I have no birth claim on Madhya Pradesh. The state arrived in my life the way the best things have — through people. It came with my marriage: Balaghat, my in-laws' town in the far southeast, where the Wainganga flows and Kanha's tigers are nearly neighbours. A lot of my Madhya Pradesh discovery I owe to my in-laws. Their home became a door, and the state kept walking through it.
Then I started noticing. Two of my closest friends are also from Madhya Pradesh — grown on the same soil, carrying it with them the way people carry a home state without mentioning it. I never chose this state. It keeps choosing the people around me.
This August we drove the circuit out of Balaghat. Amarkantak first, where the Narmadā is born — you stand at a small kund and a river that will run over a thousand kilometres begins quietly at your feet. Then Jabalpur, seen mostly through a rained-out windscreen; we owe it a proper visit. Then up the ghats to Pachmarhi, and home. An earlier trip had already taken us to Kanha and to Pench — which I only later learned are Kipling's own Seeonee hills. Mowgli's forest, an afternoon's drive from my in-laws' door.
In Pachmarhi, a framed map on a wall stopped me cold — Pachmarhi and Environs, four inches to a mile. I had it down as some British geologist's work; it turned out to be a Survey of India sheet, printed in 1912, hanging from the same web of triangles that once measured Everest. I stood in front of it wondering how to explain contour lines to my son. By evening it had become a page; the state followed; now there is an atlas on this site that lights up wherever this family stands. Six places glow so far. The rest are the plan.
And two walks wait on that map like open questions. The Kāwad Yātrā — carry the sacred water on foot and do not set it down until it is poured over Shiva: a test of bhakti bhāv, of what you carry. And the Narmadā Parikramā — three thousand-odd kilometres around the whole river, source to sea and back, never crossing her: a test of grit and of the mind, examined daily for months. One is devotion, the other endurance. I suspect they are the same test, set at different lengths.
My tradition has a word for accounts that stay open across lifetimes — ṛṇānubandha, the bond of debt that keeps pulling you back to certain people, certain soil, until something is settled. A state I have no birth claim on, arriving through my wife's family, through my friendships, through a map on a hotel wall, through my son's questions. Some past-life connection, it seems? I could be wrong. But the account is clearly still open — and I find I am in no hurry to close it.