About Travel

This time, I have nothing special to write, but about travel. You people must be thinking that what I am going to write is about a travel which I made in recent times to some distant places. To free my post from such speculations, I may tell you that I haven’t made any such travel or pleasure trip to any such wonderful places in the closest past.

If you travel daily from one place to another in a regular manner, there will develop an affinity in your mind to certain objects or areas in the paths. If the travel is not so frequent, happening only in an intermittent manner also, that affinity would be there, but with a tinge of nostalgia. I am talking about the second case, the nostalgic affinity you have in your mind, towards the objects or areas in the path, if you have a regular route to travel from one place to another in a not-so-regular manner.

During my time in Trivandrum, I used to travel back to my home in Kottayam once in a while. Sometimes, I used to take the risk of riding on my sincere bike all the way, covering some 175 kilometers. In such cases, sometimes, I had my drive crazy-cousin also with me to get an emotional support for my feeble mind. With his frequent travel back and forth, my cousin was even sure of the exact places where you would find a gutter on the road.

Once we leave the Trivandrum city, the first stopover would be a small church, where we used to put a ten rupee note as the bribe to the Almighty to save us from any danger in the way. But, once upon a time, while I was driving his bike, at a dangerous curve, a middle aged man suddenly jumped in front, and with lost control we both fell down with the bike, with my laptop on my shoulder, and with a thumping sound. By God’s grace, no one was hurt, not even a single object was broken.

The second stopover used to be a road side tea shop, from where we get tea and some traditional snacks. My cousin would use this time for a wayside-free-stand smoke. There are some more tea stalls on our way to home as our subsequent stopovers. We used to choose a route where we can go through rustic country side paths dotted with tiny towns and hamlets in midway. One of the areas we need to pass is a dangerous forest. This is the route through which you can reach the famous South Indian pilgrim centre located at Sabarimala. It is heard that the forest area is where a lot of burglaries had been practiced by some antisocials. So, my cousin used to force me to pass the forest area before dusk.

I had my last such trip from Trivandrum to home the day before I shifted to Cochin. But, since it was a rainy season, I reached home wetting in the rain for kilometers. The next day I set out to Cochin in the evening when it was raining lightly. From home to Cochin, I was all the way wetting in the rain, which sometimes drizzled slightly and some other times fell heavily.