High school sweethearts... (#Wattys2017)

Journey to the chennai-2

          Journey to the Chennai-2

Chennai otherwise called Madras, a prominent place in south India and to certain extent madras is so prominent that all the south Indians are termed as Madrasi. The reason behind this term Madrasi can be briefly explained.

 During the British rule, there was a province called Madras Province. Apart from Hyderabad, Cochin & trivancore, Mysore provinces. 
Madras province covered many parts of today's Andhra Pradesh except for Hyderabad province. This extended till Vizag. 
Madras province covered many parts of today's kerala except for Cochin& trivancore province. 
Similarly in today's Karnataka southern parts except Mysore province and Mangalore province belonged to Madras province. 

So the Madras province had Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam speaking citizens. 

So people from North in general called the south Indian people as Madrasi’s in that period. It has not faded out till now even after the states were bifurcated linguistically.

It was very early while we reached Chennai and all of us started to walk out of the station. Chennai railway station is a very well organised station and which almost resembled a mini airport. Station is mostly filled with Chennai people and next place goes to Marwadi’s. I don’t know how come Marwadi’s be at every part of India. I guess they are the most adaptable people to any environment.

“Nīṅkaḷ oru hotel vēṇṭum?” someone shouted while we just reached the exit door.

Now the next big task is Language. The native language of Chennai people is Tamil. Tamil is one of the difficult languages among all the Indian languages. And the only thing we understood is term Hotel in the phrase he shouted.

We stopped at once and Din said “Resort.”

“Cari, nīṅkaḷ oru resort virumpukiṟīrkaḷ?” that fellow shouted.

Now also we tried to sort the language and we can only understand the word “Resort.”

John went close to that guy and asked “Do you know English?”

“If he really knows English he will not be here in the station” Raghu said hitting John on his head.

“Okay do you know Hindi?” John asked him again.

“Nooo.. Hindi! Only tamil.” he replied

  Tamil people usually consider it as an offense speaking Hindi the reason behind this is to resist instead of accepting everything that was thrown to them.

“Why should everyone learn Hindi leaving their language? All the states were like countries on their own before British Rule. The way it was United as a one country doesn't mean rest of the country to take whatever it shoved on to them.”

 
“Learning Hindi has nothing to do with Patriotism or Culture. I was raised in Chennai. To me anything other than Tamil was foreign. I could relate to the other South Indian Languages but definitely not to any North Indian Language. If I had to learn a Foreign Language, I'd choose English over Hindi because of obvious reasons.”

Somehow after awhile we could convey them what we wanted exactly by our ancestral language, that is showing them what we want exactly by gestures. For a while it seemed like we are playing dumb shell arts early in the morning.

The person who was guiding us was a Taxi driver himself, he carried our luggage and placed inside taxi. The one peculiar thing about this was, while he was guiding us all the taxi drivers where smiling and something seemed very wrong.

“Red lagoon Beach resort” a big board notified us while we were entering through a huge gate.

“This looks most isolated.” Din said looking out of the car window.

“Why are we not finding anyone moving around?” John asked.

Though the place looked most serine but lots of question marks were rising in our mind.

Taxi driver dropped us right in front of the huge main door of the resort and as we paid him the fair he gave us a sarcastic laugh which was throwing even many more doubts.

We entered the resort and there was only one middle aged man in the reception. As we entered he saw us made a pleasant face and asked us, “Good morning sir, How was your journey and how may I Help you?”

A big relief in this huge panic was to see someone speaking the language which we know.

“We would like to take two rooms, beach view mostly if they are empty.” I said moving close to reception.

“Whole resort is free sir, you can take whichever room you like to take.” Receptionist said.

“Why?” all of us shouted at once.

“Dry season na sir, so..” Receptionist said handing us over a form to fill. We quickly filled it and paid him the money for 4 days.

“Raghu..” John shouted looking around as he was already missing.

There was a sudden panic, and all of us ran out to search Raghu. As we managed to run in the garden and started to slow down once we reached a narrow passage, with a beautiful single gate wrapped with jasmine plants and the fragrance at once mesmerised us. We walked out of the gate and found sand glittering brighter than gold. And found Raghu sitting alone.

John walked quickly to kick him for leaving us without saying but all of us stopped at once looking at the beautiful early morning waves hitting each other to reach the sea shore. Beach view mesmerised us completely and made us forget all our tensions. The sound of waves was more melodious than any musician best music.

We were unable to resist and ran into water and started to play as if we never played in water. Though the water looked sweet from a far distance the very instance we entered made our eyes burn because of excess salt. I guess God wantedly made the water salty or else human beings will add them also in extinct species.

We played for almost an hour and suddenly noticed the watchman laughing at us.

This time we were not ready to keep quiet and the firt person to run was Raghu.

Raghu went to the person and the smile on watchman’s face faded slowly.

“Why are you laughing?” Raghu asked holding his collar while we hardly reached him to stop.

“No sir, no laugh sir.” Watchman said with broken English.

“Tell or else you will be smashed in my hands.”Raghu shouted.

Sweat bubbles started to form on the forehead of watch man and finally he conveyed the most terrific information in broken English which we managed to patch to know the actual meaning.

“6 months ago a girl was raped by 4 men who came to this resort and killed her the cruelest way. Surprisingly all the 4 died in this beach too. From that day resort was considered haunted and resort was about to close in a week and you 4 came for the last week, so ….”

Raghu left his collar and all 4 of us were shocked hearing this news. We almost payed half of the money we had in our pockets and so we no have chance to leave another resort.

And next 4 days are going to be the most dreadful days for us.

                                                                   ….To be continued.