled much since then but have always had an eye on my left leg, making sure it's not put under duress unnecessarily.
That resolve popped up in my mind when Poonam and I travelled with a couple of friends to the picturesque ski resort of Killington, Vermont, last weekend. Many call such trips a "honeymoon" but that word seems shady to me, since this is just the beginning of our travels and will feature again and again. Thus we drove to Vermont, the rarest of the New England states.

Moments slow down when the surroundings overwhelm. As we bend out backwards to reach inside the confines of a far-reaching desire, perspective does a tribal dance and changes shape and colour. I believe that the nomadic and pastoral persona that many of us keep suppressed has slowly convinced itself to be urban. A getaway to the majesty of mountains, for whatever reason, pulls one back from the cliff-edge of self-absorption, where we stand like a fool, wondering whether to jump or to lie down. The snow-capped peaks, the conifer trees, the slow and smooth glide on dewy roads and the occasional gurgle of a nascent river that keeps us company as we drive higher and higher. These provide the canvas for an idyllic journey, one that crystallises my mind and sings lullabies to preoccupations. I learn and re-learn that valuable lesson every time I come under the shadow of towering peaks. The state of Vermont offered countless such moments, and I barely stopped myself from flowing away like an eager young river myself. The company of loved ones makes such a passage even more refreshing. With each passing turn in the road, the slivers of sunlight played hide and seek with us, and bounced off the fragile ice on the accompanying river like a runner at the end of a shuttle leg. The laughter, the music and the jokes joined hands to create a cocoon of calm as we slipped off easily from the slopes of reality into a Narnian snowscape where all that mattered was each other.

Occasional warnings on the road about reckless mooses crossing the road almost made it feel as if the road was an overspill of the mountain woods. That kept us on tenterhooks as we expected a grim-looking moose to jaywalk sometime soon. The clickety-clack of a camera kept breaking my frequent reveries and those drift-offs into the hills yonder. But the biggest reverie that was broken was our illusion that skiing was a matter of whooshing down white powdery slopes with cinematic splendour. The first couple of minutes on gentle and innocuous snow smoked away all such illusions as we opened our eyes to the challenges of basic skiing where gravity lives in a straitjacket and friction is fast asleep. Bumps and collisions, crashes and awkward attempts to salvage grace while getting up decked our next few hours. Fall, amble up, slide, twist, turn, soar for half a second, giggle at the others falling and then fall once again. This was a proper sport which we had misunderstood. The boots played some cruel jokes on us by making us feel like we were on a planet that had a gravity ten times that of Earth.
I wish I had picked up skiing when I was a kid. Dad, why didn't you let us ski in Cuttack? Oh that's right - we were hundreds of miles away from snow, forget slopes!

This was no Venice, but a gondola ride up to the pinnacle of Mount Killington granted us a spectacular view of six states and Canada. I felt the old surge through me - of flapping my imaginary wings and taking off into the sunny blue. So much purity, so much freshness that possesses a majestic mountain, makes me raring and eager to migrate and set up tent under a rock and grow a beard. We found secret paths between the woods that vanished into the snow, and a paradise of a restaurant at the top of the mountain that provided luscious hot chocolate.

The cherry on the cake actually lay in the quaint little European-looking towns of Woodstock, Quechee and Shelburne Falls. Enthralling covered wooden bridges, half-frozen rivers, curving little by-roads that snaked off into the wilderness, and fascinating houses that had thick layers of snow peched on their rooftops. The average speed of people in such towns is probably seven miles per hour. In Woodstock (no, not the legendary one), my eye caught what I had it trained it to catch. No, not a sparrow. Not even a fish. But the sight of a little shop hidden between houses, with a rusted sign hanging outside saying "Rare, old books". The little shop was a world in itself, and included books from half-forgotten authors as well as books from popular ones. Some were yellowing, others were squeezed in tight racks and most had a page or two falling off. But when I saw Tagore's Gitanjali and I heard the shopkeeper say what a wonderful book this was, I realised that I was in the company of a genuine bibliomaniac. Such was the pull of words that he seemed content in his magical shop.

What do book-sellers gain in their profession? They get to know who's who by looking at their choices. They get to explore the vast worlds which lie in their books whenever they feel like. Theirs is a route that is often not taken, akin to the sentiments of Robert Frost the poet, whose poems coincidentally focussed on rural like in New England, of which Vermont is a part.

I flashed upon that moment when I had toyed with the desire to be a book-keeper for a few moments when I was ten years old. But that was in the list of fifty other potential careers which I had fantasised about before entering teenage.

As the icy winds of Vermont met the cheerful sunlight on our drive, the lush expanse of distant hills made me forget that it was the popular weekend of the biggest social scam ever, Valentine's Day. As mass dementia spreads like hay fever to make pomp on one day in the year where love apparently reigns supreme, I question myself and I put the question to Poonam - what makes one day so special, when there are 364 others?

Why should we always follow that road of celebrating one day in the calendar as a day of love? Isn't that supposed to be an omni-pervading feeling?

I see the question stoking fires in her eyes. I also see Robert Frost turning in his grave with another grin.

Of all the roads not taken, that is not one I would return to.