In The End We Made It

An unplanned road trip made Nitin Chaudhary understand his niece better. this time, the journey really was the destination

- Nitin Chaudhary

The rain fell hard, the road was slippery and the steep Alpine climb was bare of traffic. We had lost our way. And the fuel in our car ran low. The few houses that we drove past were farmers’ sheds, padlocked at this late hour. The GPS obstinately pointed us downhill, back to where we had come from. There was no one on the road to help us find our way to a hut in a small village, Hermance, where we had booked our night’s stay. Sweat tracked my brow despite the chill in the air, and anxiety, which had for the last hour been niggling quietly, abruptly metamorphosed into fear.

I stopped the car. When driving in the Alps, it’s easy to become accustomed to magnificent scenery. But in the darkness and rain, when one edge of the road stares into a deep valley and the other merges into a cliff that rises 300 metres until it reaches forested slopes, the roads are scary. On the backseat slept my niece and wife, tired after a day of walking on the anguine streets of Chamonix.

I parked the car on one side of the road and sat quietly, sipping hot tea from a flask. Outside, the raindrops formed intricate veins over the glass window of the car. In that quiet moment, I reflected on the trip so far.

It was the summer of 2016, when my 13-year-old niece,  Vanshika, was visiting us in Sweden. Inexplicably, she remained uninterested and listless even after a few weeks. Somehow, the Swedish spring weather and the laidback atmosphere had not appealed to her, and she continually sought refuge in her smartphone. All the plans we had made for her to visit the Swedish countryside were masterfully destroyed with monosyllabic responses and irate swipes at the phone.