The Hindu Business Line : A Mumbaikar looking beyond Rly time-tables!

IT took the three of us about 40 hours to reach Kodiakkarai from Mumbai with the Dadar-Chennai Express starting at 8.30 p.m on a Friday moving into Central Station on time at around 8.15 p.m on Saturday.

From there we made it to Koyambedu bus station by pre-paid taxi to board an all-night bus to Nagapattinam. By about 7.30 a.m. on Sunday, we were at Nagapattinam to climb into a second bus which dropped us at Vedaranyam. A third bus took about 30 minutes to arrive at the forest guesthouse at Kodiakkarai by about 11 in the afternoon with the climate hot and sticky.

The bus journeys passed quietly with the Tamil Nadu Government sensibly banning videos and music. Travelling in a second class, 3-tier compartment on a reserved ticket is slightly better than being in a general (unreserved) coach. There is no respite from noise. From about 5 in the morning till 10 in the night, vendors attached to the pantry move up and down offering stale wadas, idlis, lunch, watery tea and coffee in unmusical notes.

The vendors are railway employees and have the first right to sell to the passengers. Add on the decibels of private operators selling fruits, bhel, toys, cold drinks and beads followed by beggars - men, women and children — with some blind and others displaying twisted and broken limbs. That is India at the ground level though it can be said that trains in Kerala are cleaner and generally do not carry any category of poor with most making careers in the Gulf.

Nothing seems to have changed in rural India as our train clanged at a steady pace through Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Payal, Rushikesh and myself did not take any solid food as from somewhere a hungry hand would extend itself for help. We managed with a few cups of coffee and an occasional plate of oily wadas. In fact we had our first sambar and rice on Sunday evening at Kodiakkarai. Before one started on the trip one was sure of having a glass of filter coffee at the wayside joints in Tamil Nadu. Filter coffee seemingly does not exist any more in Tamil Nadu.

At Kodiakkarai, the thatched-roofed hotels either serve cups of dreaded tea or Nescafe or Bru but never, just never, aromatic filter coffee. The water we drank was brought into the village by tankers and had a metallic taste. Mostly power was absent and one night we stayed awake snapping at mosquitoes.

Dr S. Balachandran and myself missed out watching on TV the India-Australia cricket match at Chepauk forcing the good doctor to fetch a transistor from his friend to go back to non-TV days of the sport. A liquor shop near the STD booth did brisk business in the evenings as men stepped in for a short trip.

Early in the morning, some of us would take our place on the roof of our mini-bus to get a top view of the villages we drove by to the forest. Women scrape clean their home fronts with bamboo brooms before jazzing up the place with pleasing kolams made from powdered rice. For me it has always been a sacred ritual to an unfolding day.

Every one knows every one and in Kodiakkarai, Hindu and Muslim homes touch each other with some sharing a common wall. One noticed this healthy habit on either side of the road leading from Vedaranyam to Kodiakkarai. There were no tourists except for a tall woman from Belgium doing a doctorate on Krishna consciousness.

On an evening, we walked to the Palk Strait beach where fisherfolk live to find a hermit crab scrambling on the sands.

For a moment, the dark brown creature stayed still before moving and one went down on one's knees to have a near look. "That's a hermit crab," informed Rushikesh and for me it was yet another first time sighting.

"For a Mumbaikar any flora and fauna is a first sighting as the poor fellow looks at nothing beyond railway time tables, " remarked Payal, a two-weeks old Mumbaikar. Then there was the jackal ambling across the grassland and the feral horses near the Munniappan Lake.

The December 2002 issue of Sanctuary has a piece on "Feral horses of Point Calimere" written by R. Vijaykumar Thondaman and Clement Francis M. None is sure of how the horses made it to this salty place. They did not look any different from horses elsewhere as they thudded along the flat lands at a brisk gallop. The last census, according to the writers, came up with around 1,990 blackbucks (99 fawns), 27 chital (16 fawns), 50 wild boar and 26 horses in the forest. "This count excluded those animals that had moved towards the shore and the swamps," they add. Will they be around 20 years hence?

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