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passenger door would fly open as I emerged.
    “Hop in!”
    Saying “Sasrikal, Ji” in the Sikh greeting, I would clamber up, and Raja Singh with a chuckle of approval would race off.
    This was my own vahan, and it flew me not only to school and sometimes back but also to the greater world out there that I could only imagine. Everyone in the village knew that when Raja Singh was stopping over in the area, only he could take the gaadi-varas to his English-medium school in Goshala. In an interior smelling of puri and bhaji, sweat and motor oil, decorated with Ganesh and Guru Nanak on the dashboard and a tiny Sai Baba on his sun visor, I would be regaled with a song or two, hear choice Punjabi curses flung at fellow vehicles or lazy pedestrians or an oblivious cow or dog or pig or camel on the road, and listen to the latest news of the world, with commentary. In Raja Singh's truck I kept up with the latest war in Africa or Asia, what America's Kennedy said and what Russia's Khrushchev replied, what Nehru or Nasser or Sukarno said, India's cricket tour of England, or vice versa. How the godless Russians had sent a satellite to orbit round the earth.
    “These Russians, yaar, a dog in the sky … going round and round … what next? Moon they want to go to, and the stars … to the end of the sky … is there an end to the sky? Ask your papaji the Saheb to give us his wisdom on this matter.”
    And if I turned reflective, as we stopped for the camel carts outside the cloth-dyeing factory on the way, Raja would show his concern.
    “Ay!—what are you staring like that for? Henh? Fancy going up there yourself in your own
Sputnik
?”
    “I would be afraid to go up there, Singh-ji.”
    “What is there to be afraid of?”
    “If an accident were to happen up there, I would be lost in the darkness—and not be able to come back home.”
    Raja Singh, the man who was always on the roads of Gujarat, who seemed never to have returned to his home in Punjab, stared at me and acknowledged, “Back home to mother and father and your Pir Bawa … don't worry, the Americans or the Russians would rescue you.” And as if to highlight his own predicament, he launched into his favourite ditty, “My shoes are Japanee / my pantaloons Englistanee / my red topee may be Russee / but fear not, the heart is Hindustanee!”
    Raj Kapoor, in the film
Shri 420
, the hero of all nomadic souls.
    “No doubt, to Hindustan you must definitely return, wherever you go,” Raja Singh concluded, rotating his turbaned head to drive home his point.
    I have often wondered about his special attachment to me. He told my parents he saw an aura over me. That pleased my father, especially. But perhaps Raja only felt sorry for me, for the burden I carried, and thought to bring a little of the fun and joy of the world into my life. This much is certain, though: he was the first to know that one day I would leave.
    “Raja Singh, tumhara ghar kahan hai?” Where is your home?—my favourite question, a joke between us two, to elicit the expected, the explosive answer: “Bhatinda!”
    Smiles and chuckles.
    Such a name for a place!
    “What do you pray to Jaffar Shah for?” I once asked him.
    Jaffar Shah was the patron saint of travellers. He was a son of our Pir Bawa and had the largest grave in the Garden, two feet high and, intriguingly, seven feet long. There were many stories about the journeys of Jaffar Shah, during which he acquired followers to the path of Pirbaag.
    Raja Singh would approach the grave with a large basket of flowers, which he spread carefully over its length. Putting aside the empty basket he would lie flat on his stomach in obeisance before it. Asking for what, I now asked.
    Red with embarrassment and surprise at my question, he did not say a word at first; then he responded with a smile, “I pray that I win a lottery, so I don't have to drive this laarri around the country any more.”
    “Tum idhar nahin ayega, phir?” You wouldn't come here,