"TRIP"PIN' AWAY!!

Restless for the last twenty minutes. The people in the train are wondering what's wrong with me. It's like i'm being hyper during a stroke. Nice way to start a trip. Eight minutes. Two stations. A sprint out the gates to the bus. Hopefully it'll still be there. The train stops and I shoot out, knocking people aside, out the gates, past the security check...on independence day weekend..good thing I wasn't shot at. For some reason my head starts playing "I would do anything for love". I love the song, but my mind's bloody sarcastic.
I can't find the bus. Seems to have drowned among the thousand odd people at the bus station. I'm sweating like hell, out of breath. Spotting a guy around my age I manage to wheeze out the words "Hamirpur", and the guy points me to a bus that's just leaving. Another short sprint...and i'm in. Soaked to the bone in sweat, I just wonder how much I'll stink after travelling for 12 hours, sitting in my own drying sweat. Only i'd show up for a date (technically) like that. Settled nicely between two "already snoring" gents, i plug in my earphones, i'm out...just have to wait out the night. The morning will be amazing.
Morning. I never sleep while traveling. So it was up to me to balance to falling heads while they slept so as to not end up in an awkward position. The bus takes a detour so I don't know where I am and I could be late. My phone's got no network. My players out of battery so the music that kept me sane is gone. Then the guy sitting next to me gets off and I get the window. And once in the fresh air, looking at the view, it calms me down...there's a calming effect that only looking at the hills and all the green on a moist monsoon morning can have. I smile. I've realized that the weekend has officially begun.
Enter Hamirpur. I'm supposed to meet her there before heading up to the final destination. Barot. Google it up for location. I was just intrigued by the trout-fishing, that's the only thing that I knew about it at that point. No idea what's there, no idea how to get there. I need breakfast. She said she'd get me some. I need a shower. No one can help me on that. A bottle of water to wash my face, and a bench to sit and wait on...that will have to do for now. A call home threatens to spoil things for a moment, but I decide to take things as they come and switch off my phone. I am out of the loop, Sir.
And then she's there. I know why i'm here, and if happiness has any purity to be measured, beginning from that time on i knew it'd be as good as it can get. There's the awkward shaking of hands we always do...it seems to have become the decorum of all our hellos. She explains me the route, and I nod along as I try and figure out. It's a lot of stop-overs and lot of bus changing to be done. Four in all. i just have my fingers crossed. Just get me there and i'll be good. On to our first ride of the day, time span approximately an hour. Pretty much uneventful, time and places passing by as we talk. Trip two. Break for brunch. Trip three. By four, it's getting to us. "Just get it over with!!" feeling starts creeping up. The driver takes unnecessary breaks, it's pouring out and i'm staring down gorges as the bus turns at every turn, even the amazing views of the river have lost the calming effect. We just want the travel to stop and rest.
Enter Barot. It's smaller than I imagined. Looks more like two long streets in a city divided in the middle by a river. Which has gone wild, thanks to the incessant raining. But the place looks awesome...both of us have already regretted numerous times not having brought a camera along, have made lots of plans to stop at various places on the way back, pointing out little waterfalls and amazing scenery on the way. First things first though...get to the room, get a meal and a bath. So we tread along the road, taking in the locales. The short walk is interesting, a preview of sorts, they've got some kind of a fare going on, a couple of rides and a few food stalls and stuff...good ol' small town charm. Doesn't look like many people actually come over here to stay either. Is more of a place you pass on your way, stop for a couple hours on your way to a more notorious destination. We're here for two nights. Should be fun.
Guest house. Run by an ex-army man, which i'm skeptical about till she says it isn't necessary for every army guy to fit my mental image of one. Then comes the first blow. They don't do "Food". The only restaurant in the town caters to that angle. So as the evening sets in we walk in the pouring rain, during which I realize I can't walk when two people share an umbrella, I just don't have the right technique for that, but then I don't mind getting a little wet for the sake of romanticism. Onwards to get our first meal of the day. Entering the restaurant as we look around first and then ask for a menu, the guy looks at me and says "No menus. We just have specials, veg and non-veg. What'll you have?" Normally though vegetarianism would be the safer option, the dishes put us off that, so we go for the chicken. Half an hour while he gets it ready. We decide to take a short walk...and look for some cigarettes. The town doesn't have any cigarettes accept "Four-Squares", apparently they were all confiscated by the cops, that's the tale the owner of the guest house tells me. There's no chemist in the town as well...so we can't get any meds for her headache. No place to get any alcohol either. I'm starting to get the "That's WEIRD" feeling. There's the thing they show in movies where you enter a strange little town where nothing's what it seems. Barot's shaping up to be that way. Everything's closing. We stock up on what we can...instant noodles, chips, cokes...just in case, and head for dinner. That's where things start looking better. The food is way beyond what I had expected. Maybe not fabulous, but then satisfaction matters too, especially at the end of a long day. Then another walk back in the rain, I can hear the river raging even if I can't see it, down the road to the place and we're in for the night.
We slept earlier in the night than i'd have thought. And i'm up earlier than i'd have thought, seeing how exhausting yesterday had been. The list of "to-do" things is really short because what I knew of the town was limited to a single word. Fishing. Except for that we had the whole day open. Hopefully the morning looks like the weather won't play spoilsport. So after the regulatory couple of hours being spent being lazy and coaxing each other out of bed, we head down to get our "Fishing License" and the apparatus to fish with. Apparatus would be stretching things a bit actually, because when the guy handed me a empty plastic coke bottle with a thread tied around it with a hook tied to the other end, I had no idea how i'd catch any fish with it. "Just throw the hook in the water as far as you can, then pull in the string with the bottle," the guy tells me. So much for images I had of me sitting next to the river holding my fishing rod, I had a bottle. Down to the fish-farm next to get the license, which we get after the person there misspells my name even after I spell it out thrice (He writes down "Antant" in the license). Armed with our "Bottle n' hook" and our license, next agenda was to look for the perfect spot. So we decide to explore some more, heading down and crossing over to the other side of town. The place looks awesome, so green you'd think somebody took the town and dipped it in a can of green paint over and over. There's a really tall pipe next to the river that spews a blast of water every few seconds, we can't decide if it's natural or man-made, but what we do agree upon is that it's a lot of fun to watch how far up the water goes. Cue, standing and watching the water reach the tip of the tree next to it, and come falling down in a drizzle. Then back to the walk, with a break in between to ogle over a huge rooster, I can see where the town gets it's chicken from. Crossing over again on a rickety-looking wooden bridge, it's decided to walk in the water. First step and I can feel the chill. The water's totally freezing for a while, but after some time the body adapts to it. So we stumble along, hopping from one rock to another, heading to the banks where the river got too deep, picking up interesting looking pebbles, and it's pure fun. The kind of fun you have when you're a little kid, you don't care about anything else cause you're busy enjoying the moment you're having. She concurs, and I can make that out by the huge smile on her face. The plans for fishing have been delayed, I think i forget to mention that, because it was told to us that the best time to fish would be early morning or late afternoon. So we decide on doing it after lunch. A little distance down the river, on a whim we decide that a rock placed in the middle of the river is the best place to be at the moment. So wading across the river, we clamber up on the boulder, and settled down on our perch, it exudes some kind of unknown satisfaction, looking objectively it doesn't seem much, just two people sitting atop a rock, but for some reason it felt like it was a part of utopia. I never wanted to leave. I know she didn't either.
Lunch was good. She's fallen in love with the momos and the broth the guy has made, and there are talks of taking him along as a cook. Now it's the time for fishing. Carrying on from where we left off, we go a further upstream, and settle upon a place that looks alright. It started drizzling a while back, and it's raining more heavily now, and the river is flooding up by the second. As we head down, hopping over the rocks again, we look back to realize that the path we just came down has already submerged under the rising current. Not a good sign. So we don't venture out any further and pick a "safe" spot...and I reach into the bag for my ammo. My bottle and hook. Which is not there. We've left it back at the room. The fishing adventure won't materialize after all, not that anyone feels sad about that, we've had too much of a great time to be felt let down, and I get a feeling that inside we both are glad that now maybe we have an excuse to visit the place again. So we sit on the edge of the river, marking a point, so that we know when it has submerged that it is time to leave. And it is scary and amazing at the same time. The untamed river, lashing out wildly, the dense forests behind with all it's green splendor and the cloudy monsoon skies overhead. I take it all in, perched on top of a rock, until I feel dizzy with all the fast flowing water in the backdrop. Would be stupid to fall in the river. The rain's gotten heavier. It is time to head back.
The evening is spent indoors, until it's time for dinner. We may not have done any fishing, but we have some freshly caught fish waiting for us. Another walk in the rain, and another satisfying experience at dinner, and another walk back under the umbrella, back to the room. I can't believe we have to leave in the morning. We're up early, and for me it's the usual play of me against time, trying to savor every moment there, every moment with her, before i'm thrown back to the everyday life. The day is beautiful, the sun is out in all it's glory after being missing for a couple of days. We head out, another bunch of small trips strung together, before I embark on the night's journey alone. I see the trails of the weekend passing me by as we head out, and it feels just right to say that we have to come back sometime. The bus trip is the same as it was coming in, apart from the us being exhausted part, we talk about places we could see the next time we are around that place, pointing out views from the bus windows, along with bits of the random chats. Second ride's the same. While going on the third, which eventually turns out to be the final one, there's a bit of drama thrown in when she realizes that she's left her wallet back in the room we had, but that is soon taken care of with a phone call to the guest house's owner, who says he's found it and sends it over later in the week. And then as the day winds down, there's the realization that this is it, the weekend's over, she'll be going in a while and I count down the minutes as I always do. If only time could stand still.
It's time for her to go. Soon I'll be alone on a 12 hour ride, I'll be doing things in that time that'll make her, and other people really mad at me, but of course I know that now, did not then. One last goodbye, one last wave of the hand, and she's gone. I make a silent promise to myself that I have to see her soon. Love and distance are not the things that should be put together. For all the poetic verses about distances making love stronger, it's still all about being close. All these thoughts occupy me as the bus heads off into the dark night...

It's been three weeks. And every memory is still etched on my mind.

There's a place, and there's you. All that I need. Bliss.