Trip to Mahavirji - 2: Kick Off

Nov 2, the night before we were to begin the journey, I fell sick with high fever. When it appeared that we would have to cancel the trip, papa’s favorite Dr. Rakesh Mittal came to the rescue. After examining me with his worn out stethoscope in his tagore villa clinic, he prescribed an assortment of pills and capsules, as is customary in India. I gulped them down with a nice glass of water, sweated heavily all night and was up in good shape at 4ish in the morning. In half an hour, we were speeding away in a three-wheeler leaving Govind Garh in the morning slumber. Jiji and Saju were already at the nostalgic Doon Railway station, impatient to get going.

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Dehradun_India_2006-4.JPG

Nov 3, for the first leg of our journey, we took the 5:10AM Janshatabdi express from Doon to Meerut where my other sister waited for us. This was kids’ first train journey and they enjoyed every bit of it. By 9:30, we hit the Meerut station; Sandeep jijaji was waiting for us there. While Manisha drove in the car with him, I decided to give my American kids a taste of tonga ride. Poor animal left his lunch in the middle and battled through the heavy office traffic and pollution to satisy our whim and bring us home.


In the afternoon, Sandeep jijaji and I went out to the local internet café to finish booking the rest of the tickets and take printouts of the electronic copies of the same. We took advantage of the Indian railway’s site to make all our bookings online. Earlier that week we struggled hard to find an agent to do the same for us but couldn’t do that because the site was unoperational during the day. We used this fact to our advantage and I got on the phone with Sandeep jijaji at midnight to get this done during off peak hours while most seats remained unbooked. At this point I would also like to sing the praise for the Indian railway's call center. Being used to the grumpy CSR's of the 80s, it was a treat to talk to these young fellows who had an amazing patience to attend to me for as long as I wanted and spoke standard call center lines of the west perfectly copied in Hindi - 'namaste, mera naam pradeep hai. main aapki kis tarah se sahaita kar sakta hoon. Also, they were quiet knowledeable and were able to suggest several trains to me within minutes for our complex route.

After securing the tickets, we went to talk to the local taxi waala to arrange for a big size taxi that could take all of us to Nizammuddin railway station, the second stop of our journey. After mulling over all possible options, with his idle drivers sitting around and dropping suggestions, in a small dingy room, the manager gave one final sweep to his moutache and decided that Tata Sumo would be the best bet of the day. So, Tata Sumo it was.

Rajesh jijaji joined us in the evening after closing his shop at Doon. He and I decided to hit a local bar across from baby’s house. There is something about the ambience of an Indian bar that’s just hard to find in the US. We chilled in the hazy room under dim lights watching sultry Zeenat Aman in ‘Yadon ki baarat’ on the big projection screen.

TBC...

Trip to Mahavirji - 1

My next India trip is shaping up, already, and I think it's time to wrap up my last one in 2008 that remains incomplete without the mention of our maiden journey into the center of the great country. The prime destination was Mahavirji, the holy city for Jains. A place of solace and peace, it's situated in Rajasthan, not so far from Sawai Madhopur, on the banks of the river Gambhir. We also travelled to Jhansi where my mamaji lives and then to some other nearby places of interest. It was quite an experience and a trip to remember. In the next few entries, I will try to capture this experience.