Maattam varumo (Will there be change)?

At 130-plus kilos, it is hard to mistake me for a roadrunner on National Highway 66. Yet, the bike is heading towards me, with a single-minded devotion and with no other potential speed-breaker in sight.

“Which way?” the rider asks me, screeching to a halt and barely giving me time to collect my poise and girth which was in danger of tipping over to an overgrowth-rich ditch by the kerb of our own version of Route 66.

It would have been too clever by half to retort: “Which way to where, hell or heaven?”

The rider had seen me near the road leading to the GDM Auditorium in Kayamkulam, around 100km from Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram, where Rahul Gandhi had halted on the tenth day of the Bharat Jodo Yatra after the morning session.

It was evident from the licence plate that the rider had come from another district, which does not fall on the Yatra’s route. If Rahul does not go to the mountain….

The visiting rider was asking me from which direction Rahul would start the evening leg of the Yatra.

A few minutes earlier, my friends and I were waiting outside the auditorium, and police had with consummate professional skill pushed us gradually back from the road and into the compound of a house where some moulded chairs were placed, possibly by local Congress leaders who had picked it as a vantage point. Grateful, I flopped into a chair and thought that little would make me give up that oasis in the afternoon swelter.

Like the boy on the burning deck, one young man had positioned himself at an impossible angle on a coconut tree, his feet fighting for purchase on the grooves cut long ago by toddy tappers. His intention was to click on his cellphone an untrammelled picture of Rahul when he stepped outside but the mid-tree lensman had become the unwitting weather vane, each of his twitches sending a ripple through the expectant crowd. From the conversation around me, I could make out these were professional politicians, many catching up after Covid’s retreat and bringing one another up to speed on their children and matrimony.

I was there not to see Rahul but to see those who came to see Rahul. On my right was a person probably in his seventies, wiry and not a trace of black anywhere in his silvery mane and beard.

He cut a dashing figure in the sea of regulation starched white that has become the calling card of career politicians. I could visualise the crowd surging forward when Rahul came out but I could not figure out how this cool and composed septuagenarian would meld into such a scrimmage.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. When Rahul got into the car and the predictable scenes unfolded, the silver-crowned onlooker acted with remarkable agility — of mind as well as body. He picked up the chair and strode briskly to a corner, where he placed the chair, tested the reliability of its perch on the ground and just jumped on the chair like a sprightly and supple teenager to catch a glimpse of Rahul. It was a risky manoeuvre. Had he misplaced the chair, the surge would have toppled him over.

A little later, I was told the padayatra would actually resume at 5pm, not 4pm as scheduled, because of the heat.

It was this information that I had to share with the rider who I thought was chasing me. He had seen me coming from the auditorium side and expected to be briefed. That was the unwritten rule of the road. I told him about the change in the timing, too, without being asked.

Social responsibility fulfilled, I was pushing past him when the rider asked me: “Maattam varumo (Will there be change)?”

Journalism, seasoned with scepticism and cynicism, teaches you to ignore such questions with a polite smile or a shrug.

This time, I could neither smile nor shrug.

My friends and I then moved ahead and circulated among the throngs of onlookers who had begun to line NH66, the coastal national highway that runs all the way from Kanyakumari to Mumbai, covering five states. In Kerala, you don’t treat national highways with disrespect: marauding state-run buses, known as Aanavandi (Jumbo Wheels) for the logo they carry, own the road. You don’t want to be caught near one when it’s screaming, hurtling or thundering down the highway.

This Saturday afternoon was different. Traffic was heavy but it had to share space with the onlookers stepping out of their homes. Someone shouted from behind me to be careful, and an Aanavandi whizzed past me. I was caught between the devil and the deep ditch. If I moved any further to the corner, I would disappear into the bushes. These roads were built for mechanised travel, not carnival by foot.

Yet, they came. Entire families, including toddlers. It was as if the families wanted the children, probably too young to process the events unfolding in front of them, to remember when they grew up that they were there this afternoon. I remember having waved at Prime Minister Indira Gandhi when I was a child but that was on a city street cleared of other traffic, not on a national highway heaving with metallic mammoths.

I found myself surrounded by a family, mostly women. Since there was nothing to do but wait, a tall gentleman with a kind demeanour and a sunny disposition struck up a conversation with me. We were ahead of the Yatra’s resumption point by around 2km. He introduced himself and wondered why the police weren’t yet closing the stretch to traffic. From the doubtful look on my face, he read my mind: the annoyance towards road closures, harboured by those who have had a reasonably fortunate run and have little to fight for.

“No. It’s not that. There’s a parallel road through which traffic can be diverted,” he said.

That sounded reasonable. The national highway is the property of the republic, not just of those who pay road tax.

I did not ask him the cliche question: Why are you here? What is making you stand on a highway with your family, some in their housecoats?

Then the first Yatris started heaving into view and it struck me. This is not a regimented Yatra. The designated Yatris do not march with the goose-stepping precision of a conquering army. They are regular folks who are setting their own pace.

When Rahul had said in Kanyakumari he was not “leading” the Yatra, I had not understood the meaning. I had assumed it to be an attempt at humility — the kind that makes a Prime Minister call himself Pradhan Sevak.

Seeing the Yatris trickling in, I realised Rahul was not bluffing — at least technically. Rested after the morning march, the Yatris are back on the road while Rahul was listening and speaking to the young about their aspirations and the daunting challenge of finding a job.

I do not know if it is strategy or happenstance. This amorphous arrangement, shorn of the dispassionate and granite-like visage of a military parade, allows the Yatris to connect with the onlookers. A namaskar, lots of fist bumps (the child next to me was terrified and then thrilled when a bear of a Yatri walked up to her to bump fists), thank-yous and endless smiles. Some Yatris were limping (this could also be a reason for the early start so that they do not have to keep pace with Rahul).

I spotted Kanhaiya Kumar in another knot of Yatris, walking faster, driven by the elixir of youth. “How’s it going?” I shouted from the sidelines.

“You tell me,” Kanhaiya bellowed back above the hubbub, knowing fully well that the atmosphere itself was the answer to such a rhetorical question.

Then a Yatri from Madhya Pradesh paused and thanked us for the hospitality of Kerala. More fist-bumps.

There were signs of a letdown, too. A vanguard approached, enveloped in a battery of amplifiers. Somebody was reading out from inside, possibly from a written note: “Rajakumaran (the prince) is coming.”

The announcer may have meant the prince of democracy or the party’s future leader but it came across as an unfortunate choice of words when the Congress is battling the dynasty syndrome. On our way back, my friend Shyam would say that he would not vote for the Congress until Rahul teaches the party that it can stand on its feet, not on the Family’s feet.

Damaging sycophancy such as blaring from loudspeakers that “the prince” is coming is not the answer that such voters would be expecting. The academic Apoorvanand recently wrote that the Yatra should repair the language, broken by the BJP and the media. The Congress can start the repair from its own home by ensuring that words like “prince” are consigned to the dustbin.

Nor could I figure why the mobile PA system had not been put to better use — such as informing those waiting patiently when the Yatra would resume and when it would reach a particular spot, unless security compulsions prevented the disclosure of the details.

After a while, Rahul, too, appeared, setting a brisk pace and waving — with the police struggling but admirably managing to create a channel within the highway with two ropes. Roped out, so to speak, a huge wave of Congress supporters spilled over to the sides and washed over us like a dam that had broken. In panic, we held on to each other to escape the ditch into which the Aanavandi earlier could not pitch me.

It was over. The Yatris were on their way and so were the onlookers.

Two days ago, I had heard journalists I respect wondering aloud on a Malayalam TV channel what the point was in loitering here and there and waving at onlookers. I could not find a ready answer then.

But standing on NH66, it dawned on me that this glorious and formless band of marchers was gifting us a chance — a pause — to think about us, about others. The experience — and the lesson — is in the waiting, not in watching Rahul walk and waving back at Rahul.

It is not about Rahul, it is not about Modi. It is something larger than all that, something that does not need a pronoun.

“Maattam varumo (Will there be change)?”

I was startled. It was the tall gentleman who was waiting on NH66 with his family, repeating word to word what the rider who nearly ran me over had asked me. There was no Rahul, there was no Modi, there was no Congress, there was no BJP in the question. Or, all of which were there, indeed.

I am not looking hard for a meaning and a significance where none exists. I am merely reporting what I saw and what came to my mind at that point.

Soon after my encounter with the rider, I had seen an aged person accompanying two children, probably his granddaughters, waiting outside a tea shop. In the crowd, I could sense that one girl was trying to wriggle free of something. Moving in closer, I realised that the grandfather was removing a gold chain from her neck. The child was visibly annoyed.

“So many people are going to be here. Why take a chance?” the grandfather told the girl as he removed the chain and put it safely in his pocket.

Then he caught me staring at him. He gave me a wide grin and a thumbs-up.

I returned the compliment.

On my way back, the granddad stayed in my mind.

We can’t take anything for granted. Somewhere along the way, we did. We forgot to protect the gold standard that was gifted to us by those who preceded us.

That also is a reminder from the Bharat Jodo Yatra. The lesson is not in the watching but in the waiting.