It’s sometimes worthwhile to escape from the jam packed roads of Delhi with its crazy traffic and drive far away from it on a week-end to enjoy the freedom of open spaces. Savour this:

There’s a winding road with sugarcane fields on either side that stretches for miles until the uniformity is broken by mud houses, and even pucca ones, with a small bazaar that constitutes the village market. You take a bus drive down the Muzaffarnagar-Meerut Road and stop at one of the roadside dhabas. But this dhaba is different. Besides the usual stringed cots there are chairs too, made of bamboo. The tea here is good, so is the coffee, except for the flies that seem to abound as soon as you sit down.

You can escape them, however, by occupying a seat in one of the two bamboo cabins on either side. Behind them are the fields, but there is also a swing under a tree and an old well that has gone “blind” because there is no water in it and so is known as “Andha Kuan” ~ something like our own Dhaula Kuan. The view from the cabin is an excellent one. You sip the tea and see the fields, in which the only animals are the village dogs. It’s still not time to cut the sugarcane. Then the field will slowly become barren and the cane loaded on the trucks. But not all. Some of it will be used to make gur. To eat hot gur is a treat, provided you don’t walk about in the sun or sit in front of a fire and run the risk of getting dysentery.

The evening advances into dusk and a motorcycle zooms in. A uniformed man is driving it with two others on the pillion, one armed with an old gun and the other with a lathi. You wonder who they are ~ highwaymen or terrorists? They go to the dhaba owner, make their inquiries and drive away. You come out of the cabin to ask him, but he reads your thoughts and blurts out, “These policemen have the knack of showing up at odd hours.”

A newly-wed couple enters the other cabin. Chottu, the boy who serves the tea, pulls the bamboo curtain to guard their privacy and you make for the bus, wondering whether you would visit this dhaba again, for it surely is quaint as far as dhabas go. Moreover, you don’t find them even in the remote areas of Delhi, where steel has taken over from bamboo.