An Ooty Downpour, May 24, 2014

This post has been selected for BlogAdda's TangyTuesday Picks (July 1, 2014).

It was not the first time Ooty saw me. She had, in fact, known me back in 2008, much before I got married, even before I shifted to Bangalore. The wind under my wings had grown curiously strong those days, and they could fly me from Kolkata to Hyderabad to Bangalore to Ooty, all in a single weekend, at the drop of a hat. Prior bookings? Who cared 'bout them? Hectic schedules? Who gave a damn? 

But now that I am married, and (therefore) chubbier, and have Lazy-lazy-lazybonesourav as my husband, and was travelling for the first time with my new parents, things were different. Full-sleeper bus berths were booked via Redbus well in advance, and MakeMyTrip hotel listings were scanned and re-scanned to achieve absolute unanimity of choice. The results were somewhat lukewarm. While I snored gracefully (or so my husband claims) throughout the night of our journey (from Bangalore to Ooty), the rest of the folks

 had sleep rattled out of their eyes and bones by the jerky ride. And the first glance of the hotel we had booked, Maruthi Cottages, had us suspect the plus-fifty praise-gushing MakeMyTrip/TripAdvisor reviewers to be bots. 

Ooty welcomed us with a torrential downpour that had Sourav and I undertake nothing short of an adventure in order to procure lunch. Our hotel offered no dining or room service facilities, though their website designer had the gifted imagination to advertise separate vegetarian and non-vegetarian restaurants in the premise. We ate, watched the rains, sneaked into our blankets, still watched the rains, slept, dreamt of an Ooty in floods, and finally woke up to a lovely, mildly rain-sodden evening tempting us to step out. We ventured out to the Botanical Gardens that was muddy, splashy and on the verge of a stampede, courtesy to an impressive flower show, an unimpressive cultural event and some ministerial visit. Maruthi Cottages turned out to be stone's throw away from Charring Cross, the commercial center of Ooty. And we somewhat forgave the bots on MakeMyTrip after tasting some of the renowned handmade chocolates sold in the shops lined along Charring Cross. 

Night descended with the gleam of a thousand meditating fireflies seated on the hill slopes. We watched mesmerized, only until one of the two supposedly out-of-order TVs in our cottage sprang back to life. City humans, alas, give in to the lure of the idiot box a little too quickly. Some random IPL match, some more heavenly chocolates, a few more clicks, reminiscence of many other hillside trips, and with that, our Day I at Ooty came to its closure.