In the breakfast room, Sarah recognized me immediately and asked with a smile whether I had managed to find vegan food at the Tarka Lounge the night before. When I told her it was the best meal I’d had on the trip so far, she practically started glowing. She eagerly brought out my coffee and oat milk before disappearing into the kitchen to cook my breakfast. When I looked down, the milk looked suspiciously white. I hesitated for a moment, but found no logical reason to suspect Sarah. As I sat there, she checked on me again, noticed me struggling with the cafeteria filter, and kindly showed me that I just needed to push the plunger down to make it easier.
I often make these kinds of silly mistakes intentionally just to test people's reactions. At home, both Ashwini and the kids consistently prefaced their help with, "I don't know how you got a job at Meta..." before showing me what I am doing wrong.
A few minutes later, Sarah rushed out of the kitchen, her face completely pale with horror. She apologized profusely, explaining that she had accidentally poured me regular cow's milk, and offered to replace the coffee immediately. I controlled my composure with great effort, smiled, and told her it was completely fine. I genuinely do not mind when honest mistakes happen, and looking at the sheer sadness on her face, I stuck firmly to my narrative. I really didn't want to make her feel bad. Of course, the coffee now tasted like absolute poison the moment the realization hit me, but I drank it down regardless. When I finally left, Sarah wished me well, followed me all the way to the front door, and apologized one last time.
Day 5 set off in a completely different environment, beginning with a walk through the Barnstaple town center before joining the Tarka Trail. The atmosphere here was unlike any other day on the path; there was a constant stream of people walking, running, and cycling. Yet, paradoxically, the journey felt far more silent than walking completely alone through miles of deserted cliffs. Few people returned my smiles, and the crowd only made the trail feel lonelier. I felt a powerful urge to break the silence and turn on Spotify, but I had already taken a silent oath to abandon the app. I could hear my friend Aishwarya teasing me in my ears: "remember, Once you decide something, You don't even listen to yourself!" The weight of maintaining this stubborn, false image can be quite suffocating.
It’s not like I am a big talker anyway. It's the opposite—I seldom speak. Back home, my mother routinely tells the villagers that I only smile, likely because she gets tired of answering questions about my limited vocabulary. In school, our teachers always encouraged more writing and less talking. During high school, my friend Vijay and I routinely competed over who could fill more pages. In a three-hour window, we would easily produce a 24-page answer booklet, knowing teachers felt too guilty to award anything less than four marks per page. Yet today, my close friends complain about my four-page blog. I even started naming friends in the posts as a form of paid advertisement, but I'm still operating at a loss.
People who talk non-stop have always fascinated me. In college, I ended up rooming with Ballu. Once he started talking, he simply couldn't stop. He possessed an incredible memory and knew everything under the sun with absolute accuracy. I initially thought I would benefit immensely from his knowledge, but like a standard Indian husband, he spent his entire day and night hidden away in the computer center, only returning to the room after 11:00 PM. Naturally, we never fought.
When I first moved to the UK, I had another colleague named Harshad who operated on the exact same frequency. Unlike Ballu, Harshad was always by my side whenever he visited the office. Whenever we took the bus together, his voice would completely fill the space; it felt like even the vehicle entered a silent mode just to accommodate him. Sometimes it actually concerned me, but Harshad was never bothered by the bus. While I certainly gained a lot of knowledge and entertainment from him, I never could comprehend how his brain managed to grasp and retain things so vividly.
I missed those interactions for years after starting driving and commuting alone. Covid and remote work aggravated it further. With the Meta office moving to Kings Cross, I found that dynamic return during occasional office visits, this time through Deepti. By then, I had mastered dealing with natural talkers. She would speak non-stop for ten minutes, at which point I was required to speak for exactly two minutes to keep the momentum going. My strategy was simple: I would intentionally state something factually incorrect about a topic she knew inside out, so she could naturally interject and take over for another ten minutes. It worked beautifully since I prefer listening to talking. After a while, however, I realized I hadn't placebo-tested my theory, so I adjusted the ratio to 50:50—my absolute practical limit. That completely dismantled the system, and she abruptly changed her morning train timings. I couldn't take the insult lying down, so I shifted my timings to match hers. She didn't usually care about competing, but when challenged, she could be even more stubborn than me; she immediately shifted to an even later train. It was then I realized there was no point winning the battle only to lose the war. If I kept competing, I would lose my office breakfast—and absolutely nothing is more precious than that.
To be fair, the path itself wasn’t actually boring. It was a beautiful tarmac road winding through a lush green landscape with the river running along one side—the kind of place lovers would consider an absolute paradise. And there were quite a lot of them, which made the journey feel even more horrible as a solo hiker. The previous day, I had spotted a girl sitting on the edge of a cliff, completely absorbed in painting for hours. I could genuinely appreciate and enjoy a quiet moment like that, but walking non-stop while being forced to look at couples holding hands was a different story.
I never once saw my dad holding my mother’s hand while walking, nor did I ever see Ashwini’s parents do the same. Yet, somehow, she had developed this firm idea that good couples must always hold hands when they walk. Naturally, unlike her, I prefer action movies—where the hero only holds a hand when he’s dragging someone into a fight!
In order to truly understand this hand-holding phenomenon, I began closely observing the couples passing me by, and a very clear picture emerged. The people holding hands were invariably unmarried. It was easy enough to verify; either they were simply too young, or the woman wasn't wearing a mangalya. In a few odd cases, I did spot people in their forties or fifties holding hands, but that data remained inconclusive because they could have married later in life or found a new partner entirely.
Everyone else was walking with a dog, and they were out in massive numbers. It was only then that I realized the dog is just a pretext. It isn’t actually a profound love for dogs that drives them, but rather a lack of romantic vigor to showcase love to their actual partner. Later on, I extended my research and found that people who absolutely hate dogs simply go for hiking poles or children as an alternative buffer.
Suddenly, a realization hit me. Ashwini had been saying recently that she wanted to buy a dog, and now everything made perfect sense! I immediately began visualizing the absolute perfect gift for her 50th birthday: a romantic gesture that no one have attempted in my 5 days of walk, taking her for a Tarka Trail walk, with me holding a dog in one hand and her hand in the other!
By this point, the bullet ant blisters on my feet were becoming increasingly uncomfortable, tempting me to stop and rest every now and then. However, the voice of my friend Abhinandan kept echoing in my ears, constantly repeating: "If you stop, it will be much harder to restart." That had never actually been the case for me on previous walks, but hearing his warning on loop in my head a few times was somehow making it a physical reality. I had to keep moving.
Passing Fremington and heading toward Instow, a peculiar formation of stones caught my attention. It was the Yelland Stone Row. Apparently, it was laid down roughly 4,500 years ago by Neolithic people, though the rising sea has since consumed and submerged the majority of it. Staring at those ancient, half-drowned remnants offered a brief, welcome distraction from the tarmac.
Instow itself wasn’t too far away. Back at the B&B, Sarah had suggested that I take the ferry from here across the water to Appledore to save my feet. But when I arrived, there were no ferries running; apparently, they can only operate during high tide. A wicked idea struck when I spotted a young boy selling ice creams nearby. I would ask for a vegan option, confident that a local kid wouldn’t know the difference and would simply hand me whatever was closest. He looked at me without missing a beat and directed me to walk all the way to Bideford.
As I resumed, I passed walkers photographing an old signal booth, muttered ‘tourists’ under my breath, and moved on — only to discover later it holds a significant place in British railway history. I dragged my feet further, passing more walkers, runners, and cyclists, but none of them did anything to change my mood. Out of sheer boredom, I finally cracked, picked up my phone, and called my friend Sriram. He had recently moved back to India and usually always had time for his friends. But today of all days, even he rejected my call; it turned out he was traveling in Europe, and apparently, that is the only time he actually does any office work!
Right as I was thinking about him, the colors of the trail changed all of a sudden. A beautiful, six-foot-tall lady came running toward me. I intentionally slowed my pace just to enjoy the scenery, and even as she passed and faded into the distance, she remained a commanding six feet tall.
Witnessing that height instantly unlocked a story from my past—one that I have never shared with a single soul until now.
Back in 2008, when we were migrating back to India, I went to Heathrow Airport to receive my wife. We had spent almost three months apart without seeing each other, which remains the longest stretch we've ever been separated, even to this day. I was confident I remembered exactly what she looked like, so I kept a sharp lookout at the arrivals gate. After waiting a long time, I spotted someone who looked just like her walking toward me from a distance. As she drew closer, however, her height seemed to keep increasing. I was absolutely thrilled, naively wondering if staying apart from your husband could somehow cause a sudden growth spurt. When she got within a few meters, I finally recognized the face clearly—it was Deepika Padukone. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. But I kept on waiting; I am a principled and committed man, after all.
A couple of minutes later, I noticed a luggage trolley rolling down the terminal entirely on its own. It was stacked high with three massive bags, balanced precisely one over the other. I stood there thoroughly impressed by the advanced robotics behind this driverless trolley. As it finally rolled closer, however, the illusion shattered: I could see my wife walking behind it.
She wasn't even five feet tall, despite what had been advertised on her matrimonial page. I do remember a few people commenting on our height difference when we were getting married, but I had never considered height a metric worth worrying about. That day at Heathrow, I finally realized why those people had been so concerned. Still, I was right, it was difficult, but not impossible to spot her behind the trolley.
Some more mental rumblings later, I found myself crossing the Bideford Long Bridge. At the time, I had absolutely no idea I was walking across a historic medieval masterpiece featuring 24 arches—each built to a completely different size, mathematically proportional to the wealth of the specific trustee who had sponsored it. All I cared about was finding a seat. I stopped at a local café and treated myself to a stunning avocado on toast alongside a vegan cake that quite literally came with a free hammer just to break it apart. Even the café's toilet was historic enough to be worth mentioning; it is a baseline memory I will carry with me for a long time.
With my stomach finally full, I pulled a classic Abhinandan—locking into a rhythm and refusing to stop again until I hit Westward Ho!. I didn't add both ! and . to fool you into thinking my text wasn't AI-curated, but this is the only place in the whole UK with a ! as part of the official name.
Once there, I spent ten minutes on the shore watching kite surfers, fascinated by how they managed to navigate the air. For a fleeting moment, I considered adding it to my list of future hobbies, but my 200GB cloud storage was already full. The wind here was undoubtedly the second highest I had ever witnessed in the UK, with gusts screaming across the coast at a recorded 56.7 mph. The beach looked never-ending—a vast desert where the gales created a literal sandstorm right on the Devon coast. It allowed me to sing loudly without hearing myself, producing the best vocal performance of my life.
Battling through the flying sand, I finally reached my B&B, which doubled as a lively local pub packed with people. After a long-awaited bath, I grabbed a table outside and tried to convince myself that my glass of lemonade was an adequate reward for the uneventful day. Everyone else was laughing and busy playing Bingo inside. I haven't yet developed the skill to bribe a stranger to keep me company over a pint anyway.
