THE ERNAKULAM REDEMPTION TOUR- Part 1 (Chapter2)

Chapter 2- 11:40pm-Rest of the night: The Midnight Street Wanderers

“There is not a single, goddamn, person in this entire city on the road right now!!” Arnab exclaimed.

“That’s not the point. But where the hell are all the hotels of this place???” Rahul said with a nervous laugh.

“We’ve got to ask someone!” Suraj said.

“Ask who? There is not a single soul on the streets except the dogs!” I remarked.

It had been 20 minutes since we had got down at the Nagercoil station, 15 minutes of which we just kept on walking like Bedouins searching for water in the desert. In our case the search was for a place to stay. At least for the night.

 Everything was closed, shops, vendors, restaurants, even the medicine centres.

There were a few autos that we saw in the station. But we avoided them owing to their high bargaining cost. Plus we had the notion that if you tell an auto rickshaw driver at 11:30pm at night to take us to a hotel, lodging, he would always take us to a lodge or hotel where he has a prior understanding with. A hotel which we expected would be more costly than our expectations. Being students we wanted a cheap hotel that would come under our budget. And our budget wasn’t really high either. So that option was closed as well.

“Hey why don’t we ask that guy?” Arnab pointed out.

A man, probably in his late forties, battered, tired and worn out, due to probably a long day at office, with an office side bag was walking ahead of us.

“Let’s ask him”, Suraj said.

We started to talk to him in English which quickly changed to Hindi as Rahul started to speak. It took the guy some time to realize what we were talking about. This was quite natural! J 

I mean seriously! What would you do, if you were, coming back home, after a draining, gruelling, 10-12 hours in the office and while coming back you find that there are 5 prospective aliens, speaking in some foreign language, to you? 

The guy stared at us for half a minute. And finally he understood!!

“Lodge, lodge??” he asked.

The end result was that the guy we were talking to, told us to, “go straight you will find plenty of lodge’s!”

We walked for 2 more minutes and yes indeed there was one lodge. 1000/- bucks per night. Definitely not in our budget!

“Sir we are students, can’t u please reduce your tariff? Its only for one night!”

“Hmm”, the reception guy said, in a rather considerate manner. “950/- bucks is the best we can go down upto”.

“Ok thank you,” Suraj said, and we were back on road again!

We walked for a further 15 minutes more.

The roads were completely empty except for a few dogs! Once or twice, but rarely, one or two vehicles passed us by. But we kept on walking. 

We met another person on the way who told us to go straight- “go straight, you find many lodge!” and indeed we kept on walking straight.

“Hey look an ATM shop! I need to take out some money.” Rahul literally squealed!

“I need to go as well”, Koushik joined him.

“I need some cool air!” I went with them.

“Wait for me!” Arnab came forward to join.

“Shit! No money! Go back go back!” Rahul shouted.

“No money! Go back.” Koushik shouted.

“No money, but AC is there! Let’s camp here for tonight!” I said.

I went in. Arnab followed.

“What the hell are you guys doing? Oye you two, come out! We need to find a lodge!!” said a slightly annoyed Suraj.

And we were back on road again! I had never heard pin drop silence in the night on road at 12 am anywhere in my home city. Even at 2am at night you would have those occasional cars crossing the road. The call centre guys coming back home from work. Even ambulances could be seen. The medicine shops would be open all night. Even during the cold winter nights!!

This wasn't exactly a whole new experience for us. It's much of the same in Cochin as well!

We again saw a man. A young man this time. Who literally ran when we came near him!

Finally, at exactly 12 am and after 40 minutes of walking, covering more than 3 km we finally came to a kind of a junction. A bus depot. A common bus stop from where, buses to various places around the state, arrives and departs!

 We saw a policeman in the depot. Fully awake, surprisingly!

Again it took a lot of time to register in his head, what we were actually asking him.

We asked him first about the first bus to Kannyakumari. The first bus, time it takes, hotel availability, hotel fare, etc. We asked him whether it is better to stay in Nagercoil for the rest of the night or whether to go to Kannyakumari by the first bus (which by the way was at 4am) and sit out the next 4 hours in the bus stand? 

 I have to say I was expecting the duty cop to be irritated! I mean its 12 am at night in a small town and you get out of state tourists after long days work. He was bound to get irritated! But even if he was, he really didn’t show any sign of that. May be its a boring job for him, and may be he likes distractions!

I must say we were quite pleased with him for his full co-operation. In the end he told us where exactly is the way to the lodges.

His last words were, “Arey no problem, you go towards right you find plenty lodges. Only about 200 metres".

We took the right that he mentioned. Went about 200 metres and indeed there were lodges! It was like heaven of lodges. That street had a total of 9 lodges, all of which were we were shocked to see, were rudely closed!! The 8th one was however, open. The gates were closed. The receptionist was thankfully fully awake, and counting the daily transactions. Probably was the manager himself. 

And as we came to a consensus with the room fare, we finally got a room to rest our sorry backs for the rest of the night!!

The receptionist requested us to see the room first. 

We said, “its ok, we’ll take it anyways!”

A noble answer considering the time and the walk we had!

“Get ready and prepare yourself to see the worst hotel room of our lifetime”, Rahul chipped while climbing the stairs.

We were all kind of expecting the worst as he said. And you can understand the pleasant surprise when we found that it was quite a decent enough room. Big and airy, kind of room that you require for dwelling of 5 lunatics like us! J

“How is the bathroom? Come on I need to see the bathroom first!” Rahul gave a high hearted nervous laugh!

"It’s good man! Separate one. Thank god!” I informed.

“Yeah thank god!” Koushik said with a silent laugh.

“True. True! Thank you god, for the beautiful bathroom you have given me, I mean us! We promise you that I will use it I mean we will use it judiciously!” Rahul prayed jokingly.

All of us laughed at that!! Typically Rahul! J

After 10 minutes, as we settled down, it was the first time that we realised something. Our stomach! We had no dinner; We last ate at 3 pm in the late afternoon. We had been walking for almost an hour in an alien country with no food. We were literally burning with hunger!

True we had food! 10 small packets of biscuits. 2 packets for each of us. But is it enough for feeding 5 hungry monsters? We ate 6 packs. That did not decrease our hunger. It was like engulfing small ants in a long dark empty tunnel!   

“Hey, its 12:45 already. We’ve got to sleep now, or waking up at 4am is virtually impossible.” Suraj reminded.

“You really think, we would all wake up at 4.00a.m?” Arnab gave a sarcastic laugh.

“Yes, yes Suraj come on mate pls understand, I have to sleep. We are all tired. And that is what holidays are meant to be, resting days” Rahul literally pleaded.

“What the hell man, if you wanted to rest you could have done that in the hostel itself. We had 7 days for doing that!” Suraj said. “Anyways, I wasn’t really expecting any of you to wake up at 4am in any case!” he smirked.    

You must be thinking what this was all about. You see when we fixed the visit to Kannyakumari, we planned on visiting some of the landmarks in it as well. Of course the famous Vivekananda Rock is one of them. The Kannyakumari temple was another, if we get time that is. And the last one was witnessing the sunrise and sunset over the ocean from the tip of the country. Don’t people say that for watching something good or rather for having something good in life you have to sacrifice something for it. We had to sacrifice our sleep for watching the sunrise in this case. It would have been easy had we been in Kannyakumari. Problem was we were 16 km’s away from being there and stuck in this ghostly town of Nagercoil, and taking that 16km journey at 4 in the morning did not felt like a good option. And we weren't the type of a group that likes compromising sleep, no matter what the reason might be. Try talking about sacrificing sleep to Rahul, you'll understand what I mean!

But yes staying 16 kms away was a problem. Oh and this town was a ghostly place all right, not that we saw any actual ghosts. But you know what after staying in a bustling city like Ernakulam for a year and a half and seeing how the city’s roads go to sleep completely by 10pm there, this wasn’t anything new to us. If anything the place was only alien to us as much as we were to it, and may be nothing else!

There were 2 beds in the room. Suraj and Rahul shared the relatively smaller one, while Arnab, Choto (we tend to call Koushik by that name) and me cramped ourselves in the relatively bigger one. The TV was on. Tamil songs were being played. Not something you would want to do at 1am in the morn that too after a long, hard and tiring day, but it continued for 10 more minutes!!

Lights were out 5 minutes later.

“Choto, hey Choto?! You asleep?” Arnab called.

“Hmmm. What is it?”.

“Just one last thing. Don’t get afraid or scream, if u find me cuddling you, while sleeping!”

Typically Arnab! J

.......................................Stay tuned for the next Chapter, possibly next weekend........................................