Lamp-posts, Lemongrass & Discovery!
Boiling down our thoughts to condense upon a choice of location for our would-be home was one of the toughest brain exercises that we underwent in the previous couple of months. The effervescent boiling of matters ultimately resulted in the concept of a would-be home condensing into the concept of a would-be apartment. After all home is where the heart is! And we decided to put our hearts into one of the not-so-bad newly constructed apartments in the city suburbs, not-so-far from our work location.
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| Pic Courtesy : http://www.coloribus.com/ |
The maximum adventure we could possibly encounter & extract out of the available resources en route is a railway crossing, which keeps bringing back memories of some old Doordarshan safety documentary that I used to religiously watch as a child. But having found a foothold in the middle of the shifting sands of life, thinking of all the precious kilometers and minutes…or possibly hours… we would be saving in our daily commute to and from work, we were happy. No … slightly more than happy.
Our wait to enjoy the serenity of the locale, I learnt, needed to stretch on until we were through with some of the pending official & legal paper work & also through with completely furnishing the space, all of which was expected to take as long as two months or more. So until then, it was through frequent short visits that we were keeping in touch with our would-be living space. During one such visit to our apartment, to my utter delight, my husband got the sudden divine inspiration to do something different.
The entire locale was quite new to us. We had become familiarized only with what existed towards the ‘leftern’ hemisphere of the place. We normally deviated to enter the apartment location from the main road that stretched out in that particular direction. So with a question-mark in our hearts, as to what lay towards the other side, to where we had never been to, we set out to explore the rest of the road that continued from the apartment towers to we-didn't-know-where.
We passed a college gate, a petrol station, lots of houses of various shapes, colors and sizes, with very interesting names, few other apartments, an over bridge built over an inland backwater artery, a church, a linguistic study centre, houses again and again. We could have been driving for hardly five minutes when we arrived at a cross road where signboards indicated places that could be reached if we turned left or right. But all that we could look at, at that unforgettable moment, was located neither to the left nor to the right. We looked straight ahead and we just couldn't believe what we were looking at.
Ahead was a very short road lined by the shade of coconut trees that ended with a tea-shop on its right hand side, and right beyond it was… the vast expanse of a beach (!). A beautiful sandy shore overlooking the waters blue, the pristine sand dotted here & there with catamarans, little bunches of children playing here and there, and a few tourists (God knows from where!) enjoying the gently lapping waves. Our joy knew no bounds. It was a discovery for us! Though we were accustomed to the distant view of the ocean horizon from the roof-top of the apartment, we had no notion that there could possibly be any accessible beaches nearby. We just couldn’t wait to park the car and run headlong into the sand. But not being little kids anymore (ahh…the licenses that came with being little kids), and also for being under the stern watchful gaze of a few old men sitting and sipping tea & munching banana fry on wooden benches lined in front of the tea-shop, we maintained a dignified poise with all our might.It did cost us a ton of energy to restrain ourselves from being overtly expressive, but given the fact that we lived in a land where people spent more energy in trespassing upon the lives of others, reaping sadistic pleasure out of their so called ‘moral policing’, than taking care of matters right under their nose, we stuck to the ‘society-prescribed’ dosage of graphic sobriety… (though not for long!). We got out of the vehicle and slowly walked…ran…walked towards the sea. And then I don’t clearly remember what happened, but we were shrieking and running around, and sitting in the catamaran on the sand, singing Chemmeen songs and rowing away to glory. We skipped around clicking pictures of crows, dogs, boats, and waves. Posing in style on the catamarans we prayed to Kadalamma that no fishermen would come marching up the beach to throw us headlong into the ocean. But then a bunch of fishermen did come along, though for other noble purposes. We sheepishly jumped out of their catamaran with our LED grins making way for them to launch their catamaran into the sea.
It was an amazing sight watching the fishermen roll the catamaran into the waves and row off into the depths in pursuit of the evening’s catch. By then, the grey skies had become diffused with the colors of a hazy sunset. The clouds were rolling in fast, signalling the approaching rain. Our hearts went out to those fisher folk who were out in the deep waters risking their safety even as they pursued their livelihood. But it appeared that, for them it was nothing out of the normal course of office-going matters. In one way their office-room, the vast open mighty ocean, was so much more noble and higher than any other office-room in the world. I could not forget the face of that fisherman as he got into the catamaran with his son and took the oars in his hand. What emanated from his face was pride, valor and above all, an untold devotion to the task he had at hand. Making a silent wish for them we walked back to our parked vehicle, our hearts beating like drums, thinking of this crazy delight of a news that we were going to break to our daughter, whose first love had always been the sea-side, making a mental note this time…Yes… This is the place to be!
*Chemmeen - an internationally acclaimed Malayalam romantic drama film of the 1960's
centered on the life of the fishing community along the coastal belt of Kerala.
* Kadalamma - Goddess of the Sea
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