There are many unfortunate things that one categorises—in the subconscious, perhaps, where no spore of political correctness or glum reason pings—as happening only to others. A tyre-burst on a highway is one of them, especially if one is a resoundingly stay-at-home man, especially if one has not cared to learn to drive, especially if one’s car time, despite being in a country constantly reshaping itself for cars, is very, very low. The thing with unfortunate things, however, is that some of them do happen to you. For example, you die. How irritating! And if you must die there must be an unfortunate cause. Why not a tyre-burst on a highway?
It was a 155/80 R13 tyre, if you must know. Diminutive, you would say, if you knew how to read these things (I still don’t). Diminutive, most definitely, considering the monstrous round things that go into the Mahindra Thars and the Toyota Fortuners of the world. It belonged to a Nissan Micra—our Micra.
Here’s the scene: my wife is driving, I’m on the other front seat, my mother and younger brother are in the back seat. To put it with true sentiment: my whole world is in there. We are excited. It is late October. A cousin is getting engaged at a resort near the Punjab-Himachal border, and we are taking the opportunity to enjoy a three-day stay in Kasauli before attending the celebrations. We started this morning from Muzaffarnagar, which is where my mother lives. We cross Deoband on a flyover, from where we marvel at the domes and minarets of the grand masjid visible to our left. We bypass Saharanpur and Jagadhri. After Jagadhri is when it happens: the injury.
A wall painting at a bus shelter in Kasauli, invoking a famous Hindi film catchphrase and adding levity to an otherwise quiet hill road.
| Photo Credit:
Tanuj Solanki
That a highway should have potholes is another unfortunate thing, though one so common that in no corner of your mind can you categorise it as something that only other cars have to negotiate. Our car is running at 80 kilometres an hour, and up ahead is a “road-wound” so wide that it is impossible to avoid the whole of it. Our left front tyre gets the worst, and the resulting thwack and judder is violent.
Just a halt, not the end
We drive on, though. After about five minutes the car begins to bob up and down. I’m told that those who drive a fair bit know this as a sign of a puncture. The thought does cross my mind, but for some reason I convince myself that the effect has something to do with the patch of highway we are on, and that it will soon be alright. A couple of more minutes and there is a mini-explosion on the front left side. The car swerves to the left uncontrollably, almost hitting a motorcycle with two men on it. There is a screeching sound, akin to half a dozen chalk sticks drawing forced circles on an enamel board. Time slows down for me, and I notice the men on the motorcycle looking back at our front left tyre. I look at my wife to ascertain if she has control of the car. Her eyes tell me things are fifty-fifty. “Tyre’s gone,” we shout together, and somehow—perhaps in the very next instant or in several troubled seconds that we experience as glued together—she’s able to bring the car to a halt at the roadside.
Here the persnickety among you might be tempted to suggest that what I have claimed as a tyre-burst is actually only a puncture stretched too far—by rank novices, no less. You would not say this if you saw the tyre. It had exploded. I learned—while simultaneously marvelling at the fact—that a car tyre has a metal mesh within its layers. The mesh in ours had come out as twisted net and wires. The tyre had a hole the size of a fist.
We had a spare one. But, as you might have guessed, we had no experience of doing the deed. Replacing a tyre requires sense and strength. I had only some contributions to make in the first department, and the responsibility to fill the massive skill gap was taken up ably by my brother.
But what if your enemy is the road.
| Photo Credit:
Nikita Gupta
I am reminded here of a quote attributed to Leo Tolstoy: “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” I don’t disagree; what would be the point? But if I was allowed to suggest a corollary, I would propose that a family going on a vacation is a scenario that needs some distinguishing. Members of a family know each other, to an extent that despite the new experiences that a vacation offers and despite the novel responses and actions that these experiences elicit, members shall still limn patterns in each other that they are all too familiar with. It is entirely possible for a mother to comment on the elder son’s general gaucherie in a puncture-and-tyre-replacement scenario; just as it is possible for the mother to stay mum and for the elder son to still feel some prickles of criticism. I’m not saying this happened in my case; I’m saying it would be worth considering if, say, this were fiction. Which is still nothing to say of the wife’s inner life at the moment: it could be full of self-criticism, for having failed to sense a puncture or to do the precautionary things that could have averted the scenario; or it could be full of criticism for the husband, for being a thorough car noob and all-round passenger princess. Of the pride felt by the brother: well, what to say, dear reader, what to say.
Half an hour later, we were ready for the road again. As we got back in the car, I remarked on the absolute necessity of buying a new tyre. “We have no spare now,” I said, as if this fact needed emphasis. All through our way to Kasauli, we tried to find a place where we could make the purchase, but had no luck. If we had ventured deeper into Chandigarh, it would surely be done but we (my wife, primarily) decided to play our luck, which, after the almighty scare it had handed us, decided to keep to its lane.
Idyll ruined
Now to speak of Kasauli. Ever since watching Dil Chahta Hai as a teenager, I had imagined Kasauli as the most serene of hill stations, a place that artists—like Akshaye Khanna’s character, Sid—frequent for focussing on art, especially after some emotional turmoil. You would recall Sid’s spat with Akash, Aamir Khan’s character, in the movie. Finding serenity requires some effort in Kasauli. Actually, how much of Chandigarh is present in Kasauli on any given weekend might be a good statistical exercise. There isn’t any serenity, fair to say, at the town’s central square, where a statue of hockey legend Major Dhyan Chand is frequently the cause of a frenzy of picture-taking. Gangs of monkeys, adept at grabbing at bags from women and children, snuff out any vestigial chances of walking by without anxiety. The trails are pleasant and soothing, though walking in the cantonment area one cannot avoid the feeling that it would have been so much better if only one were friends with a Brigadier or something. One could find treks, one could walk off the beaten path. But an attempt to do so soon comes with the revelation that one’s mother’s enthusiasm is actually false bravado.
An outcrop of houses on the side of a hill in Kasauli. The place did not turn out to be the tranquil hill station or artists’ haven the writer imagined from having watched Dil Chahta Hai in his teenage years.
| Photo Credit:
Flickr/Debraj Ghosh
Shared meals, shared time, new environs—that is what it comes down to, I guess. And that is always enough. My mother cannot—will not—eat momos, and that didn’t change in Kasauli, despite some fun attempts on our part. If my wife and I like the food at one restaurant, we are liable to revisit it all through the vacation, which is what happened, again, in Kasauli. My brother will not fail to reignite old jokes, which is a habit he once again stuck to, effortlessly, in Kasauli. We hypothesise around my late father (“What would he say about this?”) when we are all together, and we did that aplenty in Kasauli. Perhaps a measure of serenity can also be noted in this: a family being same-same in a new place. Those three days were the fastest three days of 2025.
And then, the morning when our stay in Kasauli was over, our tyre-anxiety returned. We continued to play our luck. During our onward trip to the resort where my cousin was to be engaged, each check for tyre pressure came out positive. But our trip back to Muzaffarnagar was most dramatic. We had seven checks for air pressure during the journey, and on four occasions we were told that we had a puncture. It was a new tyre each time! This plethora of punctures is an unfortunate thing that not many others have suffered—I am sure of this. There were occasions when it felt that news of our anxiety had been relayed all along our path, and that a secret conspiracy was at play. We did manage to reach home in one piece, though, and as the comfort of home began to create space for theorising, we mused that the Indian road is no space for the small car anymore.
The tyres were replaced eventually, dear reader. I’m writing this from another vacation, in fact: from the haveli town of Mandawa in Rajasthan: this time it’s just me and my wife. We did two air pressure checks on our way here. No punctures.
Tanuj Solanki is the author, most recently, of the novel Manjhi’s Mayhem.
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