In Delhi it’s perfectly acceptable to live off a trust fund and spend your days camped at the golf club but Mumbai’s denizens appear to scorn a life of leisure. And egregious displays of socially irresponsible behaviour — such as the one presented by two disheveled middle-aged gents, donning wayfarers (undoubtedly to obviate evidence of nocturnal excess), driving enthusiastically out of town on a weekday morning — clearly grate commuters’ sensibilities.
It was, to be fair, a glorious Autumn day — the kind that ought to devoted entirely to golf and lager. As the wheels of commerce continued to turn in India’s financial capital, our two grizzled occupants, piloting a red Volkswagen Beetle were attempting to slink under the radar — out of town and on to a golf course. Duty crumbled in face of Wings: the former lay squashed between two golf bags in the back; the latter was in ascendance.
An efficient jailbreak from Bandra needs timing and patience: our duo needed to hotfoot it before the city woke up to its daily commute, navigate west through Mumbai’s unending suburbia and slip onto the Pune Expressway just past Khopoli. Despite failing miserably in that endeavour — buoyed by their successful French Leave — two shiny happy people were soon cruising along, smug grins pasted on their faces. Make that three: if cars could smile, then the VW Beetle does so from ear-to-ear. And its infectious enthusiasm was transmitted to its occupants, who, ensconced in the pop-art interior of the cabin, basking in the shaded light filtering through the sunroof, stepped on the gas keeping time with the Jazz standards streaming from the Bug’s eight-speaker extravagance. The car piped in with it’s own sonorous soundtrack to fill the lulls—sputter and rasp.
The Oxford Golf Club on the outskirts of Pune always makes for grand sight. Set in a bowl of an expansive valley in the Western Ghats, this resort’s location is absolutely stunning. Guests who descend on the resort for staycations lay their hats at Oxford’s chalets, perched on a vantage point overlooking the layout. On this occasion, enthusiastic strains of discordant karaoke emanate from the restaurant, while a spiffy groom and bride, with the endearing naiveté of eternal togetherness that only newly-weds possess, posed for posterity in the lawns.
In-residence enabled the two to make an early morning beeline for the first tee from where they proceede to explore as much of course’s 136-acre expanse without getting lynched by trailing groups. Only the Sahyadri Mountains, that isolate the course from three sides, prevented their superb play from tee to rough of tee-to rough from going further awry. There’s no escaping failure in golf. Can we escape the lives that were chosen for us? That might well be the biggest reason people get obsessively hooked to the game: during the four hours or so that it takes to finish a round, all other woes cease to exist—a failing that trumps all other.
Even by the dispassionate standards of course-conditioning, the Aamby Valley GC would easily rank amongst the most picturesque courses in the country. A spectacular natural location—on a sloping forested patch abutting a deep valley and encircled by low rolling hills; a complete lack of man-made sounds—silence except the chirping of the birds and wind whistling through the trees scythed occasionally by the sound of you golf club swishing through the air; and a gem of a layout—one of the better ones by David Hemstock; and you’ll forgive your writer writer for gushing. If you dream about golf, as most of us who play the game do, then this is pretty much how that would pan out.
The game comes back as mysteriously as it deserted the twoball at Oxford GC. The signature hole—the absolutely stunning 167-yard par 3 15th—is a deceptively difficult stunner of a hole. With out-of-bounds lurking behind the green, and all along the left side of the fairway, and a low-lying trough short of the green. The trough makes the hole seem shorter than it is, and the crosswinds mean that you could be using anything from a seven-iron to a rescue.
You blink, and the set changes. In a high-rise apartment back in Mumbai, the weekend gone by appears not like a lucid dream, but like the fragment of one. You’re left with a moment, standing on the brink of that cliff on the 15th hole at Aamby Valley, when time, life, everything, stood, perfectly still. “How long is forever?” asks Alice. “Sometimes, just one second,” says White Rabbit.