Girls On TRACK

TWO WOMEN, ONE LONG JOURNEY FROM KASHMIR TO KANYAKUMARI

"WE MET EACH OTHER WHILE WALKING around the Aravallis," says Preeta, a life coach and sound healer. She is talking about a group called "Let's Walk Gurgaon" that she was a part of in 2008. She would go for walks twice a week, Wednesday and Saturday mornings, and that's where she met her friend Sehba Imam. The idea of taking a train journey together without a fixed destination in mind was conceived at one of their weekly meetups.

"We are both very restless souls, and I just thought how beautiful it would be to take on an aimless train journey," says writer and educator Imam. Their nostalgic memories of childhood, coupled with their love for travel, played the catalyst for their exciting plan.

These two women, as ordinary as you and I, decided to take on an extraordinary journey of 70 hours to travel from Kashmir to Kanyakumari on a train in the spring of 2019. Covering the north and south ends of the country, they planned to go the minimal route.

"We wanted to leave all of our wants and needs at home and enjoy whatever the journey would throw at us," says Imam. Journeying across the length of the nation is no mean feat. Most of the time, as Pradhan tells me, we are so fixated on reaching our destination that we think of the journey itself as something of a hassle, a merely tolerated means to the fitting end. For many of us, the journey is a transitory inconvenience.

"Not for us," quips Imam as Pradhan adds that for them, this entire idea stemmed from the romantic notion of travelling from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, so much so that both of them travelled from Delhi to Katra in Jammu to catch the Himsagar Express, which would take them to the southernmost tip of India. "There was no plan, just the solid idea of fun."

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