The urge to feed our gypsy souls, we find ourselves on the road every once in a while, we avoid taking flights as much as we can simply because one misses the in-betweens, we either go for long distance bicycle rides, or back home in India it was always a ride on the Royal Enfield but hopping on to a car with all the camping gears and our bicycles perched on the contraption at the back is what we indulge in the most.
Owing to the fact that I don’t drive, I am a constant on the passenger seat. I like watching the windshield morph into a screen, almost like a widescreen television where stories are broadcasted live as I pull out my sketchbook from the glove compartment and watch the landscape that’s playing, sometimes switching to the small screen of the rear view mirror to watch stories fade away. There are also stories that take shape in my sketchbooks, they mostly start with a map of the place where we’re headed but invariably the next sketch is the view through the dashboard, The sketches have one thing in common, we are a part of the story, so to put it in a crude way, they are like “selfies”. It all started in year 2009 when we were headed to the island Cres in Croatia, it was a long drive and after a point I felt the urge to do something so the first sketch from the car came into being.
When on the road, the option to stop and step out into the scene is always there so my sketchbooks are sprinkled with such encounters with places, spaces and people but the dashboard selfies are different, they reflect more of moods and emotions rather than an image of a place. Last to last summer, on our way to Bosnia, I had placed my hat on top of the glove compartment and somehow the presence of it in the sketch gives it more meaning, it’s like an old travelling companion.
The sketches from the car always have different moods, for instance, now that we have a four year old kid. we have to hear a lot of kid’s music on our road trips, so last May on our way to Hamburg we had three hours of non-stop nonsensical music and the visuals that played in my head somehow managed to find their way into my sketchbook.
Sometimes on the way back from a trip, I end up sketching an impression of the experience. One such time it turned out a bit psychedelic and when people flip through this sketchbook and stop at this one page and ask, What were you high on? I simply answer, Life!
Once we were stuck in a place called Plyos in Russia and there were no immediate connection to the next city we were headed to, so we thought taking a taxi. Well, we got a good bargain so we hopped on to the old Lada, with me on my usual spot, the passenger seat next to the driver and my wife on the back seat. But the way our man drove I was convinced he was an ex cosmonaut from the soviet era. Ask my sketchbook and it will tell you the exact emotions we went through, We survived the ride through the Galaxy.
Coming back to the small details in these sketches, the dinosaurs on the trip to Hamburg, it was a phase where our daughter read only dinosaur stories and it was our first trip out during the Pandemic. The cosmonaut sketch, we had watched Germany win the football world cup in club in Plyos and celebrated like crazy, missing the morning bus to Yaroslavi was inevitable therefore we had to opt for a taxi. The hat on top of the glove compartment, I remember picking that one up in a small town called Erlangen in South Germany where I had gone to mourn the death of an old friend called Paul, after meeting his family, while walking through the streets of the old city I spotted this hat in a shop window, I knew it is going to become a new companion, not a replacement for an old friend but something I picked up in his memory. The interesting thing about sketches from a travelogue is that on the surface it’s only a sketch but there are layers of information and infinite stories behind them and only YOU have the key to these stories. Now when I sit and type out these words and browse through photographs to accompany this piece of writing, I stop at this one, me in the hat sketching at the picturesque campsite in Bosnia, it’s the same hat I picked up in Erlangen, I remember Paul and I smile!
Written by Allen Shaw
Week 47, November 20
