Highways are fluent. Moving along NH 766, the Mysore - Kozhikode highway, I knew the grammar well. Wide shoulders, signboards in two or three languages, billboards with familiar brands, hotels with huge parking lots and employees with ‘pick us’ posters inviting you in for meals that cater to every taste. The highway organises itself assuming you don’t belong there and offers comfort and familiarity. It is designed to be legible for the passing body.
Then I took a turn the map suggested at first but then tried to re-route to the more reliable highway. The road narrows as it curves with trees leaning in and suggesting a dead end. I continue. Shoulders, billboards, English, they all disappear as the asphalt gets intimate. Trees keep close on both sides. Kilometres of silence. Then farms. Then a few homes dotting the vast landscape. A village.
I was in Wayanad mid-June as the monsoon was engulfing Kerala with every passing day. I had a rental scooty and a deliberate lack of plan as I moved across hilly country along the Western Ghats. I kept taking turns along narrower and narrower roads, arriving at places I couldn’t name.
There was a shop at an intersection. The shopkeeper sat at an angle to the entrance, not facing it. In most places, every shop is a mouth opening towards the street, trying to swallow your attention. Here, the shop didn’t perform for anyone. The signboard was hand-painted, faded, sized for someone who already knew of its existence. And the glass jars, where I lost twenty minutes. Things I didn’t know. Sweets and savouries and pickled somethings in fascinating shapes and colours. I pointed at them, asked questions. Most of the responses were insufficient to tell me what I was looking at. Still bought a few. Put unfamiliar textures in my mouth and tried to taste a life that wasn’t mine.
That’s the closest you get. You don’t enter an imagined life by looking from afar. You enter it through sensory experiences. Through the mouth, through the moist wind that sweeps across your face, through the small transaction of pointing at a glass jar and trusting the shopkeeper’s nod. Even then, I was just a guy on a rented scooty who had to leave in an hour to get behind a deadline on his laptop.
Past the shop, I noticed homes. The porches – wide, elaborate, shaded and with swings. In Delhi, a balcony is usually a ledge you stand on to escape an apartment. Here, the porch was a room. A life-room. I could see the geometry of an evening – two people on a swing, tea, the six o’clock light filtering through whatever that tree was. I tried constructing lives. How things were painted, how objects were placed, the logic of space. Generous, breathing, one with the vast landscape surrounding it. Everything my cramped Delhi life was not.
And then, hanging on a concrete wall next to a barleria bush, Lionel Messi. Twelve feet tall. A massive poster. ‘ARGENTINA FANS OF –’ some village name I couldn’t pronounce. Some meters past it, a Brazilian flag, then Germany tricolour. I recalled seeing young men in jerseys of Zidane and Ronaldo along the way. The 2026 World Cup had swallowed the village whole. I found this everywhere I went.
This is what stopped me at that poster. In Delhi, the World Cup lived inside commercial spaces. Taprooms with cover charges and projection screens and supporter programmes. It is packaged and sold. Here, it felt raw. A village had simply decided to announce its loyalty to Argentina. The devotion was not curated for an audience, nor was it monetised, it was just there. Just like the shop, or the barleria bush slightly concealing Messi’s left foot.
I know how easily this tips into romanticising the unknown. The disgruntled everyman from a metropolitan feeling the kicks. Yet it is a crucial emotion with which to look inwards at the four walls that surround me at all times. How different my life would have been had I been born behind one of those window blinds. A different language, a different kind of green, a different care for Messi. The contingency of it is staggering. Every life is an accident of geography and I happened to get Delhi, which then allowed me to get a rented scooty and the arrogance to ride into someone else’s world and imagine I understood something.
I don’t think I understood anything. I bought something from a glass jar. I looked at some porches. I photographed a football poster. I consumed a village the way the highway taught me to consume places. Passing through and taking what I could carry.