A man from Mysore has criss-crossed India on a 25-year-old scooter in six years with a pillion rider — his 75-year-old mother.

D. Krishna Kumar, 44, and Chudarathna, reached Calcutta on Monday, en route home.

The two have travelled over 94,000km since January 16, 2018, on a grey Bajaj Chetak that belonged to Kumar’s father. They have been to pilgrimages across the length and breadth of the country, from Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu to the Shankaracharya temple in Srinagar and from Dwarka in Gujarat to Parshuram Kund in Arunachal Pradesh.

They have also visited India’s eastern neighbours — Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar.

Kumar and his mother have put up at a guesthouse at the Ramakrishna Mission Belur Math. The Telegraph met them at the same place in May 2019, barely four months into the odyssey.

By then, they had already visited states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand. Now, there is hardly a pilgrimage in India that they have not been to.

“I am on a mission to serve my mother. This is why I have embarked on this journey,” said Kumar, a bachelor.

Chudarathna, who turned 75 on February 12, said she “enjoyed every bit of the journey”.

“I have gained the experience of a lifetime in a few years. My son is a very safe driver. He rides very slowly when the road is bad,” she said, smiling.

Kumar’s life changed after his father passed away in 2015. Chudarathna told her one day that she wanted to visit a temple in Halebeedu, a three-hour drive from Mysore.

“She had never been there; in fact, she had never been on any trip. Her life was spent doing domestic chores in a joint family. I was determined to change that,” said Kumar.

By then, he had “saved enough for two persons” and left his job soon.

When this newspaper met him six years ago, he had unkempt hair and a free-flowing beard. Wearing a Bruce Lee t-shirt, he looked more like a spiritual guru than the marketing professional he once was.

On Tuesday, the hair was short and the beard trimmed. Their journey was halted by the abrupt lockdown announced in March 2020 to tackle the outbreak of Covid-19.

They were in Samsing, a town in Jalpaiguri, known for its tea gardens, at the time.

“We had taken shelter at the home of a resident. We spent close to two months there,’ said Kumar.

Raju Bista, the BJP MP from Darjeeling, contacted Kumar and offered him a passage to his home in Mysore.

B. S. Yediyurappa, the then chief minister of the BJP government in Karnataka, also reached out to Kumar. “I received the necessary papers for the travel and left Bengal. I reached the Karnataka border in seven days,” he said.

On August 15, 2022, Krishna and Chudarathna started again. In the second leg, they visited Telangana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

The return journey from Kashmir took them to Punjab, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat, among other places. They returned to Mysore in December 2023.

The third leg started on February 28 this year. During Covid, I had to cut my travel short. We missed several spots along the eastern coast of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. I wanted to make up for it,” he said.

“Kumar, who speaks several languages, has also picked up some Bengali, like “amar pronam neben (please take my respects)”.

Riding his father’s scooter makes the journey more endearing. “We feel he is with us,” said Kumar.

The mother and son do not prefer staying in hotels. They look for shelters in temples and maths and eat prasad. The two are vegetarians and carry flattened rice and fruits, to be mixed with fresh curd they buy.

Kumar rode his two-wheeler till Gaurikund, the base camp of Kedarnath, before shifting to palanquins for his mother. But the most challenging ride he had to endure was at Sela Pass in Arunachal Pradesh, located near the China border in Tawang, at an altitude of more than 13,500ft.

“Our journey has been most special because we have been able to witness up close what we have always read and heard about — that the unity in diversity is India’s pride,” said Kumar.