One morning in 1995 Tara Bariana walked out of his house in Walsall and didn’t stop walking until he had reached the village in the Punjab where he was born and grew up. Ten thousand miles in 19 months is a lot of footwork. What made him do it?
‘I came here in 1960 with my mother and two sisters,’ he told Clare Balding in Ramblings (Saturday), her Radio 4 programme dedicated to those who love nothing better than to tramp for miles with no other objective in mind than the reassuring pleasure of putting one foot in front of the other. ‘But I’ve never forgotten my childhood; those early years in the village.’ He had been back to India two or three times, but always by plane. Flying between his two homes, so far apart, so very different, always left him with a question. What lies between the West Midlands and the Punjab? ‘There was always a darkness in my mind between here and there,’ he said. ‘The void.’
Bariana wanted to know what it was like in between, and realised this meant crossing the terrain, not flying over it. To reconcile the gulf between his early home and where he lives now, to bring those two parts of his life together, he needed to witness how people change as you travel through (not over) Europe and into Asia, across the border of France and into Italy, then Greece, Turkey and Iran. ‘From Turkey onwards it changes,’ he said. ‘It becomes more Indian as you go.’
Balding talked to Bariana, his son and grandchildren as they walked through the dense woodland of Cannock Chase just north of Birmingham. How did he prepare for such an amazingly long trek? He trained for three years, walking from his home and into the wood, often between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m.,
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