…I had given up trying to
read and my attention was trying to focus upon the rebounding horizon when suddenly
I was driving Daisy (my car) with Julie ably following in Valerie the Volvo, Daisy
is built for bumps, Valerie is not. It
was with this brief memory of navigating one of the UK’s worst public roads in
search of a country inn, that I was transported to Lincolnshire and, hey
presto, I had my metaphor for the landscape of Western Gujarat!
The patchwork of small manually-tended fields had given way to a level 360 of fen-like monocultures. Either side of my dead-straight farm track (and its two-way cargo of trucks, camel carts, and mad-max bikes) blankets of corn and pinstriped vegetables faded into the distant haze dissected by orderly irrigation channels. On crossing the Porbandar/Jamnagar district border, the horizon (which for tens of miles had been gyrating like a triple-bar-olympian) rocked itself into balanced poise and with that came peace and predominantly forward motion. Loose windows settled into their tracks, squeaking only as they were pushed open to let the hot, dust-free wind circle our sweat soaked bodies. The chassis silently licked its wounds and our knuckles returned from white to flesh. We were on tarmac, tarmac so smooth that I remembered with disproportionate joy, Daisy and I heading for Lincolnshire along the M6 toll. I made a note to thank God for the UK’s glorious roads.
The patchwork of small manually-tended fields had given way to a level 360 of fen-like monocultures. Either side of my dead-straight farm track (and its two-way cargo of trucks, camel carts, and mad-max bikes) blankets of corn and pinstriped vegetables faded into the distant haze dissected by orderly irrigation channels. On crossing the Porbandar/Jamnagar district border, the horizon (which for tens of miles had been gyrating like a triple-bar-olympian) rocked itself into balanced poise and with that came peace and predominantly forward motion. Loose windows settled into their tracks, squeaking only as they were pushed open to let the hot, dust-free wind circle our sweat soaked bodies. The chassis silently licked its wounds and our knuckles returned from white to flesh. We were on tarmac, tarmac so smooth that I remembered with disproportionate joy, Daisy and I heading for Lincolnshire along the M6 toll. I made a note to thank God for the UK’s glorious roads.
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