Rice cakes and coconut cream

The Gen-X of our family set out early in the morning to Thiruvannamalai – A Shiva temple built at the foot of a sizeable hill. Got to meet my cousins, nephews & nieces. Our family setting is pretty huge that we need a 30 seater if we all were to travel. It was my uncle's initiative and he wanted to make sure his daughter gets all the blessings of Annamalai (another name for Shiva) towards her marriage life.

CMBT: The Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminal was once housed by Parrys near High Court, I remember buses operating at a gap of 40 minutes. The construction of CMBT and moving the traffic to the western tip of my city seemed irrelevant.

We were so used to booked tickets, confirmed berths or rented buses that anything otherwise seems adventurous. Having arrived by public transport to CMBT we were flummoxed to notice that there were three buses just about to start but all three packed to the roof and a sizeable crowd waiting. We tried to barge in to the next bus but the passengers did not alight even after the bus came to a complete stop, we then realised that the bus gets mobbed on the way and that we have to do the same to travel as a pack.

10:30 AM, we started from CMBT and the bus got passengers en route who were willing to stand all along those long 5:30 hours.

Thiruvannamalai has its charm. My uncle's brother-in-law found religious asylum to his second life at this town. He guided us through the temple and explained its history and arranged a special dharshan. I thought we were done, but the real trip started only after visiting the temple. We were about to walk 14 kms around this hill which is adorned by various incarnations of Shiva en route. A tribute called as girivalam.

The first 2 kms were tough given the damaged roads but went quick, from there after we counted each km passing as watching a (soap) serial without those ad breaks. So we had to start up some insane conversation just to know that everybody is around. One such discussion startled the concept of Kerosene => becoming Krishnaail, Palm oil => becoming Balmoil. As always I said something that made no sense to the rest by commenting just like ”Rice cakes with coconut cream”.

Blank reactions made me realise that none of those knew what I was talking about in reference to weirdly named stuff. I started with some narration, “Well, a friend of mine has this appetite for new and exotic dishes. He has eaten in major restaurants throughout the city and tried many specialities. He came around to pondicherry and went to this 3 star restaurant. One of the items in the menu read 'Rice cakes with coconut cream' – excited my friend went with this choice. After 15 mins my dishes were served and he waited another 10 more minutes for his food to arrive. For a person waiting with much excitement, he got dumbstruck when it got served. Its our idlis and thenga chuttney.(Rice cakes and coconut cream)”

We were able to complete the walk successfully, we took our ride back home at around 10:30 PM and reached back to CMBT at 3 in the morning. The adventure continued nevertheless. The same story: we had to hustle our way into our bus after waiting for about 30 minutes at this strange time. When we squeezed our way in, there were some highly intelligent zombies who booked the seats with towels, hand kerchiefs, bags thrown in from the window.

We had to stand for 30 mins to reach our next junction, not to forget surviving loss of sleep, tired legs, heat & sweat but also ticket-checking at about 3:30 in the morning. Blimey, a ticket checking at that time in the morning !!! , no wonder - why the conductor put up a 10 mins ticketing stage.