The road less travelled
21.05.12
Once you have been to Two Chimneys, the otherworldly boutique hotel, designed and run by Geetan Batra, and set in Gethia, a hill station in India’s Uttarakhand’s Nainital district, it will live in your heart forever. Ever since we had first met, my friend Geetan and I had talked about the prospect of visiting Gethia and staying at Two Chimneys, her mountain resort. When she heard that I was traveling to India for a month of business, she demanded that I add Nainital to my ‘cities to visit list’ when applying for my Indian visa. One of the tit-for-tat diplomatic absurdities between the Pakistani and Indian states is the requirement of city-specific visas.
Before work could begin, two days after I landed in Delhi, Geetan and I jumped into her red four-wheel-drive with destination Gethia on our minds. As I left the capital city, I had no sense of what was to come ahead.
While Delhi is historic, rich in culture and lush with foliage, it is also continually being reshaped, its bowels distending, rending, to reveal new bridges, buildings and subways. In the city, shopping malls and subway stations stand beside colonial architecture. The pace of development was more obvious in the outskirts as the haze of pollution from too many cars cleared from the midday sun to expose the scars and stains of progress in the shape of tenements, silos and factories. It looked like Karachi’s industrial area at first glance, but there was no Urdu script on the walls declaring political slogans, upcoming rallies or the ubiquitous deterrent to public urination in a country where there are no public toilets, “Dekho Kutta Paishaab Kar Raha Hai (Look, a dog is peeing here).” Squat mud houses in fragrant, yellow mustard fields replaced high-rise homes. I was reminded of the Grand Trunk Road cutting across Pakistan’s Punjab, but here, the steel structures expelling ribbons of grey into the sky were unrelenting for the first half of the five-hour car journey. The traffic was constant, consisting largely of trucks, the back of each reading two words, Horn Please, which is what they did incessantly, calling to mind a gaggle of honking geese.
Source: The Express Tribune