Catching a Moment - Hampi Interruptions
INDIA | Wednesday, 10 April 2013 | Views [177] | Scholarship Entry
After hours of rampant riding across the brown-yellow countryside of Hampi, we brought our bikes to a halt by the bend of a road. There were three of us minus water or snacks of any kind (obviously). We were getting back from the day’s riding on and off the boulders to explore the temples, the beautiful hamlets and the abandoned ruins of every kind.
So we just had to ask the lady tugging the cow around her front porch if she could give us some fresh cow milk (!) Sipping creamy milk while gazing into the green fields in the warm odour of evening seemed like a top-notch idea. She threw around a suspicious look and eventually gestured us to wait for half an hour, mainly because my companions were very persuasive. The toddler crawling on the yard with a dirt-ridden bottom kept staring with fascination at my bandaged leg. The old man placed on a jute-woven bed even enquired with half open eyes, “What? What you do?”
“Fell from bike,” I replied with a full grin.
He tcah-ed disapprovingly and muttered something that strongly sounded like ‘Baah. City girls,’ followed by a violent snort that would have sincerely exposed his skeleton bare.
Meanwhile, we loitered around aimlessly. It was getting dark, and all we wanted to do was behold the tremendous scenes of the wonderfully arranged boulders scattered across the green. Some of the mountain sized boulders would seem to stand right in the middle of the roadways, you just have to admire the gigantism and ride around them quietly. We did the entire ‘gazing into nothing, feeling the whistling wind whiz across our hair, digesting the stench of cow-dung, taking in the refreshing scenery and feel present’ religiously.
One of us, absentmindedly, even started pacing along the muddy trails separating the patches of crops. The vividness of her ethnic orange dress with a colourful sling-bag and a misplaced polythene bag in a super-picturesque backdrop prompted me to click a picture, after yelling for her to turn and be steady, of course.
Then she leaned closer to the green to examine while my other companion was rattling away on the phone enquiring about our return tickets with furrowed eyebrows, “Three. Three sleepers, we talked about. Can you hear me?”
Tags: Travel Writing Scholarship 2013
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