In northern Pakistan, Peshawar lies at the western end of a trade route that has been significant for over 2,500 years. Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal are fifteen hundred miles away at the other end. In the sixteenth century, the Mughals extended it to Kabul in the west and Chittagong’s port in the east, with gardens along the way and conveniences for travelers. The British named it the Grand Trunk Road and improved it. The poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling wrote of it, “Such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.”

Traveling east from Kabul, every destination on our itinerary lay either along the Grand Trunk Road or on detours to the north or south of it. Along the way were Amritsar, New Delhi, and Varanasi. To the north of the road were the Swat Valley in Pakistan, Srinagar in Kashmir, and Pokhara and Kathmandu in Nepal. To the south, there were Jaipur in Rajasthan, Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, the Taj Mahal, and Khajuraho.

It was always a relief to enter India from Pakistan and to leave the highly populous, frantic city of Lahore well behind. From then on, the Grand Trunk Road runs more or less in a straight line for approximately 300 miles to New Delhi through the states of Punjab and Haryana. The land there is flat. After descending from the Khyber Pass, it is more or less flat all the way to the end of the Great Trunk Road in Bangladesh. The vast swath of it, running parallel to the Himalayan mountain range, is the alluvial floodplain of two great river systems. In the west, the Indus River and its tributaries flow into the Arabian Sea. In the east, the rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra, along with their tributaries, flow into the Bay of Bengal. The area is the largest Megapolis in the world, with a succession of densely populated cities stretching from Karachi, in Pakistan, to Dhaka, in Bangladesh.

Patna, the capital of the Indian state of Bihar, was likely one of the most densely populated cities in Northern India. I recall vividly turning onto a street in Patna and then fervently wishing I hadn’t. There were indications that it was the way to go. However, as we proceeded, all signs indicated that it was not the right road for a vehicle in transit. Driving suddenly into a surrealistic dream describes the reality of the fraught situation.

The road was unbelievably narrow for a thoroughfare, with milling throngs hurrying along it in both directions, filling any gaps immediately left in the trail of a moving vehicle. Small shanty stores of varying dimensions, lining both sides in unbroken persistence, contained the unending strip of human volatility. With no place to turn and hardly enough to move forward without soiling someone’s tunic, five miles per hour became the norm in the narrowest sections, which is as fast as a brisk walking pace.

We proceeded on and on until neither going forward nor going back held any attraction. The situation seemed so absurd that I wondered why we were not being threatened or menaced for being there.

Why did I keep on going? The answer is simple, even if going back had been a viable possibility. Going back meant admitting a mistake had been made and then taking up the challenge of discovering exactly how lost we were —a daunting proposition in an area so densely populated. If we continued, there was always a dim hope that we were on the right road and that soon we would be well on our way. It was unnerving just to be in such a populous environment where barricades existed every few hundred yards at the ready to be closed for sealing off any section where riots flared.

I am not exaggerating. Would the availability of anti-riot gear and riot control products make the facts more credible? Such products are now available in the market, especially in Bihar, which must still be as seething with human activity as it was in the seventies.

I believe to this day that it was the wrong alternative, but with much sweat and anxiety, we reached the right place.