Once upon a time, an engineer boy from Goa, who always wanted to be a writer, falls in love with a doctor girl from Kerala, who always wanted to be a doctor. Careers separates the two love birds as the boy finds himself in the bustling city of Pune, working on computers, whereas the girl treats the sick in the deep rural confines of Kerala. One day they decide to meet each other in the ‘God’s own Country’.............
So I have one week of vacation and in that week I have to attend the wedding of a distant cousin, be at a rave party in Goa with friends and travel more than 500 kms down south in Kerala to meet my beloved. Challenge accepted. The wedding and the rave party were fairly easy tasks because they both happened in Goa, the place I grew up in. Now comes the more treacherous part of the adventure. A travel to Kerala.
A pack my back-pack with all essentials. A sachet of toothpaste, my toothbrush, my Nikon Coolpix 7.1 MP digicam and a spare t-shirt. No plane or train or hotel reservations. No friends to accompany me either. It is me on my own, all alone in an alien land. I turn to Geography remembering Mrs. Furtado, my geography teacher in school, I consult the old torn Oxford Atlas and try to locate Cannanore (The place my beloved stays). I find it and it is few miles south of Mangalore. So that is easy. I know a local train leaving the Madgaon junction at 2:30 PM that will take me to Mangalore. I shall stay there for a night and leave early morning to Cannanore. I leave my home and tell my mom I am heading to Kerala to meet my girlfriend. I do not talk much as my mom is in a state of utter confusion.
Odd, as I board the 2:30 Madgaon-Mangalore passenger and I find a lot of foreigners inside it. I cross-check the surroundings to see if I am in the wrong country. I am in India and I learn from Marion from Hamburg, that everyone is either visiting Gokarna or Murdeshwara (Places considered as Meccas of Hippies along with Goa) to discover spirituality and Lord Shiva. Interesting I should say. I never knew these places existed and I never knew we could discover the almighty here.
The train starts and soon it is passing through long, dark & noisy tunnels. The train stops at Gokarana and I bid farewell to Marion as she bumbles the words “Om Namah Shivay” in a thick accent. The train leaves and I mesmerized by the beauty of Coastal Karnataka. Everything seems so pristine here. The bunch of school kids with slates and worn out backpacks enthusiastically wave at the passing train standing in the paddy fields, the evening sun slowly turning into shades of orange as it is about to greet the Arabian Sea, a lone fisherman adjusting the fishing lines on his boat in the middle of a rivulet and the huge 123 feet statue of Lord Shiva in Murudeshwara. The sights were truly mesmerizing and I reach out for my camera. Something stirs inside me and I do not take out the camera. I say to myself, what is the need of a camera when these divine images have been permanently imprinted in my heart.
It is 10:00 Pm in the night as I reach Mangalore Central Station. The first train that leaves to Cannanore, I find, is the next morning’s Mangalore-Calicut passenger at 06:30 AM. I have to spend a night in this town. The first hotel I find outside the station is the Taj mahal, which is not as majestic as the monument of love Shahjahan had built for his lady love but I think I would be fine in it. I ask for a single room and I am told there are no available single rooms in this hotel and points out to bleak building on the other side of the road which would server my purpose. The name of this hotel is V INDAVAN. Ok, the R from its neon sign board is malfunctioning or it would have been the mythological garden wherein Lord Krishna played his flute and danced with the beautiful Gopis. As I walk across to it the smell of garlic from a restaurant named Zam-Zam awakens the hunger inside me. Funny name, Zam-Zam, a person from Pune might confuse it with Tum-Tum, the six-seater shared auto-rickshaws which may even accommodate 12 people on a busy day.
So I head to the restaurant instead and order a plate of Chicken Sukkha (Dry spicy Chicken) with Porottas. My advice to all the readers, when you are in Mangalore nothing tastes better than its delicious Chicken Sukkha. After the sumptuous meal I headed to Vrindavan. I ask for a single room and an old dilapidated register is shoved towards me. “Rs. 200 fa-ar a Night” says the man with a nasal voice. The man is something to look at. With one closed eye and scars running down on his dark cheeks he could easily pass for a villain’s sidekick in a Mollywood movie. I sign the register and a porter helps me with my luggage. He walks in front of me with a torch and my backpack slung over his shoulders. Through a dark narrow passage full of cobwebs. I hum to myself the Eagles track ‘... and I was thinking to myself this could be heaven or this could be hell....’ and suddenly we are greeted by a group of about 10-12 mice who are making their way towards the storeroom. I look at them with disgust and the porter looks back at me with a sinister smirk on his face. “This haaappens sometimes sa’ar” he remarks casually. I am ushered into a dingy room with a single bed with coir sticking out the mattress in some parts. I sleep with all the weariness and it does not take long before sleep overcomes me.
I wake up the next day at 06:00,wash myself, quickly check-out and board the Mangalore-Calicut Passenger. Dawn has just begun and as the train travels through the countryside of Kerala I am being transported into another paradise. Elegant tiled rooftop houses, greenery welcoming me, fisherman spreading their nets through the solitary backwaters, I wind through the scenic surroundings of the ‘God’s own Country’. Beautiful being small word to describe my feelings within three hours of journey I reach my destination with my Lady love smiling as she waits at the Cannanore station. Simple and elegantly dressed in a white Salwar, we embrace each other. She tells me Canannore is a notorious place for young lovers hence we need not be seen together in public. We decide to travel to Thalassery instead, a historic place barely 1 hour from Cannanore. The bus ride is bumpy and the bus driver drives as though he owns the roads. He mercilessly honks at the oncoming vehicles as we pass through series of laterite and tile roofed houses with wide verandas, through a narrow track along a long, beautiful, and serene beachside.
First we sit side by side at an ice cream parlour and order two large chocolate ice-cream scoops. The taste of the ice cream is simply yummy and I fall short of words to describe it. Next we head to the Thalassery Fort, once an English bastion, and as we get cosy in each other’s company we are shooed away by two burly, dark men in their folded lungis, who point out to a school in the vicinity and say such things might badly influence the school children. We have no option then to desert the place. Now all this love has made us hungry and we quietly slip inside a restaurant.
The lunch consists of two large portions of crisp fried kingfish, a spice dry side dish of shrimps, three different chutneys and copious amounts of boiled rice on which is poured the loveliest sardine curry I have ever tasted. South India is one place where the hoteliers rejoice if you ask for more rice and so it was evident with the broad smile of the waiter every time we asked to be served with more rice. We were so full after the meal that we could barely walk. We choose to walk hand in hand the beautiful beach along the Thalassery pier. We witnessed sea gulls crowding around boats that brought crates of shrimps, kingfish and mackerels to the shore.
Finally as the sun set it was time to say farewell. It was the most memorable day of my life with mixed feelings of sadness leaving my beloved behind and also a state of ecstasy to see the Lord’s most divine creation. To see mother earth with a totally different fascination and to experience a true paradise on Earth in barely two days.
I wind through the nights,
Pondering over the lovely sights,
A new day, a new dawn greets,
as my eyes and the heavenly seas meets.
...............Two years later, they boy from Goa marries the girl from Kerala and they live happily ever after.
