I nodded. ‘Are we leaving in the morning or the day after?’
‘No, early Monday.’
‘Should I prepare an extra breakfast for Andrew?’ my father asked.
I took a deep breath as I got up from my chair and stood next to my father. I dropped a kiss on his balding pate. Someone had to be a responsible adult.
‘Andrew and I are not dating any more, Papa, and no, you don’t need to make breakfast for him or me.’
‘You both will have breakfast together then.’
‘We’re on assignment, Papa. This is not a road trip.’ I said it because I needed to hear it more than my old man.
His eyes were on my mother’s photograph, and he was smiling.
A sweet, shitty mess.
We were cruising. Andrew’s fragrance filled the vehicle, and I inhaled it. It was like sitting in an oxygen cylinder. I felt the stain of healthy colour each time I took a breath.
He was shifting between speeds of 60 and 100 kmph, which was fast for NH 275 with its patches of civilization every 10–20 kilometres. Back-breakers posing as speed checks forced drivers to pause before they hit the accelerator again. A sprinkling of shops and stalls dotted the highway. For the rest, it was great expanses of green paddy fields, sugarcane cultivations and sunflowers eyeing the rising sun. Karnataka had suffered a drought for the second successive year, but who could tell.
Outside of ‘Good morning’ and ‘All set?’, Andrew hadn’t said much since he picked me up from home at the crack of dawn. I replied but didn’t ask any questions myself.
I had offered to take the wheel any time he wanted a break.
He’d nodded.
This time of day wasn’t for words, even in the best of times. More so when he was driving, eyes on the road and focus on the assembly election.
Karnataka was going to polls next month, and six months later, India would vote, because of which this exercise assumed greater significance.
It was all about Rao, Karnataka’s longest-serving chief minister, who was in office for three successive terms before he walked away from politics. The 74-year-old had decided to roll the political dice again, returning to lead his party, KANNADA, in the upcoming fixture.
Theories, fuelled by rumours, were doing the rounds as to why Rao had decided to re-enter the cauldron.
Since his reign, which was a game changer for the state economically, his party had been all but wiped out from the region in the last decade. Late last year, when Rao took to public life again, making appearances at social gatherings, the party headquarters in Bengaluru came alive suddenly. A three-line announcement of Rao’s return to politics followed shortly after.
It said the party would contest all 224 seats after contesting in under 50 in the last two elections, bagging just a handful of victories.
It was believed, even if it wasn’t definitively reported, that Rao was reviving the party to hand it over to Ravi, who was apparently developing an appetite for politics. There was talk of Rao’s yearning for a national role. He had made a few trips to Delhi since November. I had been meaning to ask Ravi if the national role was for him, but he had shown no political curiosity whatsoever. Not even when I had raised the topic of Rao’s return to the stage. If anything, Ravi wasn’t pleased by the move.
The first thing I had done when I left my father on Friday evening was to call Ravi and tell him that I was joining Andrew on Hari Rao’s campaign trail.
‘Why Andrew?’ Ravi asked. ‘I can take you if you want.’
‘I want to go as a journalist, not as your girlfriend.’
Ravi laughed. He wasn’t happy. ‘You are my girlfriend, and you are a journalist, but you don’t cover politics.’
‘No! But I’m a writer, Ravi, and we don’t have boundaries.’
He might’ve nodded, but he wasn’t convinced.
I get Ravi. This is a difficult profession for anyone to understand, more so if you’ve never had a job. It was different from holding a position in a leadership team or simply signing papers. They may have assembled to a greater ideal, but the order was different.
Andrew pulled up at a weather-beaten stall in front of which tables and benches had been laid out haphazardly. He told me they served thatte idlis besides tea and coffee. It was, as the name suggested, idlis cooked in a different vessel, a flatter plate, giving it a sleeker texture. It was popular in this region. There were no other options. I preferred dosas, but no one asked me.
Andrew picked up two glasses of filter coffee, handing me one, before engaging with the lorry drivers and cleaners who had parked alongside us. He had found a spot on the bench beside an older driver, who saw Hari Rao’s campaign as a last-ditch fight for regional expression in Karnataka.
