After more than two years of married life, Jeeva and I went on our first official vacation. We took a three-day break and went to Madurai, Karaikudi and Velankanni 
As usual, we were very organised in our packing..I came home from office at 8.00 pm, Jeeva came home at 8.45 pm and within half-an-hour of frantic packing, we managed to squeeze in a lot of necessary and unnecessary stuff and headed to the Koyambedu bus stand at 9.15 pm.
We reached, thinking we had missed our bus, but luckily we caught a straight bus to Karaikudi. It was one of those nice SETC ultra-deluxe buses with all those ever so-nice extras.
Dinner was a messy affair! We tried to eat dosa and sambar on a thin wrapping of banana leaf and plastic with disastrous results. My dress reeked of sambar! Shucks!
After cleaning it with newspaper, we settled down for the night. Next morning, my hubby, just because he was unable to sleep (being the proverbial early-riser), woke me up at the ungodly hour of 6.00 am. And worse, I was hungry and unable to go back to sleep.
The lush green fields, the beautiful birds I spotted – egrets, brahminy kites, herons & peacocks, the abundant waterways and the splendid landscape we saw as the bus wound its way into the heartlands of southern Tamil Nadu (Theni and Sivagangai dist) was recompensation enough for being deprived of sleep – “nature’s sweet restorer” as Shakespeare put it.
We reached Karaikudi at around 7.00 am and had to wait for Jeeva’s friend Subbu for an hour, who is usually pretty reliable. It turned out his youngest son, who is a real Dennis the Mennace, named Balaji had thrown his toothbrush into the drinking-water well. They had tried to fish it out, while administring a nice trouncing to him.
Anyway, we finally reached Subbu’s house. A charming place in the suburbs of karaikudi. We didn’t get to see much of his wife, as she was too busy getting the kids ready for school. With very little time to spare the kids were finally packed off to school and me and Jeeva sat down to a superb meal, cooked by Subbu’s wife Indu.
We had dosa, puttu with a chettinad brinijal and potato speciality. I hate brinjal, but I couldn’t even recognise the detested vegetable, in the delicacy she had concocted.
We then headed off to Subu’s jewel loan shop……
Continued..
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