It didn’t seem right, not a bit. I had awoken to the most glorious morning, the sort that you experience only up in the mountains. Warm sunlight had streamed onto my face, lightly diffused by the curtains on the window, and exclaimed in a cheery voice, ‘Oi! Let’s have you up and about, my lad! It’s too nice a day to sleep in!’ I had sat up, stretched and yawned extravagantly, scratched my head in a pensive manner and scampered to the bathroom to perform the daily ablutions. Emerging in showroom condition from the steam-filled loo, I had pulled on my seldom-used winter clothes, walked across the creaking wooden floor of my cozy room and stepped out onto the balcony. Leaning on the railing, I had breathed in the chilled air, almost recoiling as its menthol-like freshness startled my city-numbed nose, and gazed at the vista before me – rolling hills dotted with Himachali houses and apple orchards, a sky so sharply blue you could cut your finger on it and a dusty ribbon of a road winding its way into the distance.
A gentle query from below interrupted my reverie. ‘Haan ji, good morning, would you like to have breakfast?’ It was the delightful Mrs Chauhan, lady of the house where I was staying, and I would hear the same question every morning of my stay there. ‘That would be just perfect, thank you’, I had replied, and walked down to her cottage, in the kitchen of which she conjured up all manner of wonders. En route, Rani, the Alsatian-mountain dog cross, had come racing up, planted her forepaws on my chest and made a committed attempt to lick my face clean. Fighting off her advances, I had taken my seat at the little dining table, there to be joined by Mr Chauhan, he of the kindly face and magnificently curled moustache. While his wife plied us with piping hot, sweet porridge, ghee-drenched parathas, aloo ki subzi and whatnot, he regaled me with stories about his younger days. It was, therefore, the absolute picture of an idyllic holiday, and I should have been in a permanently relaxed, slightly fuzzy state of mind. Instead (and this is the ‘not right’ bit), I was strangely disquieted. Every time I would slip into the aforementioned fuzzy state, I would be tripped up by one, burning question: ‘How am I going to watch the T20 cricket final?’
Now, I’m a cricket fan to rank with the best of them, but when I’m off on one of my driving getaways, I normally switch off from the rest of the world quite quickly – most times I’m at a loss as to which day of the week it is. However, in the lead up to this particular trip, I had become somewhat addicted to the T20 tournament; I found the whole spectacle hypnotic. Besides, for once, it looked like India might actually win something. The night before I had begun my drive, all my plans for turning in early had been swept aside by my staying up to watch India put it across the Ugly Aussies in the semi-final. This presented me with a problem; I really hadn’t expected us to win, and now that we were in the final I simply had to watch it somehow. Up in Rukhla, an apple-growing village about 70 km from Shimla that doesn’t appear on most maps, it was unlikely that I’d have the luxury of full, technicolour ESPN. I tried to banish the thought from my mind and get some sleep, but my slumber was fitful.
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