Maharshi

The window belonged to a small room in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh, and it looked out over a lane where nothing much happened except everything: vegetable sellers arguing gently about the price of brinjal, schoolchildren racing the rain, an old radio playing songs older than the man who owned it. For years I watched that lane and told myself that one day I would find out what lay at the end of it — not the end of the lane, exactly, but the end of every road it connected to. The answer, it turns out, is India. All of it.

Over several years, in second-class train compartments and overnight buses, on the backs of shared jeeps and the decks of slow ferries, I travelled through the states and Union Territories of my country. I did it without a fixed plan and mostly without money to waste, which I now believe is the only honest way to see India. When you cannot afford distance from a place, the place lets you in.

My hope is not to show you everything a place has, but to make you want to go and find the rest of it yourself.