Pursuing that flighty temptress

A book on a road trip that four 'oldsters' take has tension as well as adventures woven into it.

'Tripping' by C K Meena is a book about a road trip undertaken by four ‘oldsters’ as they call themselves, or at least the narrator does. The four go touring around the country for a few months. As you would expect, there’s tension and adventures and plenty of sights to see and the narrator has plenty to say about it all.

When this book opens, the narrator, the chirpy one as she describes herself, is preparing for a lengthy, and somewhat impromptu, but not quite, road trip with her husband and two friends they have known for a while. Preparing for such a trip, especially a long one spanning months, requires meticulous planning, and the narrator does precisely that — she plans.

She also has a habit of designating nicknames for the people around her. And so her husband is the Wise One. One of their friends going along with them on the trip is the Fairy Godmother. And then there’s Kay, wife to the said Fairy Godmother, who happens to be a man.

Of course, there is also the car she calls Sputnik because, well, she has her reasons.

When the action begins, the four would-be travellers are in Bengaluru. The narrator makes checklists, charts routes and makes bookings, for this is something of a pan-India journey that will take them to a lot of places. Her husband, it is decided, will drive the car named after a Russian satellite.

Told in the first person, 'Tripping' starts off well. There are a lot of to-dos as the two couples arrange for their houses and pets to be taken care of, and some tension when they finally do leave.

As they wind their way north, they come across iconic landmarks, religious sites, forts, odd people, dhabas, new food, little shops, flora, fauna, and talkative tour guides. Sometimes, rooms are booked incorrectly, and sometimes, what one eats disagrees with one’s fragile constitution. There are language issues. Misconceptions abound as they move further north.

And the lady telling this tale always has something to say about what she sees, hears about, and observes, and there is nary a moment when she’s at a loss for words. Her husband is more of a stoic type, and the Fairy Godmother, the man paying for this trip in the first place, is garrulous. He is also married to Kay. Kay is Thai, and she speaks very little English to the rest of them.

For all that though, 'Tripping' does get a little overwhelming at times. The narrator’s observations switch from present to past rapidly, and there are moments when her thoughts flow unbidden. Too many place names are dropped all at once, along with the names of guides and various random individuals they bump into at various locations.

There is something of a stream of consciousness in the text as well that sometimes constricts the narrative, Not all places get enough time devoted to them, and sometimes the story is more focused on the narrator’s jokes, or the names of various tour guides and what they look like than what she is doing at the time.

'Tripping' is a unique idea. However, the book could use some restructuring and appears crammed with too much information for too small a book.