The Fairs That Never Return

Indian summers have a way of humbling everyone equally.

The rich retreat behind tinted glass and air-conditioning. Labourers seek refuge beneath whatever patch of shade they can find. Stray dogs lie motionless under parked trucks, tongues hanging out, their bodies arranged in surrender rather than sleep. Even machines appear reluctant to move. By noon, there is little romance left in the landscape. The world narrows to heat, dust, thirst, and endurance.

The taxi from Meerut to Delhi Airport carried all four.

It was one of those white commercial sedans that seem to spend their entire lives between airports, railway stations, weddings, court cases and last-minute emergencies. The kind with a dashboard full of gods, a boot full of invisible histories and a CNG kit, and seat covers that had absorbed more human fatigue than any honest upholstery should be expected to bear.

The air-conditioner hummed with admirable determination and limited success. It was not cooling the car as much as arguing with the heat. Warm air seeped through the doors every time traffic slowed. The cabin smelled faintly of sweat, dust, old vinyl, and tobacco smoked long ago but never entirely forgotten. A plastic bottle rolled gently near my feet each time the driver braked. Outside, the highway shimmered beneath a white sky. Trucks lumbered forward under impossible loads. Autorickshaws meandered through gaps that existed more in optimism than reality. Somewhere ahead, hidden beneath the haze and impatience, lay Delhi.

I settled into the back seat and resigned myself to the journey.

The driver introduced himself as Ramesh Gupta.

Within minutes, as is customary across much of North India, he became Guptaji.

He looked to be somewhere in his fifties, though Indian roads and Indian sun make poor witnesses in such matters. They add years to some faces and dignity to others. A faded white towel rested across one shoulder. His shirt sleeves were rolled neatly above the elbows. His hair had begun retreating from the forehead but had not yet surrendered the field completely. His hands, resting on the steering wheel, were darkened by sun and work, with thick fingers and clean nails. They were not the soft hands of a man who had spent his life merely driving. There was something of the trader in them, something of the man who had counted cash, lifted bundles, tied ropes, shaken hands, packed, unpacked, and moved on.

The dashboard carried the usual assortment of gods, photographs, and personal relics that transform commercial vehicles into something resembling private spaces. There was a small Hanuman idol secured with double-sided tape, a red thread tied around the rear-view mirror, a pair of cracked sunglasses, a comb missing two teeth, a packet of elaichi, and several photographs whose colours had long since surrendered to sunlight. In one corner, tucked behind the idol, was a photograph of two younger men standing behind piles of cloth.

There was nothing remarkable about him.

Or so I thought.

I had spent the previous few days attending to family matters and was now travelling to Pune for the Silver Jubilee reunion of my NDA course. Twenty-five years. The number still felt faintly absurd. In my head, we remained boys in uniform, sprinting between appointments, polishing belt buckles, hiding minor sins from major punishments, and measuring life in terms of roll calls, liberty, squadron rivalries and inspections. Yet over the previous few weeks, photographs had begun appearing on WhatsApp groups with disturbing regularity. Receding hairlines. Reading glasses. Expanding waists. Coursemates standing beside kids almost as old as we had been when we first entered the Academy.

However, I was not in the mood for philosophy that afternoon. My ambitions extended no further than reaching the airport on time, checking in without drama, and perhaps sleeping for forty minutes in a departure lounge chair shaped by someone who clearly hated travellers.

Guptaji had other plans.

“Flight kitne baje hai, sahib?” He enquired about my flight schedule.

I told him.

“Pahunch jayenge.”

He said it with such confidence that I almost believed him.

Traffic moved ten metres and stopped again.

A bus driver leaned continuously on his horn with the persistence of a man who believed noise itself could alter reality. Two boys on a motorcycle threaded themselves between a truck and a bus, trusting youth, reflexes, and providence in roughly equal measure. Guptaji watched the chaos without irritation. Drivers in North India develop either madness or philosophy. The better ones develop both in useful proportion.

As we approached the newly laid highway, Guptaji glanced at me through the rear-view mirror.

“Kahan rehte hain aap, sahib?”

“England.”

He nodded, as if England was merely another district beyond Shamli, inconvenient perhaps, but not unimaginable.

“Ghoomne aaye hain?”

“No. Family matters.”

He understood enough not to ask more.

“Aur ab?”

“Pune.”

“Koi kaam?”

“Course reunion.”

“School ke dost?”

“Haan, something like that.”

His eyebrows rose.

“Achha…”

The word stretched into something between admiration, curiosity and a small recalibration of status. The rear-view mirror, which until then had contained only my tired face, now seemed to contain my biography.

A few minutes later came the inevitable question.

“Aap kaam kya karte ho?”

I could have explained my current role, but that answer would require another journey altogether. How I ended up in King’s country. What took me from military service to corporate life. How one learns to speak in dashboards, metrics and stakeholder updates after having spent years speaking in orders, intent and responsibility. These are not conversations for a hot taxi caught between Meerut and Delhi.

“I was in the Army.”

His eyes met mine briefly in the mirror.

“Achha! Fauj.”

Then came the familiar sentence, delivered with complete sincerity.

“Hamare desh ke asli hero toh aap log hote ho, Sir.”

Sahib had subtly reformed to Sir.

I smiled and let it pass.

Over the years, I had learned that arguments rarely improve compliments. One can explain that heroism is unevenly distributed, that institutions are made of ordinary men doing assigned work, that some are brave, some merely obedient, some foolish, some lucky, and many simply tired. But such explanations are ungracious in the face of respect. So I accepted the compliment on behalf of many better men and said nothing.

“Kahan-kahan posting rahi?”

I began naming places.

Rajasthan.

Kashmir.

The Northeast.

Some names passed without reaction. He nodded politely, the way people nod at places they know mostly through news channels, films and other people’s suffering. Then I mentioned Himachal Pradesh.

Something changed.

Not dramatically.

A slight straightening of the shoulders. A glance in the mirror. The smallest pause. A man may hear many place names in life, but only a few unlock rooms inside him.

“Himachal?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Kaunsi side?”

I told him.

For the first time since I had entered the taxi, he smiled.

Not the professional smile of a driver maintaining conversation.

The smile of a man unexpectedly encountering an old acquaintance on a crowded platform.

“Arre sir,” he said softly, “us taraf toh humne aadhi zindagi guzari hai.”

I assumed he meant relatives. Perhaps some distant connection through marriage, trade or pilgrimage. Perhaps a tourist visit. In North India, everyone has some claim on every hill station if given enough time to explain.

“September mein udhar gaye ho kabhi?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Seb ki petiyan sadak ke kinaare lagi hoti hain,” he said. “Hawa mein mitti nahin, seb ki khushboo aati hai. Subah dhoop pahadon ke peeche se nikalti hai aur aadmi ko lagta hai duniya mein koi pareshaani ho hi nahin sakti.”

He laughed softly, not at the memory but at the innocence of it.

“Bahut saal ho gaye.” He lamented as it was another era, another life.

The traffic inched forward. A tempo driver tried to insert his vehicle into a space that would have challenged a bicycle. Guptaji yielded half an inch, then reclaimed two, a manoeuvre performed with the calm of a man who had negotiated both roads and people for decades.

He nodded towards the faded photograph beside the Hanuman idol.

“Yeh dekho.”

Before I could lean forward properly, he reached out and wiped a film of dust from the plastic sleeve with the edge of his towel. It was an unconscious gesture, but there was tenderness in it. Some objects are not valuable because of what they are. They are valuable because of what they have survived.

The photograph showed two younger men standing behind piles of blankets and neatly folded suit pieces. Both were smiling into the camera with the careless confidence of people who believe the future will continue indefinitely. One wore a sweater over a shirt. The other had a thick moustache and the slightly stiff posture of a man trying to look prosperous for a camera. Behind them, a row of hanging cloth pieces formed a bright, uneven wall. Reds, browns, blues, checks, florals. Time had faded the colours, but not the pride.

“Is that you?”

“Ji.”

“And the other?”

“Mere bade bhaisaab.”

He smiled again.

“Kapde bechte the hum.”

Then, after a pause:

“Cloth merchants.”

There was neither pride nor regret in the statement. Merely a fact. Some men introduce themselves through designations. Some through land. Some through surnames. Some through what they once carried from place to place.

The traffic edged forward. The road to Delhi continued.

And somewhere along that road, the taxi driver sitting in front of me quietly began to disappear. In his place emerged another man altogether. A travelling merchant. A familiar face on forgotten mountain roads. A man who knew bends in roads, shortcuts through markets, tea stalls with generous owners, villages that woke slowly in winter, and customers who had aged with him one fair at a time.

For the next hour, Guptaji spoke of Himachal as one might speak of a first love.

Not through grand declarations.

Through details.

The curve in a road above Rohru, where the valley suddenly opened beneath you.

A tea stall near Kotkhai, whose owner insisted traders pay after the fair rather than before.

A village in Kangra where every customer bargained for twenty minutes and then bought exactly what they had intended to buy from the beginning.

"Sab drama tha," he laughed.

"Phir bhi har saal karte the."

The same performance repeated annually.

The same customers.

The same arguments.

The same cups of tea.

The same promises to return next year.

Listening to him, I realised he did not remember transactions.

He remembered people.

His fairs were not the giant commercial exhibitions one sees in cities. They arrived like temporary villages. Trucks rolled in before dawn. Tarpaulins appeared. Bamboo poles rose from bare ground. By afternoon, a hillside that had been an empty pasture a few hours earlier would be alive with colour.

Blankets hung from ropes stretched between poles. Bright shawls swayed gently in the mountain breeze. Children darted between stalls carrying balloons and sticky fingers from freshly bought jalebis. Somewhere, a loudspeaker crackled through a Pahari Nati, loud but somehow familiar. The smell of pakoras mingled with dust, pine resin and woodsmoke drifting down from nearby houses.

Women in bright scarves moved between stalls carrying wicker baskets. Men gathered in loose circles playing dhol, chimta and ransingha to appease the deity. Somewhere, a local politician delivered a speech to an audience considerably more interested in bhoj than governance.

"Aur shaam ko," he said, smiling at the memory, "jab thand padti thi na sir, tab asli mela shuru hota tha."

The evenings, it seemed, belonged less to commerce and more to conversation over a tipple.

People lingered.

Alcohol lasted longer.

Transactions became excuses.

Stories became the real currency.

"Kapda toh sab bechte the sahib," he said. "Agar sirf kapda lena hota toh log shehar jaake le lete."

He paused for a moment.

"Hum kapde se zyada khabar le jaate the."

We carried news more than cloth.

Before mobile phones, before WhatsApp groups, before social media and twenty-four-hour news channels, men like Guptaji were part merchant, part messenger and part witness.

The merchants brought blankets and shawls.

The villagers brought stories.

Both exchanged something of value.

"There was an old lady in Mandi," he said. "Every year she bought one shawl."

"Every year?"

"Haan."

"Did she need that many shawls?"

He laughed.

"Bilkul nahin."

Then his face softened.

"Kabhi laal. Kabhi hara. Kabhi neela."

He shook his head.

"Aur har saal bolti thi ki pichhle saal wala rang zyada achha tha."

Every year, the previous year's colour had somehow been better.

I laughed.

The old woman instantly became familiar. Every family contains some version of her. The person who complains about the very thing they faithfully return for year after year.

"Last year she bought from me, she said, “Agli bari isse te achha liyaana."

Get me a better one next time.

He fell silent.

Outside, traffic continued its endless negotiation with itself.

Inside the taxi, we travelled briefly to a mountain fair that no longer existed.

"The next year, she wasn't there."

I waited.

"She had died."

His fingers tapped lightly against the steering wheel.

"Her daughter came instead."

"What did she say?"

A faint smile appeared.

"Ama aapki udeek kardi thi."

My mother used to wait for you.

For a few seconds, neither of us spoke.

A truck carrying construction steel overtook us.

A shiny EV car zipped past.

A van took a wrong turn.

The world continued.

Yet, in the taxi, the old woman had ceased to be a customer.

"Pata hi nahin chala kab grahak dost ban gaye," he said.

Before I knew it, customers had become friends.

I found myself thinking about my own destination.

For months, our reunion WhatsApp groups had been unusually active. Men who once communicated through field telephones and handwritten letters were now exchanging photographs of children, travel itineraries, and retirement plans.

One coursemate was flying in from the USA.

Another from Dubai.

One had his daughter recently join engineering college.

Another had his son in the NDA.

The messages were cheerful.

The subtext was not.

Twenty-five years is long enough for people to become strangers.

Long enough for them to become family.

Long enough for empty chairs to begin appearing in reunion photographs.

For a while, we drove in silence. The silence was not uncomfortable. It felt earned.

Outside, the flat heat of the plains stretched endlessly towards Delhi.

Then I asked the question that seemed inevitable.

"What happened?"

He knew exactly what I meant.

The smile remained, but something else entered his eyes.

Not sadness.

Not bitterness.

Recognition.

The look of a man who has already made peace with a loss, but still remembers where it hurt.

"Sab badal gaya."

Everything changed.

The answer came without bitterness.

The way one might speak of the weather.

Or age.

Or children growing up and leaving home.

Things that arrive whether invited or not.

Young people left for cities. Roads improved. Television arrived. Then mobile phones. Then smartphones. Villages that had once waited a week for news could now receive it instantly. The distances remained the same, but somehow the world became smaller.

"Sab badal gaya."

There was no resentment in his voice.

His generation had spent decades travelling rough mountain roads, sleeping in temporary lodgings, loading and unloading stock, following fair calendars from district to district.

The next generation wanted shops.

Or malls.

Or cities.

Or simply something different.

And who could blame them?

Next generation dreams of escaping the hardships its parents considered normal.

"The fairs continued?" I asked.

"Hote toh rahe."

For a while.

But something about them changed.

People lingered less.

Conversations became shorter.

Customers arrived, bought what they needed, and left.

The crowds remained.

The rhythm did not.

"Par kaam phir bhi chal raha tha."

Business survived.

Then came Covid.

The words seemed to lower the temperature inside the taxi.

Every generation eventually acquires a shared historical marker. A date after which life becomes divided into before and after. For Guptaji, Covid appeared to be one of them.

"First few months”, everyone said, “this is temporary."

The phrase sounded harmless enough.

Comforting, even.

Stall holders called one another. Customers sent messages through relatives. Committee members postponed events. Nobody cancelled anything.

They simply deferred hope.

To the next month. Then to the next year.

One fair disappeared.

Then another.

Then another.

Some reopened when restrictions lifted.

Many did not.

The organisers had grown older. The volunteers had moved away. The economics no longer worked. The momentum had broken.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"What everybody does." He smiled. "You find another way."

Life had changed the script. He had learned new lines.

The man who had spent decades memorising mountain roads learned airport terminals instead.

The skills remained. Only the setting changed.

Outside the window, the outskirts of Delhi announced themselves long before the city arrived.

Warehouses. Flyovers. Thicker traffic.

The horizon filled with concrete, cranes and half-finished ambitions.

Then came the hoardings.

A giant smiling politician welcomed travellers to the capital. Then another promised development, prosperity and transformation. Each smiled with the confidence of a man whose photograph occupied more space than his achievements.

Guptaji glanced at one of the hoardings and snorted softly.

"Sab badal denge."

Then, with the timing of a man who had delivered this line before:

"Pehle rishwat dete the toh kam se kam kaam toh ho jata tha."

He paused.

"Ab rishwat bhi nahin hai aur kaam bhi nahin hota."

I laughed. He laughed too.

For a while, the road offered nothing worth watching. A truck. A petrol station. The flat, exhausted geometry of the suburbs.

"Still go there?" I asked. "Himachal?"

"Nahi, sir."

"The fairs still happen?"

"Hote toh hain."

Then he looked through the windshield for several seconds before speaking again.

"Par pehle jaisa nahin raha."

The answer carried no anger.

Only acceptance.

The kind that arrives after arguing with reality for long enough.

Airport signs began appearing overhead like mile markers of an approaching conclusion.

↩ Terminal 1   Terminal 3 ↑   Terminal 2 ↪

Arrival | Departures

The conversation, which had wandered through mountain roads, vanished fairs, old customers and dead friends, suddenly found itself back in the present.

The airport was close.

The journey was ending.

There was one question left.

"If the fairs started again tomorrow, would you go back?"

For the first time, Guptaji did not answer immediately.

Traffic edged forward.

A plane crossed the sky above us, descending towards the runway.

He watched it for a moment.

Then nodded.

"Main toh chala jaunga."

Of course, he would.

Then he added quietly:

"Par pata nahin log aayenge ya nahin."

Will people be there? He did not look at me when he said it.

His eyes remained fixed on the traffic ahead.

For the first time in the journey, he sounded less like a trader speaking about a fair and more like an old man speaking about time.

A few minutes earlier, I might have taken the answer literally.

Now I found myself thinking about my own destination.

Twenty-five years is a long time.

Long enough for friendships to deepen.

Long enough for them to fade.

Long enough for life to scatter people across continents.

Long enough for empty chairs to begin appearing in reunion photographs.

The business could return.

The roads could return.

The stalls could return.

Even the fairground itself could return.

But people rarely return unchanged.

The taxi rolled into the departure lane of Terminal 2.

Passengers emerged from vehicles carrying backpacks, suitcases, golf clubs, oversized bags wrapped in cling film and the usual assortment of anxieties associated with air travel.

I paid the fare.

Guptaji stepped out and unloaded my bags.

The heat struck immediately. He set the larger bag down with the practised economy of a man who has spent a life loading and unloading things, and straightened up slowly, one hand briefly on his lower back.

Jet fuel hung faintly in the air.

Announcements drifted from somewhere overhead.

Travellers hurried in every direction, convinced their urgency was unique.

Just before I turned towards the terminal, he smiled.

"Kapda toh phir bech lunga sahib."

Sir, I can sell the cloth again.

I waited.

He closed the boot gently.

"Mela kahaan se laaoge?"

But where do we find a fair?

For a moment, I had no answer.

Then the airport swallowed me.

A day later, I was standing in Pune among men I had first known as boys.

A few things had not changed. The arguments had not changed. A disagreement from the second term; something about a dare, a punishment parade, and a missing belt buckle, the details disputed then and disputed still; resumed within twenty minutes of arrival, both parties slightly louder than the evidence required.

The insults had not changed. Old nicknames surfaced with the ease of objects that had only been temporarily misplaced.

But the faces had.

Hair had greyed. Waists had expanded. Reading glasses appeared where swagger once lived. A man I had last seen outrunning PT instructor across the ground now walked with a slight catch in one knee. He said nothing about it. Neither did anyone else.

On the second evening, someone raised a toast to those who were not present.

The lawn went quiet.

Not entirely. Someone was still laughing softly at something behind us. A glass clinked somewhere. But the quiet at our table was its own kind of sound.

One had died in a jet crash, many years ago, in a place most of the country had by then forgotten. The second had passed quietly a few summers ago. Cancer. His wife had sent a message through the group. None of us had known what to say. Most of us had said very little. We had liked and hearted the message, as one does, which is not the same as saying anything at all.

Nobody spoke for a while.

Then someone said, "Remember when he used to eat double breakfast, pack third in his pockets and still complain about the portions?"

Everyone laughed.

The laughter was genuine. It did not diminish what had come before.

Both things were true at the same time.

Later that evening, long after dinner had ended, I stood at the edge of the lawn watching conversations drift across the grass in loose clusters. Nobody seemed particularly eager to leave. The official programme had ended. The real reunion had begun.

Photographs were being taken. Promises were being made to meet more often, to plan something proper next year, and not to let so much time pass again. The same promises, perhaps, that men have made at railway stations and village fairs and farewell parades since time was young enough to make such things feel possible.

Standing there, I found myself thinking about Guptaji.

Not about the fairs. Not about the cloth or the mountain roads or the woman who had always preferred last year's colour.

About the last thing he had said.

Par mela kahan se laaoge?

For twenty-five years, we too had been attending a fair.

The uniforms, careers, achievements and disappointments were incidental.

The stories mattered.

The people mattered.

The returning mattered.

The reunion was just an excuse to gather, meet and remember.

Some fairs return every few years.

Others happen for the last time without anyone realising it.