The Old Footprints

Why do we want to read a book? And why do we want to read fiction in the first place? Maybe the lies are good enough to put you to sleep, or maybe because you find the truth between those lies. Does it irritate you when the smell of a book plays with your concentration, or do you read like the rest of us, a nonfiction? You and I are the rest of us and when I tell you the story, it is you and me, and not the rest. 

In The Old Footprints, the boy explores his relationship with his hometown, his crude memories of growing up in a violent family, town-walking, and street foods. The boy grew up listening to home-bound tales, in the times of gully cricket and forests freshly cut for abandoned projects of National Highway, and the sense of loss that comes ever-after. In a conservative town where you grow up to either prepare to be a government officer, or take over your parent’s business, a boy dreams of the adventures of Santio - to find his own treasure at the foot of the pyramids. Will he achieve his dream?

In a world where self-help books are filled with “Know Yourself” and the people travelling across continents to find their true selves, and in the cliche-est sense, The Meaning of Life - this boy of 19 sets out backpacking across Rajasthan, only to get lost, his photographs and memories erased while stargazing at the Thar desert sky. 

As the boy continues on his journey of self-realisation, missing his hometown at times, comparing the plateaus as far as sight goes with the gush winds flooding into the bus, it takes him to the pink stones, and his love for the landscape, all reigniting again as he sees vast changes in the life-forms and life-systems. 

But will these experiences remain with the boy forever? 

Or will he lose all he learns after coming back to his homeland, Hazaribagh, unable to find the intersection between the two truths - two real experiences, vivid, black and white, both just and unjust, and both of them him. The pursuit left him in even more complicated terms than he had left home with. Maybe that’s what pursuits do sometimes. Torn up between old and new ideas, only to grow slowly more maddened in his closed bedroom, suddenly unable to tackle the obnoxious air of discontent that used to be so familiar - and questioning all he knew to be true, the whats and whatnots, and how and how-nots.

The book closely follows the mind of a somebody taking refuge in landscapes and poems, because they’re the only thing that gets him. Trying to find his own meaning in life amidst reading storybooks and running away at night to stargaze on his roof. 

And the story explores the dreams of an ordinary boy and his relationship with everything around himself and with the inside of his own head. It is a tale of intersections, web mingling and secondary colours.