I have always fantasised about dancing in a mustard field, my brightly coloured, swirling lehenga set off by the impossibly yellow banks of flowers swaying gently all around.
But I could never have dreamt up the form that my mustard-field fantasy has just taken. For here we are, driving through interminable swatches of mustard bumping over mud-packed bunds between fields climbing up and down sandbanks to cross unsupervised railway tracks negotiating small clearings packed with the inevitable buffaloes and stacks of drying dung. Ehsaan, our driver, jokes that we won't lack for sarson-ka-saag if our car stalls in an irrigation channel after nightfall. His driving skills eventually put us back on the highway some distance past the reason for our detour a roadblock created by irate local residents demanding exemptions from toll payments on State Highway 15A, just west of Farrukhnagar.