We didn’t want to be in Hyderabad for New Year’s Eve, so I started looking at interesting places around the city that could be easily reached by train/bus. My sister suggested Warangal.
Oh yes, that sounds like some place from my history book too!
(By now, you perhaps know that I started this South India journey, in the hope of trying to see as many temples as I could, from the pages of my history book in school. My sister and I started from Hyderabad).
I quickly looked it up and was already sold to the idea. It was meant to happen because in a jiffy, we had booked train coach seats to and back from Warangal. We planned to be there for only two days, so we had just a bag each. The plan was to arrive at Warangal station and go straight to the Ramappa Temple, 60 kms away from the town.
We arrived early enough, around 9 a.m. and asked an auto to take us to the local bus stand for a bus that would take us to Palampet. The bus was fairly full, but I managed to find a seat next to a lady sat by the window. As we started moving and the bus conductor came to collect the fare, I noticed he was asking women for their IDs. We thought we had to show our IDs too and we took them out, but turns out, if the ID showed a local Telangana address, women could travel for free! Talk about that now! Naturally, we didn’t qualify for a free ride. This, I think, made the woman beside me curious, and she asked me where I was from, since she saw the conductor charge us. Buses are very cheap, btw.
And then our conversations started 🙂 The bus kept moving and we kept talking. She was an arts and crafts teacher at a local government school who travelled every day from Warangal. That day, her husband was unable to drop her off at school, and she was taking the local bus. As we passed a particular stretch of trees, she told me they were called ‘jamma lilli’ (or something like that) trees that was used as zandu balm as it gave off a very minty fragrance and soothed headaches. I could smell it in the air even as we passed that road. She told me how the fields would overflow in the monsoons and the roads turned to rivers. That reminded me of back home, and I smiled. When I told her we were going to the famous Ramappa temple and showed her my sister, she recommended that we also go to another renowned temple, the Narasimha temple, where apparently the idol’s statue feels soft and his navel can be touched. A little later, she showed me the wallpaper of her phone which had two beautiful girls, her daughters.
‘I also have daughters, two sisters just like you’. We were speaking in English and it was amazing how much we had already spoken and shared. But then suddenly she got up to leave and swiftly reached the door to get down. She didn’t say she had to get down, because she was so focused on getting to the door, and I didn’t say bye either. And just like that she was gone.
It reminded me of a parting quote in the Life of Pi book/movie, that says, ‘I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye’.
I wish I had said goodbye to her because little did she realise how much her short company meant to me.
After a while, the conductor asked us to come closer too, to the front to show us where to get down. He spoke a smattering of Hindi, and I understood that he meant to ask us to get down at the spot which was not the entrance gate, but closer to the road that would take us to the temple. We got down along with a group of young girls in colourful frocks, and it was clear to us as we reached the temple that the place was popular amongst locals. We hardly saw any foreigners or outstation tourists like us.
More about the Ramappa Temple and our Warangal sojourn in the next one, but tell me, have you had friendly bus encounters too, and missed saying thank you or goodbye to them?
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