Pondicherry Journal: 1 — The Road to Pondy

Originally published on The Creative Cafe.

Co-travelers (Taken by me on Oct 14, 2017 near Krishnagiri)

Oct 14, 2017 Sat 10:00 AM approx, on the way from Bangalore to Pondy.

In Bengali, ‘ghumiye kaada’ is an often-used phrase. It roughly translates to ‘sleeping as mud’ -which probably sounds ludicrous to uninitiated ears. But at this moment no other construct of words would better apply to Piku. Dear journal, my son turns two in a couple of months, and it’s his first road trip out of the city. Cozy in his hooded sweatshirt with stripes of red and white, grey lounge pants and a pair of striped pink socks, Piku is in a sleep so deep that he seems unconscious, somewhat like the formless mud that splatters all over unless contained in a vessel. I, his vessel, have gathered him carefully between my arms, chest and thighs.

My co-travelers in this journey are also the closest of my co-travelers in the journey of life.

Seated beside me in the back of our four-year old Hyundai i10 is my mother. Physically in her early sixties and mentally somewhere around an indomitable forty, Ma hasn’t let her recent knee pain stand in the way of the trip. Drifting between light slumber, chit-chat and munching on the light snacks I stocked up for the trip, her eyes look breezy and cheerful. She has awaited this trip for more than a year.

Sourav, my husband of six years and friend of fifteen, is driving the car. A man of great calm, he has so far resisted the temptation to exceed 80 km/hr on his very first beyond-city-limits highway drive, and is allowing every other car to overtake us with absolute chill.

The front passenger seat is occupied by my father. Seventy and rapidly slipping deeper into the mazes of vascular dementia, Bu (as I call him) had to be coaxed to join us. Fortunately, he doesn’t look too unhappy as of now as he sits taking in the splendid view of the hills and greenery scattered all along the stretch of road between Krishnagiri and Sengam.

These are the pillars of my life. It’s not that we’ve always been a close-knit family; one could rather say that in response to circumstances, we’ve learnt to cross the gaps between (and the silent voids within) us to extend hands of support to each other, so that we may all stay afloat in the elusive pursuit of meaningful existence.

Family is an amazingly resilient social construct — time has taught me.

For the sake of maintaining records, let me also introduce to you the route we’re on. According to the discussions on travel forums, the two most popular routes to drive to Pondicherry from Bangalore (without night halt) are the following –

1. Bangalore-Hosur-Krishnagiri-Sengam-Thiruvannamalai-Thindivanam-Pondicherry (320 km).

2. Bangalore-Hosur-Krishnagiri-Vellore-Arcott-Cheyur-Tindivanam-Pondicherry (377 km)

Posts dated 2015 and earlier report potholes near Thiruvannamalai on route 1 — which is also the shortest of all routes. Half-hoping that the road conditions may have improved by now, Sourav favored this one over the widely praised route 2 for our onward journey. We started amid a drizzle at 6:30 AM in the morning, halted at a restaurant near Krishnagiri around 8, started again at around 9:30 and so far the road has been excellent. Google Map expects us to reach our destination by 1:30 PM, though we don’t really mind being slowed down a little by a short stretch of bad road as long as the cyclonic rains forecasted in yesterday’s news do not hit us en route.

Our breakfast venue of the day (Taken by me on Oct 14, 2017)

At the risk of sounding promotional, I will make a special mention of this restaurant where we stopped for breakfast. It is named Hotel Saravana Bhavan Classic, is sufficiently well-maintained, serves its dishes (mostly South Indian delicacies) steaming hot, offers the tastiest chutneys and sambar I’ve tasted in a long time, has a huge parking space and most importantly, offers several washrooms for men and women which are clean and usable. The site also offers an unhindered view of many layers of rocky hillocks stretched across a wide horizon with no hoardings or high-rises to block your gaze. After freshening up and finishing with our breakfast, we spent quite a few minutes lazing around under the soft morning sun and taking snaps before we got back into the car.

Piku was alert for over an hour since he woke up halfway through our breakfast. Delighted at the sight of the hillocks, he insisted on calling them ‘flower’ instead of ‘pahar’, the Bengali word for mountains and hills. Repeated attempts to correct him resulted in long-drawn negotiations with both parties, soon frustrated, settling temporarily for the middle ground of ‘power’. The debate was also cut short by a sudden shift of attention to wheels, my son’s perennial obsession. We had by then joined the queue for light motor vehicles at a multi-lane toll booth, and the great assemblage of wheels all around him (attached to their vehicles, of course, but who cares about them!) set him absolutely berserk. It is easy to feed Piku while he is distracted. Stories of mama wheels and baby wheels on all sorts of misadventures were eagerly gulped down along with milk, banana and biscuits before the kid fell asleep once again.

You see, when you’re parent to a fussy eater, little else gives you more relief than seeing your kid eat. Our last two long trips with Piku, both to our hometown Kolkata and each involving three weeks of stay, were marked by acute stress as our son, a baby then, refused solids for days and weeks and ended up losing considerable weight by the time we returned home. The primary reason we chose Pondicherry as our holiday destination this time was to be able to relax. We’ve planned a stay of three nights at Hotel Treebo Grace Inn in the beautiful White Town (also known as the French Quarter), and that’s a span short enough for us to afford not to worry even if Piku doesn’t eat well. Besides, all of us have visited Pondy earlier — me twice, Sourav five times, Bu twice and Ma once. This takes off the pressure to cover the sightseeing points. And lastly, the city is modern and equipped enough to address medical emergencies if any were to arise during our stay there. Because Bu is prone to accidental falls, that’s a possibility we cannot rule out.

Personally, all I want to do in the next three days is to stroll along the Promenade Beach, try out French cuisines with unpronounceable names, breath in the grace and calm of this former French colony that cares to preserve its old world charm, and witness the blossoming of a bond between two tiny humans, Piku and Gungun, who’ll be meeting each other for the very first time tomorrow.

Let me save up the introduction to Gungun for one of my next few entries. And meanwhile, I will share some chocolates and munchies with Bu. His dementia makes it hard for him to keep track of time, and from his vague and yet persistent questions on distance and time I can sense his growing impatience with the long road.

No more now. Sincerely hope that Pondy will allow me a quiet little corner for the one more entry today.

So long, dear journal…

My Tryst with a Park

And why it is my entitlement, and not a privilege, to have a park in my locality

Morning fitness regime (Clicked by me, Sep 22, 2017)

My day starts slow. To escape the lure of the messy morning bed has never been easy for me; and now that two plump little hands hug me even in sleep, getting up is harder than ever. Life, however, always conspires of ways to pull me out of the bed, and this time it has placed a decent BBMP corporator (i.e. member of city council) in my ward and a great park in my vicinity.

The park, known as the BTM 4th Stage Park, is one you can’t overlook; for it sits, flaunting an excellent outdoor gym and brightly hued playground equipment, right in the heart of the locality. Visit early enough, and you’ll see this big group of grey haired citizens booting out their age with the roar of laughter and claps. Late mornings and early evenings resound with the joyous shrieks of kids of all ages. Joggers, walkers, oxygen-and-nature lovers, laptop-lovers occasionally tired of their gadget-spouse — there’s something for everybody. And the upkeep is excellent. For a person like me who is struggling to get back in touch with her battered creativity, a daily dose of this effervescent freshness is almost therapeutic. I can’t have enough of my morning walks these days; they restore in me the vitality that the last few years of multi-pronged stress had wrung away.

Outdoor gym in full use even as park is renovated (Clicked by me on Sep 22 )

Outdoor gym -a closer look (Clicked by me on Sep 15)

These walks, in a way, have also been an eye-opener for me. Allow me to explain.

I spent the first decade of life on the banks of the river Ganges, within the premises of a large, beautifully planned residential area accompanying a water treatment plant in a town called Barrackpore. My father worked in the plant in the capacity of an engineer. My mother was (and still is) an outstanding homemaker. Our first floor apartment had this balcony that offered the view of a large sky with many constellations arching over the river where dolphins could be spotted in the monsoon afternoons. It also overlooked the grass lawn where I played all evening with a bunch of other kids. Cows grazed. Sunflowers bloomed. Touch-me-nots drooped. Mangoes ripened. Red shimul flowers burst open in early May and silk-cotton floated in the air.

When we shifted to our second home in a more practical part of the town, I accepted the behind-closed-door life of our new locality as a normal inevitability. The first decade was a privilege I was fortunate to enjoy. Normal mortals had to satisfy themselves with a tinier view of the sky, potted plants, board games and constant honks on impatient roads, I told myself. It was only natural that locality ponds should get filled up by promoters and sold off as lucrative lands; that the rare open ground should be dominated by jobless no-gooders for most part of the day; that morose senior citizens should resign themselves to the idiot box churning out stale melodrama year after year.

Children's playground equipment (Clicked by me on Sep 19, 2017)

Children's playground equipment (Clicked by me on Sep 25, 2017)

It was in the third decade of life that I shifted to Bangalore, my present city of stay. This city, once recognized for its green cover and all year round pleasant weather, has been struggling under the pressure of oversaturation. Doomsayers often call it a dying city. And yet, the focus of its civic authority on restoring to the citizens their lost breathing space demands nothing short of whole-hearted appreciation and support.

My ongoing tryst with the BTM 4th Stage Park has jolted me into a keen awareness of how much humans benefit from the proximity of nature and open space, and why it is absolutely unacceptable when civic authorities fail to factor this in during city or town planning.

Yes, these are the surroundings amid which I picture my little boy growing up — playing, running, slipping in the puddle and laughing all his way into a healthy adulthood.

Squirrels

100 word story: IMWT (Idiotic Morning Walk Thoughts) - I

Source: Me! (Location: BTM 4th Stage Park, Bangalore)

Two squirrels chase each other. Idiot pauses in her track to gaze at them. Her fitness app throws a fit. It isn’t programmed to factor in human caprice.

“Idiot, WALK! 55% of Bengaluru outwalked you last week!”

The reprimand goes unheard; or worse still, unheeded. The ‘to do’ maggots infesting her brain halt in their act of procreation, startled.

The squirrels, unaware of the chaos they just stirred up, jump across branches, fences and grass in an obscene show of nimbleness. They stomp over the maggot larvae in idiot’s head, mashing them into jelly.

And catastrophe ensues; the world falls apart.

Stealth, Death, Resurrection and the Garden of Eden

Source: Me!

Story 1: Stealth

It was one of those less sunny August afternoons when I escaped for a stroll. It wasn’t an item to be crossed off my to-do list. Neither was it an act of rebellion; although it was true that I had felt restless and repulsive for many days then. I hardly knew what my eyes wished to see, so I loitered along sleepy houses in narrow alleys with vehicles parked on both sides. My phone rang; a dear voice wanted to know what I was doing. I lied. Of course, I didn’t need to.

What was I stealing from him?

Time.

Story 2: Death and Resurrection

On a less sunny August afternoon, I escaped for a stroll. The world had been clanging all around me; my mind wanted to flee. I thought I wanted to go somewhere far. Far from whom? I wasn’t sure. I ambled along houses that held stories within, until braided women eyed me with suspicion. I tried to make myself smaller, inconspicuous, non-existent. My soul walked along to reach the Garden of Eden.

The garden had playful squirrels chasing each other. I sat on a bench quietly and called back my body. After ‘a hundred years of solitude’, I felt whole again.

Story 3: The Garden of Eden

It was on an August afternoon that I discovered the Garden of Eden. It was quite a chance discovery, not something meant to be. I was walking alone, partly disillusioned, partly distracted, when the broken concrete of the nameless alley gave way to scattered patches of un-manicured grass. I looked up, distinctly conscious, for the breeze here smelt different. And spread before my eyes was a solemn island of green, complete with unloved flowers, papery butterflies and playful squirrels chasing each other. Murmurs of leaves drowned distant car horns.

It was on an August afternoon that I hugged myself back.