What sleeping above the rear wheel of an overnight bus taught me
A year-end letter — and 50% off for the holidays
The sleeper bus pulls out of Goa sometime after 7pm, and I realise almost immediately that I’ve made a mistake. I’d booked the cheapest lower berth, right at the back, without understanding why it cost less — and now I know: it sits directly above the rear wheel, which means every crack and pothole travels straight up through the mattress and into my spine. The driver tears down the highway, overtaking trucks with inches to spare, braking hard enough that rubber shrieks against tarmac, the whole bus swaying on turns just enough to make you wonder whether this was the one. And more than once the thought crosses my mind: this is how it happens …
An hour in, I do the only sensible thing available to me and put on an episode of The Big Bang Theory on my phone, partly to jolt my mind away from the motion, partly because there is something oddly comforting about canned laughter when your body is being hurled through space at speed. But the moment Leonard, in a bid to make String Theory more accessible, exclaims to Penny that the universe might be a hologram, that we may all be living in a land of make-believe, it feels faintly disappointing that the same universe might decide that mine would end while I was on the cheapest berth of a sleeper somewhere between Goa and Bangalore, my lower back taking the first hit. I put my phone aside and go back to my thoughts.
Six months ago I was still in London, living a life that made sense: familiar streets, a job that came with status and certainty, a calendar that filled itself. Then I packed over a decade into two suitcases and left with a conviction that something had to give, without quite knowing what would replace it. I said goodbyes that caught in my throat to friends I’d built a life around and traded one set of high temples — the glass-and-steel kind to the lord of capitalism — for another set made of stones and candles and incense and bells. I don’t think I understood what that trade would actually ask of me.
The bus lurches. I grab the rail.
It’s been a year of motion. Some thirty flights, over twenty trains, countless rickshaws and tuk-tuks, too many cars crawling through Mumbai, London, Bangalore, Edinburgh, Delhi, Halifax, Pune, Kolkata, Muscat, Kochi, Srinagar, Leh, Agra, Brussels, Jaipur, Margate, Kozhikode, and more towns whose names I’ve written down somewhere but can’t seem to remember. I’ve seen vendors slipping between vehicles with flowers, phone chargers, bottled water, peanuts. Stood in queues at temples, stations, and roadside stalls. I’ve learned again and again that waiting is not the same as wasting time.
I’ve walked a lot. I’ve stepped in shit. I’ve washed it off and kept walking.
Another jolt. The bus sways. I close my eyes.
Slowly, I become aware not just of my own stillness but of everyone else’s — the quiet of a dozen bodies surrendered to motion. Phones light up briefly and disappear. Someone coughs. Someone shifts. A few snore. But no one sits up to protest the speed or the braking or the way the bus leans into corners as if halfway to flipping an omelette. I wonder whether they’re having the same thoughts I am and have simply learned to ignore them, or whether this is just so ubiquitous that it’s second nature.
This is a country where people shout at officials, bargain ferociously over two rupees, question teachers, parents, and politicians. A country where WhatsApp groups and courtrooms are never short of opinion. And yet here, hurtling through the dark, there is a shared understanding that speech would change nothing, that the real choice was made at the moment of boarding.
It occurs to me that trust here is learned early and repeated often, shaped by the knowledge that your life is constantly threaded through strangers — drivers, cooks, electricians, doctors, managers — and that carrying the full weight of individual vigilance would be exhausting. Having lived most of my life in places where safety is itemised and responsibility spelled out in paperwork heavier than the blanket over me, I feel this difference as a strange easing in the body.
It’s also been a year of strangers. Families who welcomed me into their homes, their spaces, and their stories. I’ve been fed by other people’s mothers, driven around by someone else’s father. In Ernakulam, a family went out of their way to take me to a lunch with their family priest at their local temple. In Srinagar, a shikara owner took me on many trips across the empty Dal Lake, offering me stories of Kashmir and his family along with hot kahwa. In Bangalore I shared dosa and beers with a few professionals in Cubbon Park, united by their love for the written word and a WhatsApp group that shared long reads.
Everywhere I went I was offered chai before I was asked who I was and what I wanted, to the extent that I wonder if it’s not just God that people look for in temples and dargahs and churches, but a sense of belonging and grace, enacted by people who will never see you again.
I’ve also been to places of worship where everything felt transactional, where the line moved faster if money changed hands, or where I was asked why I was coming to a space whose denomination I wasn’t a part of.
The bus brakes hard. My body slides forward. Someone groans from the double berth across the aisle.
It’s also been a year of solitude. Some days solo traveling feels like freedom — unshackled, the whole world yours to move through. Other days I wonder if I’m alone because no one cared enough to come with me. If there’s a reason I’m on the single sleeper on the left side of the bus and not on the double sleeper across?
More than anything, it’s been a year of contrasts. I’ve moved through cities soaked in sweat and dust, then found myself at a rooftop bar looking out over a skyline I’d just spent three hours crawling through. I’ve eaten oily fried food at roadside stalls and come home to millet rotis and greens my mother made so I could detox. I’ve slept in rooms that cost less than the coffee I’d had that morning — thin walls, erratic water, a single flickering bulb — and, at least once, sank into a deep tissue massage I spent the whole time feeling I hadn’t earned.
I slide the curtain aside. Green canopy blurs past, the bus cutting through some forested stretch of the ghats. I let it fall closed.
It’s been a year of places I’ll carry with me. Pristine lakes in Ladakh, the water so still it felt like standing at the edge of paradise. A week of cold water baths at a monastery in the Himalayas; watching monks scroll through their phones with the same glazed expression I recognised from the London tube. Fenced borders where I looked across at people who looked like us but were apparently our enemies. Pujas in temples set up by communities that fled the Portuguese Inquisition; a peacock-feathered broom hitting me on the head in a Tamil dargah; meditating in a Buddhist cave older than the universities I went to; and speaking to a priest by the river Periyar who told me of the legend of St Thomas the Apostle crossing into India in the first century AD.
It’s also been a year of writing. Out of boredom, out of loneliness, out of frustration, out of love. I’ve also not written when I should have — let moments slip because I was too tired or too lazy or too inside them to step back and record. I’ve loved the writing and I’ve hated it. I’ve resented the pressure to produce instead of just being present.
Somewhere in the half-sleep that follows, I imagine myself sitting up, stumbling forward through the swerves, calling out to the driver. I can already feel the awkwardness of it, the way it would place me in the bus as someone who had punctured an unspoken equilibrium. In the dream I can’t tell whether I’d be taken for a nuisance — the one person who hadn’t learned how to lie still — or mistaken for a messiah, someone who had finally given shape to an anxiety everyone else was carrying.
The line blurs, as it does in dreams, and I find myself drifting into the idea of being the dark knight, the blanket wrapped around me like a cape, my face slick with night moisturiser — less a Batmanesque disguise than an attempt to ensure that if the hologram really was due to switch off tonight, I would at least go with my skin smooth, even if the ride itself wasn’t.
It’s been a year of unexpected tenderness. Friends who came to visit — hellos that brought a literal knot in my throat, which, for all the aunties keen on getting me hitched at the many weddings I went to this season, was sadly the only knot I came close to tying. There were voicenotes and letters from people I hadn’t spoken to in years, strangers messaging after reading something I wrote, moments of laughter that left me breathless and tears that arrived not from heartbreak, but from kindness, arriving at a time when the news offers little but war and cruelty.
Gradually the jolts soften. The hard braking gives way to longer pauses. We edge into Bangalore and the speed dissolves into its familiar, grinding traffic — the bus lurching forward in reluctant bursts, horns bleeding into one another, engines idling.
When I step out, seventeen hours after boarding, I feel as if both my soul, in maturity, and my lower back, in pain, have aged seventeen years instead.
None of this year fits neatly into a redemption arc. There was no turning point, no eureka moment this year. This was a year of accumulation, of becoming. Of waiting in traffic, of movement and stillness, of being alone and being okay with it (mostly) and being honest about the times I wasn’t. Of letting different versions of myself coexist without rushing to resolve them. It was the year I was offered roles, raises, alternative futures that made perfect sense on paper, and at the same time, it was the year I learnt to say: hold that thought, let me come back to you once I’m done exploring this other side of myself. For the first time I didn’t feel the need to collapse all my possibilities into one acceptable narrative.
And yet, alongside all of this, there’s something else I want 2026 to be about — something a friend said to me a few weeks ago. She was visiting India for the first time, and when asked what she was most excited about, she said it was seeing cows on the street. And so we spent the next two weeks pointing at each and every one: a herd crossing the highway on the way to Mathura; a few grazing in the fields outside Agra; a couple of water buffaloes bathing by a stream (apparently they didn’t count); dozens wandering the streets and alleys of Jaipur; and many more. There were many laughs, a fair few selfies, and even detours taken for the sole purpose of finding some. Two weeks of this, and I realised how much I’d stopped seeing what was right in front of me. So perhaps one resolution is this: to keep noticing the animals that share these streets — the goats, the cows, the sheeps, the dogs, the monkeys — and to let that be enough. To let wonder stay unambitious.
There’s more road ahead. More buses, more flights, more temples, more strangers who might become something more than strangers.
2025, you’ve been good. Now, 2026: let’s see what you’ve got.
A note, before the year closes:
The holiday season is here, and New Year’s not far behind. If you’ve been reading along this year — whether you found me in Leh or London, through a forwarded link or a late-night scroll — THANK YOU! It means more than I can say.
If you’ve ever thought about becoming a paid subscriber, now might be the moment: I’m offering 50% off as my way of saying thank you for being here.
And to those of you who’ve already been supporting this work: thank you for staying. As a small gesture of appreciation, I’ll be adding six extra months to your current subscription, automatically, no action needed.
What you’ll get: draft chapters from the books I’m working on, paid-subscriber-only posts, the full backlog of over two years of writing, and — if you email me your address after signing up — a postcard every quarter from wherever I happen to be.1
Hope you all have a fun and restful festive period, wherever you are, and I’ll see you in the new year.
I’ve heard from a couple of you that the last postcard from Kashmir is still somewhere between there and you. Apologies — India Post moves at its own pace. The next one will go out after the holiday period and will hopefully reach sooner.
Incredible reflection on trust and motion. The observation about collective stillness on that bus captures something profound about howsafety gets negotiated differently across cultures. I spent a few months backpacking in Southeast Asia years ago and had similar moments where surrender wasnt resignation but adaptation. The part about noticng cows again hit home becuase re-learning to see what's mundane is harder than discovering something new. That resolution to let wonder stay unambitious feels like the right counter-pressure to constant optimization.