Trip to Kerala

When you know your dreams are going to remain dreams forever, it's quite normal for the mind to cherish the memories that gave the dreams in the first place...

My first travel outside the state was a trip to Kerala.  It was not any fancy part of Kerala like Kovalam or Allepey...it's a small village near Palakkad, true to the claim 'God's own country'.  My friend and I visited her maternal grandmother in that small lush green village.  We took an auto from the train station and the driver seem to be well-educated for his profession.  He conversed well in English over the phone, what seemed like a networking call with someone.  My friend explained that graduates take some sort of job before they land in an actual job and men typically choose to be auto drivers.

The auto finally stopped in front of a pay phone and my friend called her cousin for a pick-up.  Then came this 12-13 yr old boy with a flash light and said, 'let's go chechi' in a shy tone.  My friend introduced him as her cousin and gave me a long list of instructions on how careful I should be walking through the paddy fields.  We walked through the partially harvested fields (rest were left due to lack of daily labor) in what seemed like a 30 lumen flash light for almost a mile.  We reached the house in 20 minutes and I was trying to measure the square footage of the house by casting a casual look like a professional.

 

It was a sturdy two-story building from old times- the entire house was made out of wood and had tile roof.  For some reason,  I felt the house had a life on it's own.  It has seen three generations, births and deaths of every family member and lot of untold stories.  My friend said, 'It has not reached the status of being called 'Taravaadu' as the 100th birthday is yet to come for the house'.

 

Everyone in the house received us very well...even uncles older than me stood up to greet with a 'Vanakkam'.  We were taken to the dinner table by Ammamma after some refreshments and quick updates on everyone in the family.  Ammamma seemed to be pillar of the family- though she was not able to move around much without help due to arthritis, her strong presence was felt everywhere in the house.  Though her physique was deteriorating, one can't help notice the strength she gained over the years raising the family of three generations.  She suggested few places for us to visit but was still hesitant to let two young girls travel to Guruvayoor alone.  We did it...the pride in her face was priceless.  I remember my friend looking at her grandmother amusingly and saying, 'We are girls of 21st century grandma.  We can travel on our own'.  

 

I heard people do not usually rave about Kerala food but for some reason I did.  It is quite unusual for my stomach to be able to digest every item on the plate but surprisingly Kerala food was received with a warm welcome and I went to bed without a queasy stomach .  Kerala cuisine seems to be the second best after my mom's food.

 

The next day, we went around to meet some of the extended families and an actual 'taravaadu'.  we had to walk across paddy fields to get to other houses and I realized the paddy crop looked quite big as opposed to the paddy I'm used to in my grandmother's farm. Communication was not a problem at all...everyone seemed to understand what I spoke in Tamil and responded back in Malayalam.  I collected few interesting plants from every house we visited for the small garden at home.

 

On our way home, my friend mentioned that her cousin from taravaadu married an American woman met through an online dating website.  The couple seem to be happy with a 5 year old kid but nobody liked the idea of online dating in that small village.  When we returned to her grandmother's house, Ammamma was waiting near the entrance for us.  She was excited to see us returning home safely and enquired how everyone has been doing at taravaadu.  She slowly raised the topic, 'I don't like the idea of online dating.  How do anyone possibly know a person just by chatting over a computer?  One can hardly know a person even after spending years with him/her (she had an unhappy marriage).  I was dumbstruck to find 90+ year woman knowing so much about internet living in that small village.  My friend pressed my hand and whispered, 'she holds S.S.L.C from those days'.  The dinner was the most memorable part of my trip..... she started narrating 'Mahabharatha' in English as we were eating.  We had no idea how much we ate until she said...'see if you have more room in your stomach'.  As you can guess, we did not have any.

 

Days went by with varieties of food, few folks visiting us.  One fine evening, we decided to visit an 'Ambalam' (Temple) close by.  Most temples in Kerala are very strict about the clothes devotees wear.  Men are expected to wear dhothi and women are expected to wear skirt and shirt, saree or half-saree.  The temples are lit by thousands of oil lamps around the 'praharam', strictly no electric lamps.  It was a great fun lighting those lamps in the twilight with cool breeze hugging us....it was a perfect moment of 'Ehaantham'.  At that moment, I truly enjoyed being a girl in a traditional skirt and jasmine flowers while some guys were admiring us from a distance.  That instant was as beautiful as Ravi Varma's paintings.... 

 

Finally, the month of non-vegetarian ban had passed.  My friend's 'ammaai' (Aunt) started making amazing fish curries everyday...FOR ALL THREE MEALS!!!  I must have done few good deeds in my last birth...... 'Enna dhavam seidhanai...'  Ammamma sat with me and chose the best pan fried fishes while explaining how important phosphorus is to bones and showed how to eat fine fish bones without the bones getting stuck in throat.  There was unexplained love and care in her every move.

 

Finally, the day came.  Ammamma did not like this part of the trip...bidding goodbye.  She touched my forehead and ran her fingers on my cheeks....'I know Acchu always chooses good friends.  Visit again next summer'....I said 'ok' and we left.

 

My friend invited me the following summer to visit her village...I was preparing for GRE exam and said I will visit after the exam.  She called two days later to say, 'Ammamma wants to meet you...looks like my presence is not enough for her'.  I said, 'Tell her that I promise to visit after exam'.  There was another call the next day....'Ammamma passed away.  She seemed perfectly fine yesterday and it just happened all of the sudden this morning'.

 

I visited the village in early December....the house still looked the same.  Ammai received us and she was giving her usual updates.  My friend was pointing out a wet spot on the wall and ammai told 'kuttan' must have disturbed one of the foundation stones when he was trying to make a deep pit near the wall outside.  A weak foundation stone leads to cracks on the walls and the monsoon rain made it's way through the wall.  'Hmm...Ammamma would have warned him if she were alive.  Can I make sambhar and fish fry?'

 

I went all around and found Ammamma's walking stick balanced on a chair.  I ran my fingers on it....still trying to figure out why she liked me so much in just one visit and why she wanted to meet me before she had her final sleep.  The house now seemed handicapped.

 

Inner conflicts

I did not start writing the blog with an intention to have readers or followers.  Just something prompted me to write when I could not find a person who was interested in my boring stories.  But when I look back at some of the old posts, I could see a hidden interest to have some anonymous readers.  I could feel the conflicting thoughts struggling to get past each other.  I want someone to read the post and have a chat through comments; yet I do not want others to know my personal stuff.
I do not want to go public yet I want some followers.  Interesting dilemma!!

If I think about it, I do not have anything interesting to keep the readers entertained and educate them with intellectual arguments.  My blogs are more like a chit chat with a neighbor; plain vanilla conversations.  Perhaps, that's why my husband does not want to have any conversation with me other than politics or excel sheets.  Probably, he is right now wondering why am I not interested in his car discussions or share the passion to write VBA codes but expect him to understand my 'feelings', which is incomprehensible to him.  Well, I am just another 'drama queen' to him.  It was not like he pretended to be interested in my topics when we were dating, maybe I was just too excited to notice this boring detail :)

Let me see what can I do to get past this boredom...

1. Travel- Not worth it given the way he feels about the expenses after each trip and the silent treatment period after heated argument
2. Home Décor- Not worth it given the way I get penalized for every penny (my decorations are neither too expensive nor too cheap) spent in the upcoming years)
3. Gardening- The fresh blossoms refreshes my neighbors but the consequences in our home drowns me in depression.
4. Invite guests- History suggests not to take a chance. 8 out of 10 times, the plan will get cancelled after a silly argument.
5. Visit family- I take the blame here.  I can't stand superficial relatives whom I can't rely on.
6. Visit my friends- In his dictionary, my friends are geeks and now why is he being brutally punished for no reason :)
7. Visit his friends- Only thing that seems to be working....thank god his friends are 'NORMAL'

The last option is my only entertainment now...that helps me from becoming a crazy person or a depressed loser.

Pressing Circumstances

There are circumstances that present problems with no solution, leaving impressions that can never be erased.  We are forced to pretend nothing unpleasant happened and there are no hard feelings towards each other but the inevitable damage is already done to the relationships.  There is a change in the level of respect and trust and the more sophisticated a society is; lesser the conversations.

Education and refinement should work towards bringing people closer.  Unfortunately, it works otherwise making people emotionally distant from each other.  The analytical reasoning works well in filtering emotions from facts but emotion is the life force of a family and society, what's wrong in admitting it?  Done in a right way, it brings family together and nurtures the secure feeling of an individual.  Often, the value of emotions is underrated and presented as a lack of evolvement in human species.  Isn't this emotion that differentiates humans from other species of less sophisticated neural system?  If nature has created us this way, why shouldn't it be accepted the way it is.

That's why broken families and divorces are common in well developed societies....because the individuals in a family is emotionally distant from each other.  The recurrent disappointments and resentments build over a period of time and cause irreparable damage.  The individuals of such families must have spent their quality time is trying to prove each other that his/her view is right,when all it would have taken to be closer is to understand the other person's point of view.  It is ok to be wrong some times...it is ok to do silly things some times...just to get out of the rut.

Come on.....after all, stone age man was happier than today's civilized man.

Quest for a new experience

There always used to be a long list of places I wanted to visit.  I believe this quest for new experience started with the TV shows I watched in my childhood days.  I adored those hosts who travel to different places in India and abroad, experimenting some bizarre foods, working with people from different cultures or simply enjoy the scenic places the way mother nature has portrayed...

The hosts were never too flashy nor too sporty...yet they captured the attention of the audience with their excitement, which in my view is not as fake as talk show hosts.  This was still when Doordarshan was the only TV channel available in small towns like mine.  Probably, you would have guessed what show I'm talking about.  Yes..it's Surabhi!!  For those who have already got the lines on forehead thinking how many times Surabhi's hosts have travelled, I should say 'Not much' but the places they picked to visit were absolutely amazing.  I am not exaggerating...'ABSOLUTELY AMAZING'.

I still remember this show when they went to Maldives....the crystal clear water, the transparent crab with a tinge of orange on the shell hiding under the sand, numerous fishes in all possible permutations and combinations of colors, delicate corals....I swear I did not hear a word of my mom's impatient dinner calls.  I realized for the first time...what can truly mesmerize me.  My obvious question to my dad, 'Dad, can we go there someday?' to get an expected response 'Probably, when you grow to be a rich person to afford travel expenses'.  I could not sleep for a long time that night...whether or not the eyes were open, all I could see was, 'a romantic blue sea with white sand, colorful fishes, shy crab....a sea world that's beyond my imagination (different than what I saw in video game) and of course, Renuka screaming 'No, I don't want to get into water.  I'm scared' while Siddhartha was testing his courage.  The overwater bungalows became my obsession since then....I decided to spend the most memorable vacation of my life in an overwater bungalow (growing up I realized..it must be my honeymoon).

As I grew up, several books I read kindled the spirit in me to travel and see the amazing world with endless surprises.  The book that narrated the experience of a eight year old boy traveling from one end of Russia to the other and the way his visual center is trying to photograph everything he saw for the album that he treasured in his memory.  The first snowfall of the winter as the train starts moving....the moon that incessantly follows him all the way to the new city... the conductor who did not want to steal those glorious moments of the young boy and left without verifying his ticket..there was no story in that book but a beautiful narration of a curious young boy observing the outside world for the first time.  As you would have guessed, I saw snowfall in my dream.  It seemed better than the snow Arvind Samy and Madhubala enjoyed in 'Roja'.

As a teenager, the books that rekindled this interest was S. Ramakrishnan's Thunai Ezhuthu and Desaandhri.  His writing presented Lonavla as a simple painting on an inexpensive canvas and it feels as if one perceives the world he describes through a window in that painting.

I am still reading several travel memoirs and have not started serious travelling yet.  Moreover, its not fun to travel with a person who is constantly in motion making plans without taking a moment to enjoy the simplest things nature offer.  I like to travel alone and meet strangers....like a nomad...leaving my concerns behind.  Just need to grab an opportunity.  Wish me good luck my dear reader!!