Geetanjali, a local and a fellow writer, had been quick to respond, and agreed to meet me for dinner the following night. “I hope they think we are not going to drool down our chins,” I recall Geetanjali saying at that first meeting, as we tucked our checked bibs back in for our second course – a heavenly tumble of tandoori veg – amid the restaurant’s strange Flintstone-eseque stonework decor.
Geetanjali filled me in on her life as a roving reporter across the Indian subcontinent and her mixed feelings about the Couchsurfing site. She’d hosted a few Western couchsurfers at her home in a residential colony in southeast Delhi, including a Norwegian tattoo artist who stayed for a night before disappearing in search of a “Tibetan doctor”, never to be seen again, and many fresh-faced Europeans who mangled her name: Getty, Geetanja, G. “I mean how hard is it, Gee-tan-ja-li?” she asked, genuinely baffled. I remember laughing a lot. It was to be the beginning of a decades-long friendship.
A novel website called Facebook
Three years later, I was back in Delhi to research a travel book project. By now, Geetanjali and I were firm friends, in touch weekly via a novel website called Facebook, and every 18 months or so when we serendipitously found ourselves on the same continent. I’d follow Geetanjali’s treks into enticing-sounding regions such as Mirzapur, in the fertile plains of Uttar Pradesh, and the Himalayas, and she followed me, virtually, into the depths of the Grand Canyon with cheerfully jealous postings (“Sally, I would be there with you in a heartbeat!”).
We shared a passion for big skies, grand natural landscapes and getting to know the locals anywhere our travels took us. In spite of our very different backgrounds, we came to feel like globetrotting sisters. In 2011, during a six-month trip to India, we set off on a series of off-the-beaten track adventures. Geetanjali’s children, who are these days grown up and studying at universities in Europe, were small, and I remember she would call home anxiously from guest houses as we headed off on adventures into Haryana, the rural state north of Delhi, and the northern Indian hill states.
