Serendipity is my tour guide, assisted by Caprice

“Medam, Medam, Tharangambadi. Get down fast fast” yells the conductor into my ear as I woke up trying to make sense of the blur around me. On a whim, I had taken a rickety bus from Pondicherry to this no man’s land on India’s eastern coast.

The minute I arrived- An inexplicable feeling of nostalgia took over me as I stood deserted main road with its tin shops and whitewashed houses and little piles of neatly swept garbage. All I thought of was how good a place it was to play hide and seek.

Stray dogs lazed on the uneven pavements and heavily repaired cane chairs stood poignantly in tidy courtyards. The afternoon sky resembled a bad painting made by a child. The story book scenery blurred my sense of reality further. Looking at India’s first protestant church, I wondered if it was the missionaries who actually got converted.

From behind the kerosene stove at the tin roofed tea stall, she told me her name was Theyyilnayagi- ‘Queen of Sewing’ in Tamil. Nonchalantly, she described the Tsunami in 2004 that nearly washed her town away. In starkly contrasting enthusiasm, she spoke of the sewing machine the government gave her and made me believe that she had forgiven the Tsunami in exchange for her most priced possession.

Does a place shape people or do people shape the place? There is no way of knowing.

Tranquebar’s charm was in how comfortable it was with itself. There, stubbornness was a quality exclusive to the crabs that clung on to the rocks on the beach. It reminded me that in the end, we only remember the good and forget the bad. It retained only the wisdom of yesterday and that made it wiser and wiped out all indicators of having faced disaster. It had passed its restlessness to the sea which vented it through the songs its waves sung- truly the land of the singing waves as the locals call it.

As time had tried to push through Tranquebar’s fort of timelessness, it had succeeded- but only in the form of packets of Funtrola orange candy and Venus corn puffs that hung on twine in the tin roofed shops. Whatever else managed to seep in went unnoticed as it got subsumed into Tranquebar’s changelessness. Tranquebar was only a series of presents with no past or a future.

‘How did I get here?’ I thought to myself, as I climbed out of my rabbit hole and boarded the bus which slowly and grudgingly meandered away from my timeless wonderland. Was it real, I asked myself and quietly smiled as I listened to the continuing song of the waves.