I have lived in Chennai for 19 years and have not even been to most parts of the city! ignorance is not bliss especially when you are like me( read: love the city and want to explore but bad with directions to the extent that my bro says I cant find my way out of a phone booth!!)
However today was a different day! My aunt and I had plans to go to fabindia, midway we changed our mind and headed to the beach station! like I said I’m ignorant, so I thought the beach station will be near the beach....only after 20 mins on the bike, passing the port, the war memorial and the reserve bank office( I never knew this existed in Chennai until today!) , I realized the beach station is near Burma bazaar. Now this is a bazaar where people get export duty stuff and cds (ahem!). But all the shops were closed today, don't ask me why (is it because it is a sunday?) Anyways coming back to the amused and excited me, we parked the vehicle outside the station and walked in. Damn it was crowded, I hate crowds, but even this did not dampen my spirits.
The next phase of our adventure was to wait in the long queue to purchase tickets. The catch was that we didn’t know which queue to stand in. We chose the shortest and stood there blinking with question marks in our faces (yahoo smiley kinds!) a lady with two kids dressed identically, though not twins, was standing in front of us. My aunt asked her, “mrts velachery station ku ticket vaanga indha queue la nikalaama?" The lady answered, " ela edathukum same queue dhan". So the system is such that thirunelveli or triplicane you are bound to stand with hundred others in the 'general queue'. It didn’t make even an iota of sense to me. This is when we found out a short cut; apparently they were vending machines available. As I stood back saving our places in the long queue, my aunt went and checked out the machine. Few minutes later she returned with a dejected look. The expression was for two reasons 1) only the Hindi machine was working and neither of us know to read Hindi. 2) No money, only swiping cards. Confident of having brought my debit card, I asked her to wait and walked towards the machine. Two minutes later, I too walked back dejected. Reason? The machine has ego issues with debit cards and accepts only smart cards which are being issued by the railways. So our wait in the queue continued.
As we egged on to the counter slowly, I was getting bored and needed some entertainment. This came in the form of a lady who wanted to join the 'Q'(i hence forth shall use only Q and not queue as I’m lazy to type and that’s the way the railways spell it anyways!) in between and get a ticket. This sparked off a quarrel, and even we tried to join in ( after all we are Indians by birth)
Sometime later a man with a kid in hand tried forming a separate Q, this sparked off a bigger quarrel, which we kept out of( after all we are Indians!!). Finally we bought the ticket and walked off with a 'perumoochu' (translated as sighing victoriously).
The ticket cost us 28 rs and that's for the entire journey too and fro. Buying a cone ice cream at a nearby softie stall, we walked onto the platform. The train stood there empty and welcoming :)
We got in and found comfortable seats by the window. The train chugged on and we sat there enjoying the breeze and the view. Our primary job was done, as we called our other relatives (read: my mom, another aunt and cousin) to inform about our escapade and the unanimous result was that we were nuts! The first few stations are lined parallel to the beach and hence we got to see a different view of the beach, the people and the slums. The Ayodhi Kuppam stretch along the beach road and the like looked crowded and dirty but nevertheless beautiful in a quaint sort of a way. After this, we passed the Mylai station of the busy Mylapore area. And Luz (a shopping stretch) reminded me of all of those times I used to go shopping and get amused when a train passed in the track above. A couple of stops later, we were in the Kotturpuram area where we could spot a water body(tick the correct answer as I’m not sure: Coovam, or a lake, or the Adyar river). As we got to the IT hub of the city, the stations started seeming corporate (or was it my imagination?!) we finally reached Perungudi and then on the train got slow and we finally bumped off at Velacheri.
We then shifted compartments in the same train (we actually got off thinking we had to board a different train only to find we were wrong) and waited for it to start the return journey. Few minutes later the TTR came and checked our ticket. The guy had a good memory and was so amused to see the same faces. Muttering something to himself, he left making us wonder if he thought we were crazy!
The return journey was faster, and we were back in the beach station right in time for hot tiffin at the station’s Saravana Bhavan hotel. Like true Chennaiites, we licked off the hot and lip smacking sambar and the yum idlis and washed our hands to get some cold juice. Content of having fulfilled our long wished for agenda, we got back to the bike hitting the roads back to our original shopping plan, grumbling about the traffic jams and how great the mrts ride was.
P.S: 966 words, a real long post, dedicated to my aunt. And damn I dint take my digicam to click shots which I could have uploaded :(
