The Kanyakumari Conundrum....

It’s been a tough past 6 months for me. Too many revelations like I need to get a move on in life - make some plans, that I can indeed travel alone, that solitude is a two-edged sword and the big one - Song lyrics have meanings!

I am by no means a musical sort of fella. Music to me once was Himesh Reshamiya trying to blow his nose in agony. So you know where I am coming from. But a lot’s changed since then; my sonic journey has taken me through a lot different soundscapes, pretty much every genre possible. My playlist even contains something called ‘Ambient Music for airports’ by Brian Eno. Beat That!

Through all this though, one thing remained constant - my inability to concentrate on the lyrics. Sure some catchy rhymes caught my fancy, but I never tried piecing all the words to collective whole, the soundscape was what mattered. Then Pink Floyd ambled into my life which changed a lot of things, the scarcity of words in their music made their words celebrities in their own right and demanded I understand the lyrics.

In a recent U2 album, Bono starts off with recursive function – ‘Every breaking wave on the shore
Tells the next one there'll be one more’ and then arrives at a mundanely philosophical verse –

‘..If you go?
If you go your way and I go mine
Are we so?
Are we so helpless against the tide?
Baby every dog on the street
Knows that we're in love with defeat
Are we ready to be swept off our feet
And stop chasing
Every breaking wave’

Now, even though this song often pops up in my shuffle, I never paid much heed to it, until a couple of recent rides to Kanyakumari and Mahabalipuram.

I have been known to ride ludicrous distances. 500, 600, 700 kms in a day. But I never managed to do overnight trips all by myself, somehow the thought scared me. And with good reason too as well. Sure, everyday a StoryPick or ScoopWhoop article tells us 15 reasons why we need to travel alone. Well, it isn’t as simple as that but more on that later J

Kanyakumari holds a truly special place in my life. The first real ‘road-trip’ on my bike (No, a ride to Nandi Hills isn’t a road-trip. Please.) . On the road with my closest friends. So when finally months of early morning gymming, all-consuming office work and late night studying finally got the better of me I realized I need a weekend away. But wait, its 2 in the a.m., I am not going to find anyone to ride out with me. But once it sank in that I need this, and its 2 a.m. it was a no-brainer. Just grow a pair and ride out!

The road to Kanyakumari, is well, a boring one to be honest. Reach Silk Board, open the throttle and start counting down the kilometers. Krishnagiri came and went; Salem came and went in the wee hours of the morning. As the sun rose, I found my comfort zone, comfortably cruising at 120, my dynamic solitude (Yes there are two types, one is the solitude while riding and one when you are stationary). I finally found the time to look back and feel good about the things I accomplished in the madness of the previous months. The usual grin in the face when I leaned into the gently sweeping bends came back. Yep. My Happy Place.

10 a.m. Madurai Bypass, time for brunch. A Dosa, 2 Milkshakes (Come on, I am on vacation) and another couple of hours I was outside Tirunelveli. Maybe I should try the famous Halva here, but damn, the bypass never let me close to the city !  

Another hour and the wind-farms started. And the landscape is a sight to behold. The green Western Ghats signing off in splendor. The blue sky above streaked with white wisps and the lowlands dotted with endless windmills slowly acknowledging the breeze. There was even a train track amidst all this. Sights like these, they give you hope. Hope that we can still live in harmony with nature.

Anyways. 12 in the noon.  Kanyakumari. The road unfortunately ends here.(Sorry for the lame pun).  Hotel check-in. A Shudh Desi Meal at Baba Ramdev ka dhaba and an hour’s nap later it finally sunk in. I am here for the weekend. Alone!

Now being alone in a new place (read solitude) isn’t so bad when you have things to do. It’s when you run out of things to do, when you are left totally alone with your thoughts that solitude gets you.

Kanyakumari is a good touristy place.  But it’s the places around that are really spell-binding. From the virgin sands of Sanguthurai Beach, the seaside hamlets of Kheezamanakudi to the groves near the Mathur aqueduct.

Let me rephrase, Kanyakumari is a good place for ‘tourist watching’. It’s the places around Kanyakumari, the offbeat ones that are really the ‘tourism spots’.

After a good bout of offbeat tourism, as the sun started to say farewell, I strolled down to the beach and got into the water, trying to recreate in my mind, the magical evening I spent with my friends 2 years ago. How we frolicked in the rising tide. As I  felt the waves lapping at me, I saw it all. One of us trying desperately to hold on to our room keys. Two of them, perched on a slimy rock suddenly being toppled over by a sneaky wave, only to re-emerge and laughing uncontrollably. Oh, their laughter.

Flashes like these, they are triggers. The flashes of that evening didn’t stop; they triggered a whole cascade of emotions. Here I was, stripped to the bare minimums in the water looking around at people. There were groups of friends, like the ones I pined for, throwing each other into the waves, hooting in innocent ecstasy. There were also families – dads and uncles supervising, yet still trying to act cool and frolicking in the waves. The moms and aunts resisting being dragged into the water, yet enjoying every bit of it. The cool ‘grown up kids’ posing for the camera with ‘yo’ signs and finding weird ways to enjoy the water. The brothers trying to mimic each other in how they enjoy the waves. The hoots, the shouts, the exclamations of joy and here I was sitting pathetically in the water, alone.

Now I am not much for symbolism or philosophy, but situations like these, they really mess you up.

‘..If you go?
If you go your way and I go mine
Are we so?
Are we so helpless against the tide?
Baby every dog on the street
Knows that we're in love with defeat
Are we ready to be swept off our feet
And stop chasing
Every breaking wave’

This verse kept looping in my head. Am I really this helpless against the tide of time? So desperately trying to cling on to those last memories of friends, even though I know that they are gone, the beautiful memories obscured behind the veils of careers and ambitions. Those pure moments we shared. Such cruel dilemmas – try to keep them alive to cherish them or bury them in a recess of my mind to avoid the pain of reminiscing about them. Should I stop chasing these memories or just get swept by the tides of time, see where they take me.

And it’s not just friends that came back to haunt me. The images of other families enjoying, they conjure up images of a childhood I never had. The cheesy moments that families share – the stiff family photographs against the setting sun, posing in front of the temples, everyone say cheese! Waiting for Mom to select something to buy from the beach side stalls and then imploring Dad to just pay up and stop haggling. Playing hide and seek with the cousins as moms shout out not to go out too far. Getting our names written on a rice seeds. Struggling to decide what to order at the local dhaba for dinner so that everyone is satisfied.

I am indeed this helpless against the tide. Years and years of being away from a family setting has turned me against these clichéd displays of family bonding. I grimace every time I have to pose for a click with the family during vacations and try every family outing seems to drag on for ages, but yet when I am here alone, I pathetically yearn for those cheesy displays. I want to get those pose for those clichéd clicks and yet I want to detest them at the same time. Is it true that I am really ‘in love with defeat’? This mental torment which I know I am bound to lose? Those waves are gone and new ones will keep coming. When will I stop chasing them?               

I had finally relented to the bonds of friendship, come out of my shell so to say, found a pseudo family with whom I could share those ‘cheesy’ moments. But they are gone as well, and the real family seems like a distant dream. A family, which I am unable to spend time with, duties to which I can’t execute, moral obligations to which I can’t fulfill. Friends, whom I cherish as friends, but can’t even bring myself to talk to. It’s all gone. I am here standstill, hoping that time will freeze, while everyone else is running. Reminds me of a Pink Floyd song – ‘Time’:

‘..Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again..’

Sometimes I wonder, if I am indeed trying to catch up with the proverbial ‘Sun’  - reliving those moments with friends, trying to imagine those moments I wanted with my family but I never had, trying to find solace in watching other people living my dreams.

These ‘waves’. I don’t know if they want me to move on or they want to me to cling on those memories. I can’t make sense of my actions, these trips alone, are they an act of rebellion? Proving to myself that friendship is highly overrated and family is just a figment of imagination in our world or are they my last desperate attempts to hold on to the principles of friendship and family. Am I the solitary rock breaking these unrelenting waves or am I the one eroding with every lash of the waves, giving in to the illusion of being with my friends, my family again.

Whatever the ultimate truth may be, I can see I am not ready to realize it. I enjoy these schizophrenic moments of ambiguity. They give me purpose, letting me to live in sanity until the next ride.

Maybe it’s really me speaking out or maybe it’s just the couple of pints I just downed speaking for me, the reality remains that

‘Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say..'

Anyways,   i guess you learnt that travelling alone and solitude ain't as glamorous as Scoopwhoop or StoryPick claim it to be. 

All I can say is - Pink Floyd. Damn You.