Remembering Puri

Today I am suddenly reminded of my trip to Puri. The water, the salt and the warm sand. May be the it is the cold winter chills that suddenly reminded me of it...

And suddenly the rickshaw swerved to the left to tackle a sharp bend in the road which I initially thought what it was) and I was left gasping for breath at the sight of it. Suddenly, life seemed framed within a movie shot in slow motion. The camera closing in, the roar of the waves breaking on the shore was the only sound that was captured by the novice eardrums that I was the owner of.

I really did not believe that this trip was actually going to happen. I thought that this might another of those big promises that elders make at the beginning of every summer. Yeah, this is not the first time that such a promise had been made only that this time it was for real. I seriously did not believe that we were going to Puri until I was actually sitting on the train. My twin insisted that she won’t believe it until the train started moving. So to beat her resolve I said that I won’t believe it until I see the sea for real. (and hence the dramatic beginning with which I tried to start this entry).

If you want me to be the regular tourist then I suggest you read no further and check out some more useful websites. But, if you want some inside info about how to strike a deal with the nulias (the life guards who also make some money taking people out into the open sea on inflated rubber tubes) or how to covet the best position from where a four feeter can clearly see the changing of the flag in the Jagannatha mandir, trust me, you are in safe hands.

I don’t know how to swim (at all). Well that’s another tragic story that I will narrate some other time. For now, let me just say that my height played truant with my learning to swim. But swimmer or not, I have a brave heart and so I resolved to hit the biggest of waves and scare the shit out of mum and dad. (oh btw, that’s the newest addition to my ten year old lexicon). Well, of course that never happened eventually. To tell you all the truth the huge frothy white waves that crashed all around me scared the shit out of me! I almost gagged in a whole lot of salty sand-filled mouthfuls of water that I managed to gather in my ten year old contraption. But shitty scared or not I came out of the water and out of the beach (eventually) quite tanned. As for truths, it’s not tanned for us Indians – it’s burnt skin and nothing else!