IT was a summer afternoon deep inside the forest -- no network, no village within kilometres, nobody at all -- when Aamrapali Devidas Padghan’s heavy motorcycle fell into a stone-filled drain and would not come up. She tried to lift it. She could not. She had never lifted a motorcycle before even on a plain road. But she tried again. Same result. So she sat beside the machine in the heat, took a photograph of herself with the fallen motorcycle, looked at it, and tried once more. This time, she lifted it. She rode home and told no one.

 

This is the woman who will, in the first week of April, start her motorcycle at Kanyakumari -- the last land before India becomes ocean -- and ride alone to Kashmir. Three thousand six hundred kilometres. Fourteen states. Seven days. No support vehicle, no team, just NH-44 running north through the entire length of the country. She will attempt it as a women’s record. The route is plain in its demand. Day one: Kanyakumari to Bengaluru, 670 kilometres. Then Bengaluru to Hyderabad. Then northward through Nagpur, Jhansi, Delhi, Jammu -- until the seventh morning brings her the last 260 kilometres into Srinagar. Each evening she stops at the nearest city. Each morning she starts again at first light. No room for anything else. The idea for the journey came from Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries -- the account of a young man who rode through South America until he understood it from the inside. Something in it reached her and stayed. She wants to cover all of India, she says, and then the world. Kanyakumari to Kashmir is the first direction of the same. She grew up in Washim district.

 

She played kabaddi as a girl and came home hurt sometimes. Once, sitting on the ground holding an injured leg, her father told her that if she wanted to sit holding her legs, she did not need to go to the ground at all. “This kind of tough love has made me the kind to never give up in any adversity”, she shares emotively. The forest, which she entered in 2017, has given her nine years of practice at this. Twenty-four-hour duty at Bor Wildlife Sanctuary, Bordharan, Wardha -- patrolling tiger corridors at hours that cannot be decided in advance, and walking into villages rescuing cobras and pythons.

 

At Amar Enduro Park in Nagpur, under founder Ashok Munne -- a mountaineer and rallyist -- she has spent months training: emergency braking, night riding, mountain cornering, first aid, roadside repairs, simulation runs of 400-plus kilometres. For when the machine fails at midnight on an empty highway in an unknown state, no one is coming. That is simply the condition of the journey she has chosen. When she thinks of the little girls watching -- she says that no matter how much backlash you receive, no matter if anyone believes in your capabilities or not, you should go for your dream, for, as she says, anything is possible if you set your mind to it.