The met God thursday

Today the second day of the final leg starts some 30 km outside jaipur. Till date we have been coming back to base camp in the afternoon around 1 pm and then leaving again from the same point as we ended at after 4-00 pm.This is the only day that is not possible since when we end the first session we are likely to be somewhere between ajmer and jaipur so that coming back to either base camp will involve a more than one hour drive one way, making rest impossible .We decide to stay on the road all day and take rest at any convenient point at midday.

We begin the day and start walking on the Jaipur Ajmer highway. This stretch of highway is in many ways better than the Jaipur Delhi stretch. It is less crowded, broader in most parts, has absolutely clean rest rooms at every few kilometers and also has emergency phones every 5 kilometers or so from where one can call the control room incase of any mishap. It also has shady neem trees planted along the side which on more than one occasion I saw a tanker watering. When we decide to walk again fifty years from now to celebrate 50 years of this walk there will be so much shade on the highway we will not feel the heat at all- or at least the robots who push our air conditioned wheel chairs will not.

It however suffers from a great disadvantage for walkers. There are many stretches where for maybe 10-15 kilometers there are no villages or motels or even ordinary dhabas. We have the constraint of that we can carry only a maximum of 3 liters of water in the backpacks we have, otherwise they get too heavy and these get exhausted in an hour in the afternoon. We are therefore always looking for places where we can slake our thirst as it is impossible to walk while thirsty. In the afternoon we are looking for such a place having rejected the last one since it did not have power and hence no cold water. We are also looking for a place to stay out of the heat till the afternoon when we spy a building with glass frontage which looks like a hotel. We eagerly walk towards it but to our disappointment we realize it’s a residence. We walk past it and see a dhaba in the distance on the other side of the road. It is dirty but at least has cold bottled water and some soft drinks and we walk on again a little refreshed but unsure of where to rest for the afternoons. We start the namaste ritual more to pep ourselves up then anything else and see a car drive up to us, pull up and wait- and we meet the Captain.

As is the routine I say namaste to the occupant of the car. He is a gentleman in his sixties with two school going granddaughters in the back seat. He gets out of the car “Capt. Om veeer singh ,16th grenadiers retired” he introduces himself. “Are you on a religious walk “ he asks us (kya aap teerth yatree hain) on being told we are he folds his hands and beseeches us to come home with him.” I own the glass fronted house back there”, he says, “ and just as I was waiting to pick up my grandkids from school I saw you walking and told my wife to prepare some meals for you and also open the guest room, so that you could rest awhile at my home. You however crossed the road and disappeared on the other side so I rushed to get my car keys ,put my granddaughters in it and drove ahead to the cut in the verge and drove back to cut you off” he said.

It brings a lump to my throat. I fold my hands to him and thank him profusely but having already gotten our second wind breaking at this stage would not have been appropriate so we tell him that being on a yatra we could not turn back having gone ahead and hence regretfully would have to decline his offer. Accepting the explanation he drives away and we walk away with lumps in our throats for the simplicity of the man. We have hardly walked a kilometer when we see the same car pull up ahead of us and stop under a tree. He gestures us into the shade and says” You walked past my house and it is my duty to ask after your welfare and I could not have slept wel had I not been of service to you so I asked my wife to make some buttermilk for you .Please oblige me by having it” very very reverentially he pours out the chilled butter milk for us.

As we take it and walk away I want to shout out to him and to all of his ilk and tell them” Look dudes I am just waking- there is nothing so good about me . I am not deserving of the respect you give me just because you think you are saluting your God when you serve me- I have lied, I have cheated, I have let people down – I am cheating you when you I let you look at me so respectfully- don’t do this to me guys - I am not even as good as you are- at least you know there is a God within you and know there is one within me. I do not even know THAT- I am walking only to remind myself that there IS a God within me and that he still shows himself to me at times- and YOU saw him in me – don’t be such an idiot Captain, you hurt me bad by showing me so much respect , you shouldn’t have done this to me “ I yell mentally at him and burst out crying. As we walk through the town of Dudu for the next fifteen minutes people stare at the sight of a grown man striding by crying non stop as a younger girl holds his hand and keeps saying “ It is all right papa calm down- It is all right”

A café coffee day miraculously materializes as we are almost at breaking point and we whoop and rush to sip our granitas and munch on sandwiches to ease out the pain at having met God. The rest of the walk is uneventful and we are picked up and taken to reasonably decent hotel to collapse for the night. We are now just 50 kilometers from out final target.