Visakhapatnam, my last stop for this trip. The city with the naval base. The city with the oldest shipyard on the east coast. The city that is home to a lot of friends. And to me, the city that is the gateway to Arakku. I had a one day stop here before I boarded the next train. Once I checked in, unpacked and finished eating the mini bar goodies, I went down into the street. I figured I would go to the beach and get a lunch with a view. The autowala took me to the famed beach road and together we found a place that served Chinese noodles to foreign tourists. I ordered a portion of egg noodles, ploughed through the mountain for half an hour and for the first time ever left a plate of noodles unfinished. The beach was the strangest thing I had ever seen. And not the nice kind of strange. There were giant statues of gorillas, fish and people. There was hardly anyone walking on the beach, given the heat. With a heavy heart and stomach, I gave up exploring the beach and flagged another auto down. I asked him to take me to the most happening area in town. He said he knew just the place. So it was that I ended up in Jagadamba center. It was happening, alright. It was the time of Sankranti and everyone was out shopping. He took me on a quick tour of the place. I decided against getting down and risk getting lost amid the throng of shoppers. I asked him to take me around town. I had read so much about the Kailasagiri hill, but he had other plans for me. The Three Hills is where we are going, he declared. He said it was the underdog of tourist places in Vizag. I have been following friendly advice throughout the trip, I saw no reason to give up now. So up we went. As we passed through the streets, he gave me a quick lowdown on all the streets, showed me the shops where he shopped for his kids and where he took them to movies. It was a pleasure hearing him talk. I realised just how much I missed talking in my mother tongue. Sure I talk to my family, but it’s not the same thing. Only when you bargain for rides, clothes and vegetables in a language does it count. The Three Hills was so named because of the three hills in the area, each housing a different place of worship. The Ross Hill church, the Dargah Konda and the Venkateshwara Konda. He rued the fact that not all of them are open these days. He dropped me at Ross church. And I saw this. Translated, it means “holy family”. I made a mental note to buy myself a spinning wheel. The lookout from the hill, on the other hand was amazing. I took the mandatory few bad photographs from my mobile phone. This was indeed a great location to see the expanse of the city. The port and the naval base were sprawled out, making the city look vast and deep. It made me realise why people from Vizag miss the place like they do. The rest of the evening was spent on a long walk, trying to find a book store. The Amitav Ghosh that I was reading was proving to be too serious for the train journey. Luckily there were some friends in town, willing to meet, and swap some books. We had a lovely dinner in one of the terrace restaurants with a view of the beach. Better still, I got to come away with ‘The Pricey Thakur Girls’ for the next day’s journey. 6.30 in the morning is just the right time to board a train. There’s something about the early morning sights and sounds that make you feel like the city is letting you in on its secrets. It was a lovely morning and I had not felt this safe in a city for a long time. This train journey was different for two reasons. One, I was making the return journey the same day. So this was purely about the means and not the end. The other, and this was unfortunate, was that it was a passenger train on which I had a second class ticket. It was a Saturday to boot and thousands of families were out with their kids to make the day trip to Bora caves and Arakku. Nothing like a bunch of Telugu and Bengali families on a train to make you feel like settling down in the mountains among yaks that can’t talk. One set of family was teaching their kids to take photographs of the valley outside. Another was crooning to 90s bollywood romantic songs playing on their mobile phone. Paul Theroux says in his book that the railways are like a bazaar. To understand the people of a country, all you need to do is get into a train and wait for the drama to unfold. Stories are told. Fears are disclosed. Territories are marked. Class lines are drawn. I have to agree with him. Arakku is 130 km away from Vizag on the rail route. But it takes 4 hours to get there. It is 15 stations away with a 10 minute stop at each station. It seemed interminable. The innumerable tunnels were both fun and a device of torture. People screeched their lungs out with each approaching tunnel. Sometimes the tunnels lasted 5 whole minutes. There was no place at all near any of the windows to peer out. Everyone was leaning against the window bars. It was drizzling and that made the valley outside stunning in its beauty. There were breathtaking sights of the valley on the one side and waterfalls on the other. Water trickling through lush green is a sight to behold. But I caught fewer and fewer glimpses of that and increasing glimpses of the rats scurrying across in the coupes. The train was the dirtiest of the lot in the trip. I opened my book to see what the Thakur girls were upto. We arrived at Arakku by noon. I had two and half hours to kill before it was time for the return train. I got into an auto and gave him the brief – lunch and a good view. We stopped at a street side vendor to pack some bamboo chicken and headed to a view point. We went up along a winding route paved among trees that hid the otherwise smouldering sun. The view point came upon us quite abruptly. There were a few people clicking photographs and moving on; no one was really stopping there. There was a man selling honey and another selling spices. I decided to eat my bamboo chicken on the ledge separating this platform from the valley below. The honey vendor lent me some paper and plastic to unpack the chicken. I repaid his generosity by buying a bottle of honey. The lunch was delicious, the monkeys were good company and the backdrop couldn’t have been better. I got back to the station half an hour early, only to find that the train was delayed. It was one of those stations with just one platform and one train passing through it. I was quite amazed that it had a waiting room at all. A spotless, clean one at that. I parked myself on one of the stone benches lined along the wall. I had long since finished the book. And had only the 20% battery on my mobile phone to keep me engaged. There were a few other people, the men mostly sleeping and the women swatting flies. An old man playing “gimme everything tonight” on his phone kept us entertained. The mandatory drunk in the railway station kept us up to date on when the train is expected, which now was 2.5 hours later. I contemplated taking a taxi back to Vizag. He advised me against it, saying the route was not safe. So I waited at the station, which was singularly gorgeous. But I was miffed, I had enough of this, I was homesick and I just wanted to sit in the rat infested train and get back home. I spent my time dipping my finger into the honey bottle and slurping it drop by drop. Just when my finger couldn’t reach the honey in the bottle any more, the train arrived. I enjoyed the alluring scene for about 2 hours before darkness fell. After that, each time the train passed through one of the dark tunnels, I held my breath and waited for the dementors from Azkaban to come for me. As I sat there by the window counting the number of stops to reach Vizag, I realised I would be home by this time tomorrow. I mulled over what my biggest discovery during the trip was. It was this – take advice from strangers, load up your phone with bollywood music and travel by autos. You might not end up doing what you would have liked, but you will end up with a good story.
1 Comment
hayko
1/5/2015 09:47:59 am
hey, thanks for this installment! And I'll heed the words of Icy: Take advice from strangers, load up your phone with bollywood music and travel by autos. You might not end up doing what you would have liked, but you will end up with a good story. YEAH! :)
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Aishwarya KalakataThe loss of and search for individualism has never been felt more acutely. Everything changed after I had a kid. But this blog is not about me being a mom. It’s about the things I do when I want to stop being a mom. It’s about telling myself that it is possible and that it is ok. It’s about my little escapades. Mostly travel - sometimes physical, sometimes mental. A desperate bid to stop my identity from being rolled into a single word. CategoriesArchives
March 2021
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