Chapter One

                 GULLIVER’S TRAVELS PVT LTD

Being the further adventures of Hanuman Murali & Others

There is a small room posing as an office on the first storey of a time worn shopping complex in the center of the city, nobody expected a travel agency there but it existed and it has for the last sixty years. Why people didn’t expect a travel agency because the shopping complex was famous for selling bed-sheets and pillow covers.

Gulliver’s travels Pvt Ltd would have sounded as a name I would have laughed at during math classes holding my head down at the last bench; I mean seriously who would name his company as Gulliver’s Travels. But I knew the very man’s son and his name was Nivas.

Nivas is six feet three although he claims he is six feet five but we always have arguments on his height and these arguments invariably begin when he almost always bangs his head on our door, forgetting to duck. Hailing from a family of textile merchants how Nivas’ father ended up in the travel business is a thing of wonder, maybe that’s why they sold air tickets in a place known for the fabrics.

Gulliver’s Travels Pvt Ltd is your typical tour operators which you find in the various cities across the length of the country. Nivas once told me that he is what is called a middle level operator, one who doesn’t organize these big tours but is in the process of filling the bigger operators with sight -seeing families. A job in which Nivas’ father was a pioneer.

Nivas had met Murali during the days when Nivas was travel co-ordinator for a short lived TV series called ‘Valmiki’. Murali once again returned to the role of Ram Dooth Hanuman but like most spin –off shows, the content wasn’t as exciting as original, so the series came to an end when the writers tried to bring witches and aliens into the program to get more juvenile audience.

I walked into the travel agency on one raining Tuesday, both my friends were there; it was still early in the morning and by the look on Murali’s face I knew that Nivas was drunk. I never drank alcohol; some people like Nivas told me its something to proud of, others have told me the opposite.

“You know, it was in the year 1994, I took over Gulliver’s, 1994 was also the year I inherited my father’s guilt…” Nivas would roll on like a steel tin down a steep incline, I had heard the story before many times and I’m sure Murali would have to, but it is again a story worth the diversion.

Papa Nivas was a highly enterprising man, he had made a successful migration from one city to here and had established a stable business with the driver friends he had made, but there was still something. Something left untold in the ledger books of that small dingy office up there in the center of the city.

But when I had heard the story, I thought it was not something someone would be ashamed of but I could not rule out the irony in the situation, as Nivas had said above he really did inherit the guilt of his father; that being Papa Nivas had actually never made any of these travel excursions or packaged tours he had convinced thousands of families to take.

“It’s like this..” Nivas would begins “Papa would …i mean if you came looking for a place to go, he would provide you with the extensive history of the place to the extent that he would enact Rajput battles while discussing Jaipur, but only later, very much later on his death bed he had whispered to me, that he had done gross injustice to all those people and he had never gone to any of these places.”

I could relate to the father’s agony and when he died after a long losing battle with partial paralysis, Nivas did feel cheated; he had built an image of his father as some kind of Phileas Fogg which was hard to break.

From then on, Nivas took to travel on a regular basis seeking to clear his father’s name and as a part of profession ethics and education, it was on one of these trips I was invited. We were going somewhere.