The Walk That Changed Me

Have you ever wondered about the limits of your body’s endurance? How far can you push your body before it simply crashes into exhaustion and inertia? What does it take to break away from those limits and go beyond them? Have you ever experienced the sheer joy of enjoying your being beyond the limits that you had set for yourself? Well, I finally felt that rare joy after I finished an almost 12 km walk from Serenity Beach in Pondicherry to Bharat Nivas in Auroville with a heavy backpack weighing around 7 kg. To add to my struggles, that day the weather was exceptionally hot and humid even for a coastal town like Pondicherry, and I had already walked around 5 km (according to my Google Fitness app) on the sandy beaches of Pondy and through the leafy ‘French Quarter’ part of the town. While I was loitering on Serenity Beach, checking out the route to Auroville on Google Maps, and trying to convince myself to book an outrageously expensive auto, all of a sudden I decided to simply walk all the way to Auroville. At first, I felt unequal to the task, and just to make the whole thing more complicated, I had forgotten my umbrella at a distant place on the beach— retaining which meant that I had to walk another 1 km with the same cumbersome backpack weighing down my lean frame. Nonetheless, I fetched it and finally started off—with Google Maps my only guide on this journey through the unknown. Before this, I had come to Pondy only once last year. That time my visit was restricted to a fixed route from the bus stop to Auroville by an auto and vice versa. And here I was, ready to venture into the Pondicherry countryside dotted with small villages and towns where no human being from my part of the world (West Bengal) had probably set foot in recent times. For the purpose of communication, I only had a few Tamil words and phrases at my command which I forced myself to memorise before coming to Pondy. The rest of the communication, I hoped, could be done by speaking very basic English with emphasis on the key words. Most people here are monolingual.

Anyway I started off the beaten track. And Google Maps, true to its notoriety for quirkiness, made me pass through many small villages and towns in the name of “shortcuts”, where the narrow trail often lost itself in bushes and vegetation, and it happened so often that I had to make my way through someone’s garden or lawn, drawing a few curious glances at my visage. Village elders, sitting lazily on the tiny lawns of their houses after lunch, would follow me with their gaze, wondering silently who the hell I might be. These places, reasonably far from the hustle and bustle of Pondicherry, are not familiar with the presence of uninvited visitors like me, and as is also the case for villages in Bengal, the residents of these humble, restive settlements would react to the presence of new visitors by casting curious, inquisitive glances at them, but they barely decide to speak and approach them directly. It was heartening to see grannies in their 60s and 70s sitting outside their houses after lunch, and whiling away the time with chitchats and occasional laughters. These scenes—old ladies gossiping on their lawns, men playing cards near the premise of the village primary school, children playing with tyres, ducks going about their business with a royal demeanour, nervy hens and chickens pecking for food, the wide branches and leaves of the grandpa trees swaying ever so slightly in the breeze, middle-aged, married women collecting water in pots from the public tube well and filling the air with its rhythmic mechanical sound—are not unfamiliar to me. I have come across the same old scenes innumerable times during my travels across the Bengal countryside. It was hard to believe that now I was almost 2500 km away from the place where I was born. The language was totally different. The colour of the soil was different. The vegetation was also unique. (You saw tall coconut trees everywhere you went.) But the lifestyle of people in the village was strikingly similar. It was as if I was caught in a time warp that brought me back to the Bengal village where I spent a considerable amount of time in my childhood. Despite the language barrier, I felt close to them and the silent goings-on of their life. Whenever I had to speak to any of them, they showed a genuine interest to understand me and guided me to the best of their knowledge. My answer to xenophobia is travelling. Travelling makes us keenly aware of the similarities that we collectively share as human beings; at the same time, it helps us appreciate the differences and respect the other. In Auroville, I met a person who belongs to an indigenous community in Chiapas, Mexico. When people in their community meet, they often greet each other with a phrase (I have forgotten it) that means, “You are another me.” That walk forced me to come out of the cocoon of the identity of the “I” and see and appreciate a world that is so culturally and linguistically different from the one that I have been accustomed to. It made me embrace the unknown and the immediate discomfort one feels when one comes to a place where one’s existing knowledge and learnings are of no use.

The warm, humid air and the bright sunshine addled my brain with a mild, pleasing intoxication. The sun on my face and cheeks rewarded me with a quiet elation—a joy of being that is hard to explain.

Semi-domesticated dogs, seeing a stranger, would often bark loudly at me—the stuff they do best. One time a dog approached me too close, nosing me as I was speed-walking through that particular village. A little girl, not more than 7 years old, gave the dog a harsh rebuke and shooed it away. Surely, she knew the dog and the dog her. A similar reaction from me might have provoked the dog to bite me.

I made a silent gesture of gratitude at the girl and continued. I have always benefitted from the kindness of strangers whenever I have travelled solo in unknown places. By the grace of God, such small instances of kindness from strangers have almost always made my journey smoother and more enjoyable. Village folks didn’t have to read books of sociology and cultural studies to know that I was not from these parts, and probably not even a Tamilian. One quiet glance at me would suffice to reveal that I was no more than an innocuous nutcase who had either lost his way or somehow ended up here due to some mishap.

How many times did I feel the urge to book an auto or hitchhike? I lost count. As I was halfway through my journey, a slithery, insidious pain started to travel from the veins of my shoulders to my feet which were now adorned with blisters. My waist was aching like hell, and I felt I couldn’t make it unless I booked an auto or caught some other ride.

Once I was on the main road to Auroville, too often I felt the overwhelming temptation to stop a bike and beg for a ride. The weight of the backpack seemed to have miraculously increased three-fold. It now felt more like a huge sack of grain than a bag that contained clothes, some toiletries, one or two notebooks, my tablet, an umbrella and a water bottle. I couldn’t remember a time when my body was forced to go through a more challenging and exhausting ordeal than this one. I was sweating profusely and it did not help that I had no energy drinks or Glucon-D to take recourse to. Sometimes a sudden patch of meadow surrounded by gigantic trees would welcome me to lie down and take some rest. But I knew that once I put down my backpack and gave my body the rest it now so desperately craved, I would not be able to raise it and continue on my path again for at least 20-30 minutes. And that meant I wouldn’t make it to Auroville before sunset. Weariness can be a drug in its own right—especially if its origin lies in an effort that you deemed worthy of undertaking. The physical exhaustion that was now beginning to set in had, for some unknown reason, an intoxicating effect on my brain. I craved more of it—I wanted to experience its invisible tentacles slowly enveloping my body to the point where all I amounted to was simply a body with no interference from a thinking mind. It was as if the body just repeated the act of taking one step after another—again and again and again and again—to reach an elusive destination that it has been ordained to reach by some divine decree, too powerful to ignore. And in the process, the body was reduced to itself, forgetting the ideas of pain and pleasure mediated by the mind.

I had walked almost 10 km non-stop when I reached the last village before Auroville. The time was 5:21 PM. It would still take me almost 30 minutes to reach the place in Auroville where I was supposed to stay. I increased the pace of my walk. The sun behaved as if it conspired to set early today. The village road was full of ditches and mud. All of a sudden, it came to an abrupt halt near a bush with a lonely one-storey building at one corner. All around me were bushes and overgrown weeds which ended in a desolate field some 100 metres away.

Darkness was starting to establish its dominion over the skies, and there was not much daylight left. I felt like crying. The pure bodily existence that I felt I was being reduced to seemed to give way to a mind saturated with apprehension. It seemed that I wouldn’t reach Auroville today. I found myself at the end of a tiny village. It appeared to be a deserted place with no human beings and vehicles in sight—far away from any place that I have ever been familiar with. And there was no food in my bag. Just 100 ml of water was left in my bottle.

I had very few choices left. I again consulted Google Maps, and it showed a difficult path across a patch of land that looked like a ten-year-old battlefield—full of ditches as if made from artillery shells and covered with small vegetation and grass that looked more dead than alive. It had about it a foreboding eeriness that unsettled the nerves of even a self-proclaimed warrior like me at this hour of the day. Nevertheless, it was my only chance to make it to Auroville before dark. I took the route shown by Google Maps, and by some miracle, I reached the main road after walking some 200 metres. I was genuinely astonished to see that I was so close to the main road. I could have followed it all along, but I decided to take the “shortcuts” to reach Auroville early. Walking on the main road from start to finish meant walking a few kilometres extra. Anyway, once I found the main road again, I reached my destination soon. The sun had already set, and it had left streaks of red colour across the sky. The Auroville forest was coming alive with the sounds of thousands of insects and the chirping of birds returning to their nests after a long day.

I phoned my hosts. One of them came to me by a scooty and took me to the place where I was supposed to spend four days. I was only too happy to find the bed, and spread my body over it almost immediately. Later on, a cold shower alleviated the aches in my body. I was surprised to see that my body was still functioning as usual, save the stiffness in the muscles.

It had somehow digested the Herculean (well, at least for me) efforts that I made to keep walking no matter what. At times, my legs felt like a rope that was about to snap. The muscles in them had no sensation left when I was about to reach Auroville. I pinched my legs only to feel nothing. But the good, old pair of legs had done their job, and the body that had so often whined and rebelled at doing a task that was not to its liking, somehow managed to complete the 12 km walk while carrying a 7 kg backpack and bearing the heat and humidity of a hot monsoon day. That walk made me realise that my body’s endurance level is far higher than I imagined. The memory of that solitary journey across the Pondicherry countryside encourages me to always push myself a little harder each time my body and mind start with their whining and objections at the task at hand. The progress of human civilization has often depended on human beings who pushed themselves hard to defeat no one but their own former self, who endured pain, suffering and sheer discomfort to transcend their own limits, and who stopped at nothing but carried on and on until they reached their destinations. Sometimes even the destination does not matter; what matters is how well we live through the journey that we have willingly undertaken, and how sincere and disciplined we are throughout. The destination is often nothing else but a superior version of ourselves—a version that is dedicated to finding and serving the purpose it was born to fulfill.

When I saw the words, “Bharat Nivas” on a wall, I was happy and relieved beyond words. Those words meant that I had completed this almost three-hour-long journey which I was on the point of forsaking so many times. The journey became a metaphor of life for me. The two main fuels of our life are hope and will power. But hope and will power might lead us nowhere if we don’t have faith—faith in oneself and faith in something beyond the self. Maybe it’s love; maybe it’s God; maybe it’s the universe. You choose. Something that is guiding us to reach the destination we were always meant to reach—one at a time. Something that is far bigger than the ego and the personal likes and dislikes we so vehemently cherish. Something that helps us live beyond ourselves and taste the nectar of transcendence. That “something” is always within us, willing to help and guide us if we are receptive enough to listen to it. Are we daring enough to discover its voice and forge ahead? Or are we willing to give in to the comfort and ease that come from repeating the same old habits and the same old lifestyle? The choice is ours. The choices we make define who we become. What is needed is AUDACITY—audacity to dare the pain, suffering, insults and humiliation in order to make the choices which our souls always knew to be the right ones. Dear readers, if you are still reading this, I take this opportunity to wish you the best in life. Goodbye until we meet again on this shared journey of writing and reading and making sense of the world.