Guinea Pig Tale

(...Continued from Part 1 ) The next day, I was in the train to Visakhapatnam to meet my cousin Commander S Karthikeyan – or Karthik Anna, as I call him – after 6 years! As it happened, he wasn’t in the city at the time. We – his wife, my niece and I – were to go to Araku to meet him, where he was organising rappelling for students. Before that, we went to the naval dockyard and visited a submarine and a ship each. This was the first time I was seeing a real submarine. Submarines are exercises in space management, with valves and pipes in every place imaginable, including the kitchen. To be a submariner is a lot about physical strength – there are vertical ladders between levels, tiny doors and no space to exercise. But it is also about psyche – spending days on end in a closed space with no sun, moon, sky or stars isn’t easy, even for hardened military officers. There aren’t many in the navy who end up being submariners. At the crack of dawn, we started out f...

It started with a 14 hr daytime train journey. Day, mind you – not night. How did I spend it? I prayed for it not to rain. And miraculously, it didn’t rain too much or for too long when we made our way from Bombay to Hyderabad in the daylight hours. The train went through the scenic Pune-Lonavla route. Lonavla is already beautiful place, and the rains made it even more so. Mountain after mountain covered in forests or bright green grass, punctuated by the occasional waterfall. Many who have been to the Himalayas will say that any other mountains will pale in comparison. But the Himalayas are dark green and rich brown, with varying levels of white depending on how high up you are. Here, it is bright green, almost fluorescent. These mountains may not be lofty and awe-inspiring, perhaps, but they’re inviting. It made me want to pull the chain, get off the train and run through the grass. Hills and mists are our best friends.  After Pune, the landscape was more urban, ...