What I Did When I Was Not Here

(A.K.A My vacation)

Oh. My. God. This is going to be one loooong rant. A whole two month’s worth. Here I go. Hope you bear with me

So, as soon as my board exams were over, I had to leave for Belgaum, which is in Karnataka, India. I messed around till the last minute, and in that last minute, burnt about five CDs containing my all-time must have music for my portable VDC player (yes, no Discman, no iPod). My mother packed my bags, of course.

So I head out. Chin up, hoping to have a little fun at least. I had to go by BUS, and I didn’t get the first hint that this trip was going to get anything but fun. Second hint? I was going to travel with dear grandmother.

So I board the bus, and put on my headphones, connect it to my player… and put “Fukisabu Kaze No Naka De” (a really good song – from Saiyuki Reload, by WAG) … so the music starts, and suddenly the bus encounters a bump. “Fu *bump* fu – fu – fu –” My player had started skipping. AND it pauses for about five six minutes without my permission. So I turn up the volume when it did that, wondering what happened, and it started again.

“KIIIISAABUU KAZE –” I shrieked, and it caught my grandma’s attention, as well as the people sitting in the front, back, and at the left. I shook my head and gave them a weird smile before resolutely glaring out of the window.

That was the third hint.

I didn’t even DARE put on Dir En Grey after that, which I was dying to listen to.

So finally, I reach Belgaum. At 5:30 AM. The auto-rickshaw charged twenty bucks to take us about five hundred meters. But whatever, not my money. Okay, so Belgaum was actually kinda cool, because I have this REALLY cool aunt who lives alone in her flat there. She let me sleep all day and eat pizza at three fifteen, which I hardly ever got to do.

So Belgaum was like when the doctor swabs your arm with a wet cotton wad before giving the shot. You get what I mean?

Now the next morning I board another bus heading to Hubli. It had a TV in it. A Kannada movie started up. I put on my headphones again, but the road was REALLY very bad, and it seemed like it had paused forever. So I take off my headphones, and watch a Kannada movie. It was an eye-opener. Er, wait, I got it the other way around. Fourth hint, anyone?

That done, I reach Hubli. Well done, I patted myself on the back. I made it this far without committing suicide. I’m made of stronger stuff.

I reach my cousin brother’s home, he’s excited, blah blah blah. The first two weeks go by uneventfully, which is not how a vacation is to be, but who’s listening?! We go to Dandeli (wait, I don't think that's the name!!), where the Kali or Cauvery or some crap river’s running through and take a dip there. My other cousin sister also joins me. She and her family did the routine “Look how tall you’ve become!”, “You’ve lost a lot of weight, you know!” stuff and we were out.

I fell while I was IN the river. Hint number five! By now, I’d gotten the hints, I think. My face resembled that of the psychotic looking teenage in that movie “The Craft”. You’ll know which one I mean if you’ve seen that crap movie.

So more days pass, and we go to Bangalore. We as in my grandmother, me, my cousin brother and my cousin sister. We board the Intercity, as it’s called, and zoom off. Something like that.

Here, my discman played perfectly, so I listened to “World Apart” for about eighty minutes… repeating it again and again, that is. Can’t get enough of it.

We reached Bangalore at about two PM. It looked worse than Mumbai, is all I can say. Except for the Kannada signs on the shops, it might as well have been Mumbai.

Now let me tell you about what I’d been told about the relatives whose house we were going to stay in. It was my grandmother’s brother’s house. He’s an architect. He’s a bit enthusiastic, and very orthodox family type, but not too much. His wife, she’s a kleptomaniac (no I’m not kidding AT ALL, sadly.) and a clean freak. She supposedly hides all the shampoos, soaps and toothpastes when she expects visitors. Their son’s the only somewhat normal guy. He works at a call centre or some shit. Didn’t care to find out much.

So we take off our footwear outside the house (a flat, actually – on the first storey). The wife smiles coldly at me and my sister. “Line up the footwear, okay?” she says, somewhat kindly. We scrambled to line up our sneakers and sandals, and in the process, put all the shoes regardless of whether they belonged to our group or not in a neat line.

We stepped in.

Geez, I’m going to stop here (for now mwahahaha)! Talk to you all later, then.